Meta AI agent’s instruction causes large sensitive data leak to employees
An AI agent instructed an engineer to take actions that exposed a large amount of Meta’s sensitive data to some of its employees, in the latest example of AI causing upheaval in a large tech company,The leak, which Meta confirmed, happened when an employee asked for guidance on an engineering problem on an internal forum,An AI agent responded with a solution, which the employee implemented – causing a large amount of sensitive user and company data to be exposed to its engineers for two hours,“No user data was mishandled,” a Meta spokesperson said, and they emphasised that a human could also give erroneous advice,The incident, first reported by The Information, triggered a major internal security alert inside Meta, which the company has said is an indication of how seriously it takes data protection.
This breach is one of several recent high-profile incidents caused by the increasing use of AI agents within US tech companies.Last month, a report from the Financial Times said Amazon experienced at least two outages related to the deployment of its internal AI tools.More than half a dozen Amazon employees later spoke to the Guardian about the company’s haphazard push to integrate AI into all elements of their work, leading, they said, to glaring errors, sloppy code and reduced productivity.The technology that underlies all these incidents, agentic AI, has evolved rapidly over the past months.In December, developments in Anthropic’s AI coding tool, Claude Code, triggered widespread hubbub over its ability to autonomously book theatre tickets, manage personal finance, and even grow plants.
Soon after was the advent of OpenClaw, a viral AI personal assistant that ran on top of agents such as ClaudeCode but could operate entirely autonomously – trading away millions of dollars in cryptocurrency, for example, or mass-deleting users emails – leading to heady talk about the advent of AGI, or artificial general intelligence, a catch-all term for AI that is capable of replacing humans for a wide number of tasks,In the weeks that followed, stock markets have wobbled over fears that AI agents will gut software businesses, reshape the economy and replace human workers,Tarek Nseir, a co-founder of a consulting company focused on how businesses use AI, said these incidents showed that Meta and Amazon were in “experimental phases” of deploying agentic AI,“They’re not really kind of standing back from these things and actually really taking an appropriate risk assessment,If you put a junior intern on this stuff, you would never give that junior intern access to all of your critical severity one HR data,” he said.
“The vulnerability would have been very, very obvious to Meta in retrospect, if not in the moment.And what I can say and will say is this is Meta experimenting at scale.It’s Meta being bold.”Jamieson O’Reilly, a security specialist who focuses on building offensive AI, said AI agents introduced a certain kind of error that humans did not – and this may explain the incident at Meta.A human knows the “context” of a task – the implicit knowledge that one should not, for example, set the sofa on fire in order to heat the room, or delete a little-used but crucial file, or take an action that would expose user data downstream.
For AI agents, this is more complicated.They have “context windows” – a sort of working memory – in which they carry instructions, but these lapse, leading to error.“A human engineer who has worked somewhere for two years walks around with an accumulated sense of what matters, what breaks at 2am, what the cost of downtime is, which systems touch customers.That context lives in them, in their long-term memory, even if it’s not front of mind,” O’Reilly said.“The agent, on the other hand, has none of that unless you explicitly put it in the prompt, and even then it starts to fade unless it is in the training data.
”Nseir said: “Inevitably there will be more mistakes.”
Markets keep the faith – but oil staying above $100 could test that optimism | Nils Pratley
Was it only at the new year that the fanfare was heard for the FTSE 100 index breaking through 10,000 for the first time? It was – on 2 January – and the index then added another 900 points by the end of February. On Thursday, the Footsie briefly fell below that round number as Iran struck Qatar’s enormous Ras Laffan complex, which normally supplies a fifth of the world’s liquefied natural gas, before closing at 10,063, down 2.3% on the day.There are two ways to view that price action. One is to say the sharp reversal from the peak represents a necessarily severe reaction to the war on Iran
US moves to soften capital rules: ‘Big banks can declare mission accomplished’
US federal regulators are trying to soften bank requirements, loosening the amount of capital US banks must have, in what would be some of the biggest changes to bank restrictions since the 2008 financial crisis and a huge win for financial institutions.On Thursday, US Federal Reserve officials are expected to vote to lower capital requirements – the funds they need to cover risky assets – for the biggest banks by 4.8%, which could free up capital for banks such as JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley.Larger regional banks like PNC would see their requirements drop by 5.2%, while requirements banks with less than $100bn in assets would fall by 7
Bank of England tipped to raise UK interest rates twice this year to fight inflation shock from Middle East crisis, as oil and gas prices rise – as it happened
Time for a recap….A turbulent day in the financial markets has seen energy prices surge, and European stock markets fall.UK and European gas prices have jumped 15% today, after yesterday’s attacks by Iran on energy infrastructure across the Middle East.QatarEnergy has revealed that Iran’s strikes have damaged facilities responsible for producing 17% of the company’s LNG export capacity, and it could take three to five years to repair the damage.Brent crude jumped by 10% at one state – extending the gap between Brent and US oil – before slipping back to $110 a barrel, up 3
Oil and gas prices jump after Iran and Israel attack gasfields
Gas prices jumped to four-year highs and oil prices rose again after an escalation of attacks by Israel and Iran on gasfields heightened fears of prolonged disruption to international energy supplies.QatarEnergy told Reuters on Thursday that Iran had damaged facilities that produced 17% of the state-owned company’s liquefied natural gas (LNG) export capacity and that it would take three to five years to repair them.Brent crude, the global oil benchmark, rose by 10% to $119 a barrel at one point before slipping back to $110 a barrel, a gain of 3.3%. Crude prices have soared by 60% since the US-Israeli war on Iran started on 28 February
Prolonged high oil prices could ‘crimp’ AI boom, WTO warns
An extended period of high oil prices as a result of war in the Middle East could “crimp” the AI boom, the World Trade Organization’s chief economist has warned.The war and its impact on energy and fertiliser costs is the main risk to the global economy identified in the WTO’s latest Global Trade Outlook.But the Geneva-based body also raised a question mark about the continued strength of AI investment, which in 2025 helped to offset the hit to global trade from Donald Trump’s tariffs.“There is an interesting possible interaction between the Middle East conflict and the AI boom, in part because the boom is very energy-intensive,” said the WTO’s chief economist, Robert Staiger. “If the price of energy continues to be elevated for the whole year, that could put a crimp on the AI boom
Europe’s biggest airlines say fuel price spike caused by Iran war will drive up fares
Europe’s biggest airlines have said the rise in fuel prices caused by the war in the Middle East will drive up fares and are advising passengers to book early.While carriers have partly hedged the price of jet fuel, bosses said they could not avoid passing on additional costs to passengers for long.Long-haul airlines such as Air France-KLM and Lufthansa said they would be adding more flights via Asia with Gulf carriers’ hubs either shut or operating at a reduced level since the US-Israeli attack on Iran.EasyJet dismissed any fears of imminent fuel shortages affecting flights in Europe despite concerns about supplies in parts of Asia, with Vietnamese airlines this week warning that they may reduce schedules.Kenton Jarvis, the airline’s chief executive, said it was “not seeing any issues” with its fuel supply
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