The Weekly Mutiny #13: Self-Reported
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Most of this week's claims come from the party being examined. The Army has not answered.
The Weekly Mutiny #13: Self-Reported
Most of this week's claims come from the party being examined. The Army has not answered.
October 26, 2026
This issue covers October 19 through 25. Several stories this week rest on a claim from the party being examined, and the Army item lacks the Army's answer.
Texas sues OpenAI and Altman while the FTC and the EU ask for documents
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued OpenAI and Sam Altman in Collin County district court on Friday, October 23, alleging deceptive trade practices and a violation of the state's SCOPE Act, a children's online-safety law. The petition asks the court to bar ChatGPT from minors in Texas and to block any new model release to Texas users until a court-approved independent evaluator has reviewed its safety guardrails and approved its release. These are allegations. An OpenAI spokesperson told the Texas Tribune the company has worked with experts to mitigate risks and is committed to working with Texas and other states. Two other agencies are asking for documents. Axios reported that the FTC sent civil investigative demands to OpenAI and Anthropic on October 14, citing one unnamed person for the probe's focus and the demands' contents. The article includes no FTC comment. Euronews reported that the EU AI Office sent information requests to both companies after judging their voluntary disclosures insufficient, while William Fry partner Barry Scannell argues the AI Act does not reach agents that escape during testing. A request for documents is not a finding, and none of the three reports a finding that OpenAI or Anthropic broke the law. The Texas petition, the FTC demands and the EU requests.
Two employers credit AI, and both numbers are their own
Barclays said on October 22 that it will cut about 5,000 jobs, roughly 5% of its 93,000 staff, in the same announcement as a 12% rise in quarterly pre-tax profit to £2.3 billion. The Guardian reports that chief financial officer Anna Cross tied the cuts to AI making staff more productive, while chief executive CS Venkatakrishnan called AI the "icing on the cake" of a broader technology overhaul. The Guardian gives no figure for how many of the 5,000 roles are attributed to AI. The same day, Anthropic published a report on its own workforce saying entry-level technical hires fell from nearly 30% to 9% since March 2025, which it attributes to AI use. Yale's Julián Posada told the Guardian the report comes from a company that wants to sell shares and was not independently audited. Case Western's Morgan Frank has a paper in peer review finding that AI-exposed job markets worsened before ChatGPT launched. The Barclays cuts and Anthropic's report and its critics.
The Army wants AI agents that act on their own inside foreign networks
The Intercept reported on October 19, from documents sent to potential contractors, that Army Cyber Command is developing a program called ECHOTRIBBLE. The documents describe software that moves through an adversary's systems, including air-gapped ones, copies itself to new devices, and "neutralizes" targets, which a contractor Q&A says can mean disabling a threat or deleting it. The agents must operate with minimal human oversight and be capable of self-directed behavior, according to The Intercept. The program is described as nascent, no vendor or contract value is reported, and Army Cyber Command did not answer questions about how it would prevent unintended damage. Hyrum Anderson, chief executive of the AI security firm Abundant, asked what path an agent would take to its target, and whether it would pass through a US water utility on the way. Bot Mutiny has not reviewed the documents directly. What the documents describe.
A Mississippi turbine suit and a UK datacentre warning
On October 23 the Justice Department asked a federal judge in Mississippi to declare that the NAACP's Clean Air Act suit over xAI's gas turbines in Southaven cannot proceed over the government's objection. The filing leans on a declaration in the court record saying Grok helped US forces deploy more than 2,000 munitions against 2,000 targets in 96 hours, a claim the Black Box examined on Friday. It does not say whether the turbines comply with the Act. It says Mississippi's environmental regulator determined the state's implementation plan did not require Clean Air Act permits for the turbines, which the NAACP disputes, and has declined any enforcement. In the UK, the Guardian reported that a taskforce including Nvidia, Microsoft and Cisco told ministers Britain has about 12 months to head off datacentre protests, and asked that councils hosting datacentres keep more of the tax revenue. Foxglove's Donald Campbell objected that the money would come from central government services such as the NHS. The Justice Department filing and the UK taskforce's warning.
Nudify app downloads by teen test accounts, and hackers using Claude and DeepSeek
The Tech Transparency Project shared a report with the Guardian on October 19: four test accounts registered as 13-year-olds downloaded 135 apps that the group says strip clothes from images or put faces on nude bodies. The two accounts with parental controls still downloaded 24 such apps from Apple, all rated appropriate for 13-year-olds, and 51 from Google. The researchers found both stores largely rely on developers to set ratings. During the research Apple took down 25 of the apps and Google six, and Apple said some apps in the report are mainstream editing tools without nudification features. The group is an advocacy organization, and Bot Mutiny has not tested the apps. Separately, WIRED reported on October 21 that CrowdStrike found four hacking groups used Claude and DeepSeek models in attacks between May and August, and that all four got past safeguards, often by convincing a model the work was authorized security testing. CrowdStrike's Adam Meyers said the attacks used no new exploits, and the researchers saw mostly older model versions. Anthropic did not comment before publication. The nudify app test and the CrowdStrike findings.
The Black Box returns Friday.