Records. The AI, Privacy, and Security Weekly Update for the Week ending July 28th., 2026

 Episode 302.  In this week’s update.Nearly 100,000 people just tried to learn AI development in a single week, no coding background required - and the attempt to set a Guinness World Record may be the least interesting part of the story.California just built a machine that can delete your data from 600 companies with one request - and the clever part is that the state never actually sees your personal information to do it.An Australian energy giant just confirmed a breach that could affect a chunk of its five million customers.Anthropic's new flagship model costs half what its sibling model does, and it's beating it on benchmarks anyway.The largest open-weight AI model ever released just started finding zero-day vulnerabilities on its own, days after launch.South Korea just admitted a breach of its diplomatic corps sat undetected for ten months.A breach from November of last year, affecting 55 million people, is only now coming to light.And Congress wants to give the federal government a kill switch for AI systems that go rogue - introduced, as it happens, just days before the industry's biggest AI-agent-gone-wrong story of the year broke wide open.Welcome back, everyone. This week runs from a hackathon trying to make AI-building a mainstream skill, through a genuinely clever piece of privacy infrastructure, into a run of breaches that all share the same lesson about how long damage sits undetected, and closes on Washington's first real attempt at an off-switch for AI systems that stop listening to the people who built them.Find the full transcript to the podcast here.