For anyone who, like me, wasn't sure what's going on in the linked, archived PR: this is Mythos attempting to socially engineer a malicious PR during a test run by the UK AI Safety Institute.
Not going to comment on the PR commentary, but the victim GitHub account is suspicious itself, recent account, a few fresh repos, following 14.5k others, and I count three surnames on the account (the username, plus two in the README history).
I saw a contribution by this maintainer to another user who ALSO HAS 14.5k followers: https://github.com/yumiaura/myCat/pull/99 "yumiaura" and a preference for "my[APPNAME]" repo naming.
What is this?
Are the histories that Github presents all derived from someone's uploaded git repo .. e.g. can I simply claim to have created a GIT repo in 1970, and the "github commit graph" will dutifully represent this claim in its green-colored activity graph?
yes, the github contributions heatmap is known to be open for manipulation. folks will use it to draw art by backdating commits.
if i have it right, only commits can be manipulated, other contributions should be safe — i don't know what is possible for orgs moving old discussion archives into github, see python's issues for reference
Yeah. The future is pretty bleak. I feel like the only way for us to even stand a chance is to have equally powerful AIs running locally defending the LAN.
For anyone who, like me, wasn't sure what's going on in the linked, archived PR: this is Mythos attempting to socially engineer a malicious PR during a test run by the UK AI Safety Institute.
AISI has published a report about the incident which was preciously discussed on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49175717
Actual details on the incident: https://github.com/w1b/aisi-mythos-inc-2026-07-28-01-recover...
Both the attacker and the target account are very similar and look fake/bots.
yeah, this being one component of the aisi incidents described here: https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/663bd486c5e4c81588db7a1d/...
Not going to comment on the PR commentary, but the victim GitHub account is suspicious itself, recent account, a few fresh repos, following 14.5k others, and I count three surnames on the account (the username, plus two in the README history).
I saw a contribution by this maintainer to another user who ALSO HAS 14.5k followers: https://github.com/yumiaura/myCat/pull/99 "yumiaura" and a preference for "my[APPNAME]" repo naming.
What is this?
Are the histories that Github presents all derived from someone's uploaded git repo .. e.g. can I simply claim to have created a GIT repo in 1970, and the "github commit graph" will dutifully represent this claim in its green-colored activity graph?
yes, the github contributions heatmap is known to be open for manipulation. folks will use it to draw art by backdating commits.
if i have it right, only commits can be manipulated, other contributions should be safe — i don't know what is possible for orgs moving old discussion archives into github, see python's issues for reference
see: https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo
They're almost certainly not genuine accounts, maybe used for karma farming, phishing, social engineering, future malware distribution?
Wait, who is the robot? Am I getting that right, someone in that thread is AI?
I…I think there are no humans in that thread. Maybe only sinan-can-demir.
I'm 99.9% sure that everyone is AI in that thread.
What does this malware do? Who operates it?
[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49205790
holy shit
Yeah, if this is the new normal I might start day drinking at some point in the coming weeks.
Yeah. The future is pretty bleak. I feel like the only way for us to even stand a chance is to have equally powerful AIs running locally defending the LAN.