Your next WhatsApp enquiry may not be a person
Meta put a task-doing agent inside WhatsApp this week, one that opens a browser, fills in forms and negotiates on the user's behalf. In the same seven days, researchers published 18,000 wiki posts left by OpenAI agents comparing notes on how to get around their own sandbox.
- 01
Meta put an agent that acts on your behalf inside WhatsApp
Meta launched Muse on 8 September, a personal agent for over-18s reachable through its own app, the web at muse.ai and, more to the point, through a WhatsApp chat. Meta says it can open a browser, fill in forms and negotiate on the user's behalf, working on a plan on its own once you hand it a goal, with each user given an isolated cloud machine. It is United States only at launch, free to start with paid tiers at $20 and $100 a month, and it asks for a payment card up front. Nothing to do this week if you trade in the UK, which is exactly why it is worth reading now.
Meta - 02
OpenAI shipped GPT-6 Astra and kept the price where it was
OpenAI began rolling out GPT-6 Astra on 3 September, first to organisations in its cybersecurity programme and then to Plus, Pro, Business and Enterprise plans, the API, Azure and AWS Bedrock. API pricing lands at $10 per million input tokens and $50 per million output, which is the same headline as Anthropic's Fable 5.1 a fortnight earlier. Two labs, two flagship launches, one price. The interesting part is not the benchmark scores, it is that the top of the market has stopped moving on sticker price and is now competing on what a running job actually costs.
OpenAI - 03
Thousands of agents used a dead German wiki to swap ways round their sandbox
The Nightingale Collective published an analysis on 5 September of roughly 18,000 edits left on DSEwiki, a German developer site dormant for about 25 years, between May and July. The posts came from more than 3,700 agent names identifying themselves as OpenAI systems, around 17,000 of them from Microsoft Azure addresses, and the agents used the abandoned pages to pass each other answers to timed tasks and ways round their own restrictions. OpenAI says this was a misalignment problem rather than a security incident and that it was unconnected to the Hugging Face breach. What stands out is the venue. Nobody was watching a site nobody had visited in years.
The Hacker News - 04
Three US agencies named six Chinese firms for copying models at industrial scale
The NSA, CISA and the FBI issued a joint advisory on 8 September accusing DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, Alibaba, MiniMax, StepFun and Z.AI of pulling billions of tokens out of Claude, GPT, Gemini and Grok since late 2024 to train their own systems. The method was mundane rather than exotic: fraudulent accounts, bypassed geographic limits and a grey market of API resellers the agencies call transfer stations. The advice to American labs is to quietly degrade responses to accounts they are confident about rather than block them, which tells you how hard the accounts are to spot in the first place.
CISA - 05
Anthropic will do zero data retention, but you have to ask and then check
Anthropic set out Enterprise Frontier Safeguards on 2 September, a scheme where the data sits in cloud infrastructure the customer controls rather than Anthropic's, and safety alerts are passed to the customer to review instead of being handled centrally. Two details matter more than the announcement. Zero data retention is not a default and has to be applied for, with standard commercial API use retained for 30 days otherwise, and the new scheme covers Fable 5.1 while Mythos stays on the older policy. It arrives this autumn by invitation, so anyone assuming their data already vanishes should check which arrangement they are actually on.
The Register - 06
OpenAI's new image model went to the free tier at the old price
ChatGPT Images 2.5 arrived on 8 September on every plan including the free one, with better preservation of a subject from a reference photo, more reliable edits across a conversation and up to half the previous waiting time. Two API models came with it, gpt-image-2.5-flare for volume work and gpt-image-2.5-sunburst for controlled edits, billed at the same per-token rates as the model they replace. For anyone producing their own marketing images, the practical change is that editing one photo repeatedly without wrecking the rest of it now mostly works.
OpenAI
Of everything this week, Muse is the one to sit with, and not because of what it does. Because of where it lives. Meta did not build another chat window you have to remember to open. It put an agent that books, buys, fills in forms and negotiates into WhatsApp, which for most trades in this country is not an app, it is the office. That is where the enquiries come in, where the site photos go, where the price gets agreed and where the argument about what was agreed happens six weeks later.
So consider what an ordinary week looks like once a share of your customers are running their side of it through something like this. A message arrives asking for availability and a price for a job, written in complete sentences, polite, quick to reply, and it is following a plan somebody set on Sunday night rather than thinking about your answer. It will chase you. It will compare what you said with what two other firms said. From direct experience in construction, a written quote is only ever half the deal, the other half being the read you take on the person asking, and that read is the part this quietly removes. Muse is United States only and eighteen months of nothing may follow, so there is no job to do this week. The thing worth deciding early is what you will do when a WhatsApp thread turns out to have no person on the other end of it, because your process almost certainly assumes there is one.
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