Good morning. After years of misfires, artificial-intelligence hacking tools have become dangerously good.

So good that they are even surpassing some human hackers, according to a novel experiment conducted recently at Stanford University.

• Bring on the bots: A Stanford team spent a good chunk of the past year tinkering with an AI bot called Artemis. It takes a similar approach to Chinese hackers who had been using Anthropic’s generative AI software to break into major corporations and foreign governments.
   
• Beating the humans: Initially, Stanford cybersecurity researcher Justin Lin and his team didn’t expect too much from Artemis. AI tools are good at playing games, identifying patterns and even mimicking human speech. To date, they have tended to fall down when it comes to real-world hacking. But Artemis was pretty good. The AI bot trounced all except one of the 10 professional network penetration testers the Stanford researchers had hired to poke and prod their engineering network.
   
• Helping the defenders: With so much of the world’s code largely untested for security flaws, tools like Artemis will be a long-term boon to defenders of the world’s networks, helping them find and then patch more code than ever before, said Dan Boneh, a computer science professor at Stanford who advised the researchers.

Palantir sues CEO of rival AI firm, alleges widespread effort to poach employees.

Palantir is expanding its legal campaign against a rival artificial-intelligence company, accusing the CEO and two other employees of engaging in a sprawling effort to poach Palantir’s workers and customers.

The data-analysis firm, co-founded by a group including Alex Karp and Peter Thiel, said in a court filing that Percepta CEO and co-founder Hirsh Jain and co-founder Radha Jain (no relation) aggressively pursued Palantir employees for a “copycat” company, in violation of their nonsolicitation agreements. It accused a third employee, Joanna Cohen, of stealing confidential documents from Palantir before she left for the rival firm.

Justice Department drops FIFA bribery case, throwing others into question.

The Justice Department dropped a foreign bribery case against a former 21st Century Fox executive and a sports marketing company, throwing a number of other cases tied to the FIFA corruption scandal further into question, Risk Journal reports.

Prosecutors said dismissing the case was in the “interests of justice” in court filings earlier this week. They were arguing before the U.S. Supreme Court after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit restarted the case in July by vacating a lower court’s ruling acquitting the defendants.

• Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed an antitrust lawsuit against healthcare technology giant Epic Systems, alleging the company’s setup can block parents from accessing their children’s health information.
   
• The U.S. Treasury has imposed sanctions on four individuals and four entities, primarily Colombian nationals and companies, for allegedly recruiting former Colombian military personnel and training soldiers to fight for Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces paramilitary group, including children.

Mexico slaps up to 50% tariffs on Chinese goods, drawing outcry from Beijing.

Mexico’s move to ratchet up tariffs on key Chinese imports earned it a stiff warning from Beijing as Mexican authorities prepare for a complex review of a vital free-trade deal with the U.S. and Canada.

Mexico’s senate approved a bill Wednesday to raise tariffs to as high as 50% on cars, steel and other goods from China and other Asian countries with which it lacks a trade agreement. Mexico has become a major destination for Chinese-made vehicles, which account for almost one-third of the estimated 1.6 million units sold in Mexico this year.

• China to Implement Export Controls on Some Steel Products

Companies must boost extreme weather spending, report says.

Corporate spending on equipment to mitigate the effects of extreme heat, such as air conditioning, will need to be ramped up in the coming years, a new report said.

The world currently spends $190 billion annually to defend against extreme weather, but that figure will need to rise to $1.2 trillion globally, according to a report from the McKinsey Global Institute published on Thursday, more than half of which would go to air conditioning and irrigation.

• Disgruntled Gen-Z protesters, who have toppled governments and rattled rulers across the world this year, have claimed their first European victory.
   
• Ukraine and its European allies sent President Trump a response to his team’s earlier peace plan in an effort to accelerate cease-fire talks with Russia, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said.
   
• A new round of border clashes between Thailand and Cambodia and resurgent fighting in eastern Congo, two conflicts President Trump claimed to have resolved, have shown the constraints of his high-speed pursuit of peace.

• The Federal Reserve’s board of governors voted unanimously to reappoint 11 reserve bank presidents to new five-year terms beginning March 1, 2026, the central bank said on Thursday.
   
• Disney is making a $1 billion investment in OpenAI and will allow the AI platform to use its characters and properties to generate short, user-prompted social videos.
   
• The Justice Department’s effort to prosecute New York Attorney General Letitia James lost momentum Thursday after a grand jury refused to indict the Democratic critic of President Trump for the second time in a week.
   
• Lululemon Athletica Chief Executive Calvin McDonald will step down in January, according to the athletic gear maker, which has been under pressure from its founder to make changes to reverse its “loss of cool.”

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