Claude tried to design a scorpion antidote. It is not one yet — and Anthropic says so first.
AspireAI community · anthropic.com
Claude tried to design a scorpion antidote. It is not one yet — and Anthropic says so first.
Scorpions sting over 1.2 million people a year and kill more than 3,250, mostly children in regions with thin access to care. Antivenoms are made by milking venom from thousands of scorpions to immunize horses, a process taking months, and they usually cover only a handful of toxins.
So Anthropic gave an internal model the problem: build small proteins that latch onto five toxins from Mexico, Brazil, North Africa and the Middle East. It generated 318,484 designs over 64 hours, picked 180 to test, and humans added 31 more. Two contract labs tested all 211.
Seventeen passed the bar. The best two bound one toxin in the single-digit nanomolar range — a very tight grip.
The catch: nobody has tested whether any of them neutralizes venom. Binding is not neutralizing.
Read the story and explore more from the AspireAI community.
Two critical PHP remote code execution flaws — one found by GPT-5.6 Sol — were patched on October 21, 2026, and OpenAI published a disclosure framework alongside the fix. Fixed versions: PHP 8.5.12, 8.4.27, 8.3.36 and 8.2.35. Both allow unauthenticated remote code execution, and PHP's advisory says risk is highest for mod_php, where a demonstrated exploit triggers before any application code runs. The CVEs are distinct failure modes. CVE-2026-109618 (OOM corruption): out-of-memory handling can interrupt PHP while internal request data is only partially initialized, and request cleanup may then treat the invalid data as valid. CVE-2026-109619 (stale global state): request-owned internal state can survive after its backing memory is freed, and a later request served by the same worker may use that stale state. OpenAI states GPT-5.6 Sol identified the first flaw through its Patch the Planet initiative, and that Wiz independently discovered and reported both vulnerabilities. PHP's maintainers led the fixes and release, with Wiz, Cloudflare and OpenAI contributing research and coordination. Wiz's write-up adds that it used GPT-5.6 Sol and Gemini 4 Argon throughout, with Gemini 4 Argon contributing to finding the vulnerability and validating the patch. OpenAI describes the gap between discovery and public exploitation as a "Defender's Window," proposes a five-stage response framework, and committed $1 billion in subsidised Daybreak model access for organizations with limited security resources. Honest caveats: these are OpenAI's and Wiz's own characterizations, and OpenAI also notes the same capabilities help attackers build offensive tooling faster. PHP 8.1 and older no longer receive updates from the PHP project.