In the Chutes department, it’s an insurer breach and an AI model that broke dramatically out of its sandbox.
Clover Health reported that three employee accounts were breached. The breaches were implemented through a ‘classic’ social engineering scheme such as phishing–the kind that this Editor was trained on years ago when she worked in marketing for a unit of a well-known health insurer. This sounds minor except that the three accounts were of “non-managerial employees with access to member visit-scheduling and broker-facing sales functions.” However, these employees also had access to some personally identifiable information (PII) and protected health information (PHI) of members. Apparently, there was outside, non-authorized activity because Clover’s SEC Form 8-K filing reported that it was “contained and terminated” but Clover is still investigating the extent of the breach and must complete required reporting and member notifications. The employees did not have access to claims or corporate financial systems. Clover Health, considered a pioneering ‘insurtech’, has remained relatively small, with 156,000 Medicare Advantage PPO members in Georgia, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and Texas. Healthcare Dive
Agentic AI Gone Wild–the breakout of its sandbox of an advanced OpenAI agentic AI system into Hugging Face’s open-source AI model repository platform. OpenAI admitted in a blog post published yesterday (21 July) that the attack originated during internal testing of its own AI models. In what it called an “unprecedented cyber incident”, their own investigation revealed that “we now know that this particular incident was driven by a combination of OpenAI models — including GPT‑5.6 Sol and an even more capable pre-release model, all with reduced cyber refusals for evaluation purposes — while being internally tested on a benchmark of cyber capabilities.” Even though the testing was run in a ‘highly isolated environment’, OpenAI admits that the models found a way to gain internet access and attacked Hugging Face’s servers. Hugging Face detected and stopped the activity while OpenAI claims it found the activity internally. What’s scary is that Anthropic (Claude Mythos) and OpenAI now have had ‘out of the sandbox’ incidents in their frontier AI development worlds. As OpenAI put it, “The incident also makes clear that advanced models can discover and exploit novel attack paths in real-world systems without source-code access. It highlights that advanced cyber capabilities must be developed alongside stronger safeguards and defensive tools.” Hugging Face reportedly had to use GLM 5.2, an open-weight model developed by Chinese firm Z.ai, to investigate it because US AI models had restricting guardrails that blocked investigation. Computing 21 July, 22 July
And there are a few Ladders this quiet week.
Precision Neuroscience has successfully implanted its brain-surface brain-computer interface (BCI) into able-bodied test subjects and achieved successful thought-controlled cursor control. Unlike Neuralink, Precision’s implants rest on the surface of the brain, not in the brain. Neuralink’s subjects are also are mobility-impaired [TTA 10 July]; Precision’s patients have full movement but had neurosurgical procedures for a variety of reasons. By enrolling in the Precision research study, the patients were able to move solely by thought cursors to navigate games like Pong and Mario Cart on tablets and smartphones while in recovery. The 510(k) investigational devices were removed in a five-minute procedure before the patient went home. This is a real advance for a less-invasive BCI. Mobihealthnews, video (YouTube)
Tempus AI has agreed to acquire Personalis for $1.5 billion. Both are public companies listed on Nasdaq. Tempus AI is a precision medicine company using AI to analyze data for personalized care and therapeutics. Personalis is a cancer genomics company that uses DNA minimal residual disease (MRD) testing to detect cancer recurrence. The offer to Personalis shareholders is for $16.25 per share of common stock which was a 6% premium to last Friday’s closing price; it closed today (22 July) at $12.47. The deal is for Tempus shares with the option for cash. Personalis had Q2 preliminary revenue of $22.4 million. The transaction is expected to close in late 2026 or early 2027. Mobihealthnews, Tempus release
We close with a fairly hefty (for these days) $16.2 million Series A for cardiovascular tech company Karoo Health. The oversubscribed raise for the Albuquerque, New Mexico company was led by 7wire Ventures and Allumia Ventures, with participation from First Trust Capital Partners, LLC, SpringRock Ventures, Hyde Park Angels (HPA), and other marquee investors. Karoo combines on-site and virtual care teams with their proprietary technology in cardiac care for cardiology practices and health systems in a value-based care model that connects, patients, providers, and payers. The technology platform is designed for earlier detection, improved coordination, and data-driven care delivery. Karoo release, FierceHealthcare
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