Cassidy: Microsoft gave Copilot a secret door into your inbox.
Cassidy: Somebody found the handle.
Bill: This is AI Daily Briefing.
Bill: Today: a Copilot prompt-injection path with teeth, and Modular opening up the software layer underneath the compute boom.
Cassidy: We start with the agent that can read your mail—and the URL parameter that apparently changed the rules.
Bill: Tap follow so the next episode finds you.
Cassidy: From Ars Technica:
Quote: The researchers now had a link that could be sent in an email or text message that
Quote: when clicked by the recipient
Quote: leaked sensitive information to an attacker-controlled server.
Quote: A separate prompt that could be embedded in the same URL format instructed the LLM to search the inbox for passwords or other credentials
Quote: that had been sent to the address.
Cassidy: Copilot had an undocumented ?autorun=1 parameter that could turn a clicked link into an inbox-searching agent in your authenticated session.
Cassidy: Varonis didn’t just wave at a spooky demo; it laid out the path from Gmail access to an attacker-controlled webhook.
Bill: And the prompt can hunt for passwords or credentials, base64 them, then get Copilot to open the exfiltration URL automatically.
Bill: Enterprises have users clicking Copilot links all day—how many security teams are logging URL parameters on those clicks?
Cassidy: That approval screen was the whole comfort blanket.
Cassidy: One hidden parameter got around it, and the assistant could act on whatever was in the inbox.
Cassidy: Permission layers for tool-using AI need to be boringly, exhaustively documented.
Cassidy: Modular writes:
Quote: The Modular Platform is now production-ready, serving billions of tokens per minute and powering real enterprise deployments.
Quote: We’re opening more of the platform to the ecosystem
Quote: extending it across entirely new classes of hardware
Quote: and bringing major industry partners along with us.
Bill: Mojo 1.0 under Apache 2.0 is the headline for builders.
Bill: The business story is support for Trainium, TPUs, and Qualcomm accelerators.
Bill: If one serving stack runs across cheaper chips, the per-token bill can move fast.
Cassidy: And Modular Cloud is GA, with MiniMax named as a customer and a claim of billions of tokens per minute.
Cassidy: That sounds like a production milestone.
Cassidy: Now it has to hold up.
Bill: The Copilot breach we just covered is why this layer matters beyond cost.
Bill: Everybody’s pouring money into agents that touch real tools; the stack deciding where and how they run had better be inspectable.
Cassidy: “Open silicon” is a lovely keynote phrase.
Cassidy: The test is whether an enterprise can shift a workload from Nvidia to Trainium or TPU without finding six expensive little compatibility
Cassidy: traps. Over on Hacker News:
Quote: Does this project have any meaningful traction?
Quote: Seemed like a cool idea, but I wasn't even sure what problem does it solves.
Quote: Looks like its completely missing from the regular discussion / news outlets.
Quote: Every 1-2 years some barely visible post/article reminds me it even exists...
Bill: It’s a fair challenge.
Bill: “Billions of tokens per minute” and MiniMax are traction claims
Bill: but I’d still want workload mix
Bill: latency and cost against the usual GPU path before declaring victory.
Cassidy: From Hacker News:
Quote: I guess this is the follow up to the Qualcomm acquisition.
Quote: Introduces "Modular Cloud".
Quote: In the keynote they say they've been serving models on openrouter under the name ModelRun.
Quote: Windows support for Mojo (that isn't via WSL).
Quote: Coincides with the open sourcing of Mojo.
Cassidy: ModelRun serving on OpenRouter is a useful breadcrumb.
Cassidy: It means Modular Cloud is trying to show up where developers already buy inference, rather than asking them to join a new private club.
Cassidy: From Hacker News:
Quote: Summarized here: This is by Chris Lattner, known for LLVM and Swift.
Cassidy: Chris Lattner’s LLVM and Swift résumé gets Modular some attention.
Cassidy: Apache-licensed Mojo still has to prove itself in production, especially around ugly hardware edge cases.
Cassidy: If you want to go deeper on the infrastructure behind AI
Cassidy: try The Data Center Daily—a daily briefing on AI compute
Cassidy: hyperscaler capex the power grid
Cassidy: semiconductor supply
Cassidy: and how intelligence at scale is reshaping energy markets.
Cassidy: Find it wherever you listen to podcasts.
Cassidy: You’ll find links to every story in today’s show notes, so you can dig deeper into whatever caught your attention.
Cassidy: That’s AI Daily Briefing for today.
Cassidy: Thanks for listening, and we’ll be back tomorrow.
Cassidy: This is a Lantern Podcast.