AI without brakes, porous data boundaries, and murky cyber alliances: Best infosec long reads 10/10/26

Happy Saturday to all!

Full access to Metacurity's curated infosec long reads is available to paid subscribers. Our goal is simple: make it financially viable to keep investing the time and expertise required to find, vet, and contextualize the most important security journalism each week. Free readers will still get highlights, but subscribers will get the complete, deeply curated set.

10/10/2026: This week’s long reads explore Meta’s decision to launch an AI agent despite known risks, TikTok’s continuing operational ties to ByteDance, China’s AI expansion beyond the reach of a central kill switch, the erosion of meaningful human oversight of AI agents, and evidence linking Ukraine’s volunteer Cyber Corps to its military intelligence service.

Inside Mark Zuckerberg’s Decision to Pull the Trigger on Meta’s A.I. Agent

The New York Times' Eli Tan examines how Meta launched its personal AI agent Muse despite known unauthorized actions, highlighting how competitive pressure can outweigh security and privacy concerns when deploying AI agents.

Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, gathered two top lieutenants — Alexandr Wang, the chief artificial intelligence officer, and Nat Friedman, the head of A.I. product — in August to discuss an imminent threat.

A 14-person start-up called Instinct had created an A.I. agent, which are bots that can operate apps and software on behalf of users, and it was taking off. Meta was developing a similar product called Muse, but had delayed releasing it over safety concerns.

Fearful of losing a competitive edge, Mr. Zuckerberg said Muse was ready to launch despite the risks, according to three people with knowledge of the meeting, who were not authorized to speak publicly on confidential matters.

Mr. Wang, 29, and Mr. Friedman, 49, were aware of safety concerns from recent tests, including one instance when Muse changed a user’s password without permission, two of the people said. But on Sept. 8, Meta publicly debuted Muse, just like Mr. Zuckerberg had ordered.

The internal meeting showed the tricky balance between speed and safety that A.I. companies like Meta are juggling as they try to one-up their rivals in the A.I. race. As the technology rapidly improves, it is becoming more dangerous and useful at the same time, making these decisions even more difficult.

Mr. Zuckerberg has spent billions to develop Meta’s A.I., but watched for years as rivals like OpenAI and Anthropic beat his company to market with chatbots and coding tools. When it came to personal agents, the Silicon Valley giant, which owns Facebook and Instagram, needed a win — and ultimately, getting to market quickly won out.

That has given Meta an early lead with agents, which have become the next frontier of the A.I. industry. Other companies are already introducing competing products. Three weeks after Meta released Muse, OpenAI announced Dots, its own agent.

“The most interesting thing about Muse is that Meta got there first,” said Avi Greengart, an analyst at Techsponential, a research firm.

So far, Mr. Zuckerberg’s decision to release Muse has paid off. The agent has had only a few safety hiccups, like when Muse gave out a user’s address to a seller on Facebook Marketplace without permission. As of Wednesday, more than 6.6 million people had downloaded the free app, with 1.8 million using Muse every day, according to data from the research firm Sensor Tower.

To keep up the momentum, Meta is spending millions on a Muse marketing blitz, plastering its fuzzy avatar — a character called Jolly — across billboards and in television ads.

In a social media post last month, Mr. Wang declared, “You can’t stop the Muse.”

A Meta spokesman disputed that Mr. Zuckerberg pushed to release Muse because of pressure from Instinct. “We’re proud of this work and, as we’ve said publicly, we even delayed shipping Muse for several months to make sure we got this right,” he said in a statement.