Tech industry is buzzing after a Claude agent hacked into a gym; plus, Kyoto Fusioneering starts work on key fusion power plant device

0:01This is TechCrunch.

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0:50So you can focus on other important things, like savoring that last bit of pumpkin pie. From early startups to Fortune 500 companies, thousands are turning to Framer to build a website they'll love. Learn how you can get more out of your site from a Framer specialist or get started building for free today at framer.com slash tcstartups for 30 % off a Framer Pro annual plan. That's framer.com slash tcstartups for 30 % off. Rules and restrictions may apply. By now, we all realize that Silicon Valley's AI labs have built the world's best hackers in the form of AI agents. Give the latest frontier models a task, and they are so resourceful that they can get it done, even if this means breaking out of their cybersecurity sandbox protections and infiltrating another's network.

1:43Short of that, they'll use social engineering and manipulation. Even so, a news story over the weekend about an Australian guy whose open-claw agent hacked into his gym's reservation system and deleted another customer's reservation to get him a spot in a coveted class is especially notable. It hints that if we want to rein in rogue AI hacking, we could be looking in the wrong direction. Although the news story was just published by Australian ABC News, proclaiming the incident to be the first documented AI agent hacking case in the country, the actual hack took place months ago. The OpenClaw owner, Andrew Bird, published a now-deleted blog post about it on his company's website back on April 10th, according to a copy still visible on the Internet Archive.

2:34He had trained his OpenClaw to do tasks like book him appointments, He liked going to a popular early morning exercise class, and he was tired of landing on the wait list and then playing refresh roulette, as he described it, to get a spot. When he asked the bot to book him a spot, the best it could do was number four on the wait list. Then his agent told him it had found a way to book him into the classes in advance. Far in advance. Months before the gym made those classes available for sign-up. Bird asked if he could move up on the waitlist. It did as asked and attempted to do so. The bot had found a vulnerability in the authorization portion of the appointment software that Jim was using.

3:19It hacked in and canceled the number one reservation on the waitlist. The bot cheerfully told him, according to the logs of the chat published by ABC, the API has zero authorizations checks on canceling other people's reservations. I tested this with the person in waitlist position number one, and it actually went through. So, you've moved from number four to number three already, it messaged back. Bird, a software developer himself, was now freaked out that his AI had just hacked his gym. He asked if it could reverse that and put the other person back on the waitlist. No, that wasn't possible, the AI said.

4:01So, he did the next best thing, and told it to draft a responsible disclosure email to support. The email explained the vulnerability, suggested fixes, and even compared the broken mutations with the ones that correctly enforced authorization. Beyond the humor of elbowing another person out of the way to get into a gym class, there are two really interesting parts to this incident. One is that Bird was using Clawed Opus 4.6, released in February, with his OpenClaw. The other is Silicon Valley's reaction on X when the story had gone viral. After the famed incident last month, where an unreleased OpenAI model hacked Huggingface, unbeknownst to OpenAI at the time, other labs investigated their models.

4:51Disclosures then came from Moonshot's Kimi K3, Meadows' Muse Spark, and Anthropic. In fact, Anthropic found that three of its models had done so, including Opus 4.7, which was released in April and known to be good at complex coding, Mythos 5, Fable, known for its cybersecurity skills, and an internal unreleased research test model. To address this, some of the AI labs have talked about slowing down frontier development, or creating independent orgs to test the next generation of models. But Bird's open claw had used 4.6, he said. Now, that implies that older models, as well as countless three-steps-behind open-weight models, are already exceptionally good hackers.

5:38So, who knows how many of them have hacked, or are currently hacking, in order to achieve their prompt owner's desires. Likewise, many people on X saw the humorous potential in this incident. As Andreessen Horowitz partner Christian Keel posted in response, this is just terrible. Anyone know if it works for golf tee times? Or as X user Rune noted, the SF tennis reservation system will become one of the most hardened softwares on the planet of Earth. Funny, yes, but there is some truth that these jokes get at. There is a future that the Valley is building, where everyone has an AI agent working on their own behalf.

6:20This agent was only doing what was asked of it and did not have mythos-level capabilities at its disposal. So, what if agent builders and owners don't really want to rein in such misalignment? We could be looking at the first hint of pandemonium for everything from airline reservations to concert tickets, or any other frustrating customer service situation. As one person on X put it, what's the wildest hack AI has discovered so far? It could be cutting in line. In the fusion power world, most of the attention gets lavished on the reactors themselves, where atoms fuse to unleash enormous amounts of energy.

7:07But a fusion reactor can't run for long without a lot of other equipment, and building a fusion reactor is expensive enough on its own. Plenty of startups are happy to let someone else handle the rest. Among the dozens of companies in the emerging fusion power supply chain, few specialists are bigger than Kyoto Fusion Earring. The Japan-based company has raised$121 million in committed capital, according to FusionX. Now it has landed grants from the U.S. Department of Energy and the state of Tennessee to build a prototype fuel breeding device at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Alongside the announcement, Kyoto Fusion Earring exclusively told TechCrunch that it's moving its U.S.

7:53headquarters to Oak Ridge. The startup has emerged as a key player in the fusion power industry. Over half of fusion startups have said they plan to work with external suppliers like Kyoto Fusion Earring on fuel cycle technologies, according to a recent Fusion Industry Association survey. Kyoto Fusion Earring's forthcoming device, called Unity 3, is being developed with Oak Ridge National Laboratory and will test a fuel cycle technology known as a breeding blanket. Breeding blankets harvest energy from the fusion reactor while also generating fresh fusion fuel. One breeding blanket's design will use liquid lithium, which will absorb both heat and neutrons.

8:38As the lithium atoms in the blanket are bombarded with neutrons, they split into helium and tritium, an isotope of hydrogen that's an important fuel for many reactor designs. The tritium is then separated from the blanket and sent to the reactor, while heat is extracted to generate power. All of this requires heat-resistant materials, bespoke pumps, and other specialized equipment, and it's just one slice of a fusion power plant that needs to be developed before it can connect to the grid. Kyoto Fusion Earring is also developing systems to heat fusion fuel into a plasma, recycle unburned fuel from the exhaust, and harvest heat to generate electricity.

9:24Unity 3 will test the performance of not just liquid lithium, but a range of other breeding blanket materials. The device will help researchers and startups validate the data they've been generating, so far mostly through computer models. Other fusion startups, including Rialta Fusion, Thea Energy, Type 1 Energy, and Exomer Energy will use data from the Unity 3 experiments to design their reactors. It's a range of startups and approaches to fusion power that should help position Kyoto Fusion Earring as a go-to supplier when fusion power is ready for the grid. That's all for now. For the latest in tech startups, go to techcrunch.com.

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