Orum

Orum AI

Orum AI

Orum AI

Orum AI

Orum AI

Orum AI

Orum AI

Orum AI

Orum AI

Orum AI

OpenClaw has 500,000 instances and no enterprise kill switch

“Your AI? It’s my AI now.” The line came from Etay Maor, VP of Threat Intelligence at Cato Networks, in an exclusive interview with VentureBeat at RSAC 2026 — and it describes exactly what happened to a U.K. CEO whose OpenClaw instance ended up for sale on BreachForums. Maor's argument is that the industry handed AI agents the kind of autonomy it would never extend to a human employee, discarding zero trust, least privilege, and assume-breach in the process. The proof arrived on BreachForums three weeks before Maor’s interview. On February 22, a threat actor using the handle “fluffyduck” posted a listing advertising root shell access to the CEO’s computer for $25,000 in Monero or Litecoin. The shell was not the selling point. The CEO’s OpenClaw AI personal assistant was. The buyer would get every conversation the CEO had with the AI, the company’s full production database, Telegram bot tokens, Trading 212 API keys, and personal details the CEO disclosed to the assistant about family and finances. The threat actor noted the CEO was actively interacting with OpenClaw in real time, making the listing a live intelligence feed rather than a static data dump. Cato CTRL senior security researcher Vitaly Simonovich documented the listing on February 25. The CEO’s OpenClaw instance stored everything in plain-text Markdown files under ~/.openclaw/workspace/ with no encryption at rest. The threat actor didn't need to exfiltrate anything; the CEO had already assembled it. When the security team discovered the breach, there was no native enterprise kill switch, no management console, and no way to inventory how many other instances were running across the organization. OpenClaw runs locally with direct access to the host machine’s file system, network connections, browser sessions, and installed applications. The coverage to date has tracked its velocity, but what it hasn't mapped is the threat surface. The four vendors who used RSAC 2026 to ship responses still haven't produced

Track token usage per provider response

## Summary Quorum doesn't capture token usage metadata from provider responses. Session JSON stores response text but not the `usage` headers that every provider returns (input tokens, output tokens, total). ## Why - **Cost visibility** — users (and us) can't see how much a deliberation actually costs - **Billing foundation** — if Quorum becomes a billable service, we need real usage data, not estimates - **Provider comparison** — helps evaluate which providers are token-efficient vs verbose ## Proposed 1. Capture the `usage` field from each provider's API response (most return `prompt_tokens`, `completion_tokens`, `total_tokens`) 2. Store it in the session JSON alongside each response 3. Add a summary at the end of deliberation (total tokens by provider, estimated cost) 4. Expose via CLI: `quorum usage <session-id>` or similar ## Estimates (current 3-provider council) - ~97K tokens total per deliberation (~32K per provider) - Without tracking, we're guessing based on text length ## Notes Provider-specific quirks to handle: - OpenAI/Codex: `usage.prompt_tokens` + `usage.completion_tokens` - Anthropic: `usage.input_tokens` + `usage.output_tokens` - Kimi: follows OpenAI format - Some streaming responses return usage only in the final chunk

Sean O’Brien sold workers and unions out to Trump—these Teamsters are running to oust him.

As general president of the union, Sean O’Brien has operated with a “Teamsters vs. Everybody” mentality, especially when it comes to dealing with President Donald Trump and embracing the MAGA right. But now, 14 months into the second Trump administration, the labor movement and the entire working class—Teamsters members included—is under attack. In this episode of *Working People*, we speak with veteran Teamsters Richard Hooker Jr. and John Palmer, who are running to oust O’Brien from leadership in the upcoming union election. **Guests:** * Richard Hooker Jr. has dedicated 26 years to the Teamsters, spending 20 of those years at UPS and the last six in leadership roles. He is the Secretary-Treasurer and Principal Officer of Teamsters Local 623 in Philadelphia, and he is now running on the Fearless Slate to unseat Sean O’Brien as a candidate for general president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. * John Palmer has 38 years of experience in the Teamsters and is currently serving as a vice president at large of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. He is running on the Fearless Slate as a candidate to be the union’s general secretary-treasurer. **Additional links/info:** * Teamsters Fearless Slate [website](https://be-fearless.org/meet-the-fearless-team) * Hank Kennedy, *Current Affairs*, “[Sean O’Brien sold labor to Trump, and got nothing](https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/sean-obrien-sold-labor-to-trump-and-got-nothing)” * Michael Sainato, *The Guardian*, “[Labor activist takes on Teamsters leader allying with Trump: ‘He doesn’t represent the workers’](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/nov/01/teamsters-union-leadership-trump)” * Joe Allen, *CounterPunch*, “[Why are the Teamsters endorsing Greg Abbott?](https://www.counterpunch.org/2026/02/17/why-are-the-teamsters-endorsing-greg-abbott/)” * Peter Eavis, *The New York Times*, “[UPS says it is cutting up to 30,000 jobs](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/27/business/ups-jobs-layoffs-2026.html)” * Maximillian Alvarez, TRNN, “[Everybody hates Sean](https://therealnews.com/everybody-hates-sean)” * Maximillian Alvarez, TRNN, “[We asked 8 different Teamsters what they thought of Sean O’Brien’s speech—their responses may surprise you](https://therealnews.com/we-asked-8-different-teamsters-what-they-thought-of-sean-obriens-speech-their-responses-may-surprise-you)” **Featured Music:** * Jules Taylor, *Working People* Theme Song **Credits:** * Audio Post-Production: Jules Taylor Transcript *The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.* Maximillian Alvarez: Alright. Welcome everyone to Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network and is brought to you in partnership with In These Times Magazine and the Real News Network. This show is produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like you. My name is Maximillian Alvarez, and we’ve got a doozy of an episode for y’all today. As always, we really appreciate, and in fact, we depend on our listeners reaching out to us with topics and stories that you guys want us to dig into. And one of the questions that you have overwhelmingly told us that you want to see addressed on the show is the question that we are dedicating today’s episode too. Now that we are one year into the second Trump administration, what the hell is going on with the teamsters and the union’s general president, Sean O’Brien? Now, by way of introducing today’s episode, I’m going to read at length from a really thought provoking article by Hank Kennedy, which was just published in Current Affairs Magazine, and we’re going to link to this in the show notes. But Kennedy writes, “Elected as a union militant with the support of longstanding reform organization, Teamsters for a Democratic Union or TDU, Sean O’Brien has spent the last two years shepherding the lambs of the American working class straight to the slaughter via his endorsements and promotions of some of the most reactionary anti-labor politicians in the land. I was complicit in this. Back in 2021, I was a teamster working in logistics. I both voted and campaigned for O’Brien, giving money and time to his campaign. 2024 erased whatever residual affection I’d had for O’Brien. That year, he not only spoke of Donald Trump as a man, “Proven to be one tough SOB at the Republican National Convention.” He promoted as 100% on point a transphobic article by Senator Josh Hawley, this compact article on “the promise of pro- labor conservatism, a sailed corporate America for “using their profits to push diversity, equity, and inclusion, and the religion of the trans flag.” There’s been a phenomenon within the union’s leadership of working towards Trump. Whatever Trump says, the union leadership leaps to support, often without looking. When Trump called for

February 26, 2026

It appears the State of the Union was the marker for the White House to launch directly into campaign mode. Much of that mode centers on trying to defang Trump’s weaknesses with attacks on Democrats. And since the 2024 campaign brought us the insistence from the Trump campaign, including Trump and then–vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance, that “they’re eating the dogs…they’re eating the cats,” it’s reasonable to assume the next several months are going to be a morass of lies and disinformation. Trump announced in his State of the Union that he was declaring a “war on fraud to be led by our great Vice President J.D. Vance” and said that “members of the Somali community have pillaged an estimated $19 billion from the American taxpayer…in actuality, the number is much higher than that. And California, Massachusetts, Maine and many other states are even worse.” He added: “And we’re able to find enough of that fraud, we will actually have a balanced budget overnight.” This, in part, seemed designed to reverse victim and offender by suggesting that rather than Trump’s being the perpetrator of extraordinary frauds and corruption in cryptocurrency, for example—he was, after all, found guilty on 34 charges of business fraud in 2024—immigrants are to blame for fraud. As Kirsten Swanson and Ryan Raiche of KSTP in Minneapolis explain, members of Minnesota’s Somali community, 95% of whom are U.S. citizens, pay about $67 million in taxes annually and have an estimated $8 billion impact on the community. While some have indeed been charged and convicted of fraud over the past five years, the accusation of $19 billion in fraud is just a number thrown out without evidence by “then-Assistant U.S. Attorney Joe Thompson,” who estimated in December 2025 that “‘half or more’ of $18 billion in Medicaid reimbursements from 14 high-risk programs could be fraudulent.” Yesterday Vance and Dr. Mehmet Oz, who oversees Medicaid, the federal healthcare program for low-income households, announced the administration is withholding $259 million in Medicaid funds from Minnesota, claiming the state has not done enough to protect taxpayers from fraud. It is illegal for the executive branch to withhold funds appropriated by Congress, and a federal judge has blocked a similar freeze on $10 billion in childcare funding for Illinois, California, Colorado, Minnesota, and New York while the case is in court. Nonetheless, Minnesota representative Tom Emmer, who is part of the Republican leadership in the House, approved the attack on his constituents, posting: “The war on fraud has begun. And Somali fraudsters in my home state are about to find out.” Minnesota governor Tim Walz, a Democrat, posted: “This has nothing to do with fraud…. This is a campaign of retribution. Trump is weaponizing the entirety of the federal government to punish blue states like Minnesota. These cuts will be devastating for veterans, families with young kids, folks with disabilities, and working people across our state.” While Walz is almost certainly correct that this is a campaign of retribution, the administration is also salting into the media an explanation for the sudden depletion of the trust funds that are used to pay Medicare and Social Security. In March 2025, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated the trust fund that pays for Medicare A would be solvent until 2052. On Monday, it updated its projections, saying the funds will run out in 2040. The CBO also expects the Social Security trust fund to run dry a year earlier than previously expected, by the end of 2031. As Nick Lichtenberg of *Fortune* wrote, policy changes by the Republicans under Trump, especially the tax cuts in the budget reconciliation bill the Republicans call the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” have “drastically shortened the financial life spans of both Medicare and Social Security, accelerating their paths toward insolvency.” Between Trump’s statement that if the administration finds enough fraud it can balance the budget overnight, and the subsequent insistence that cuts to Medicaid are necessary because of that fraud, it sure looks like the administration is trying to distract attention from the CBO’s report that Trump’s tax cuts have cut the solvency of Social Security and Medicare by more than a decade. Instead, they are hoping to convince voters that immigrants are at fault. Similarly, in an oldie but a goodie, Republicans today hauled former secretary of state Hillary Clinton before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee to testify by video about her knowledge of the investigations into sex traffickers Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. In a scathing opening statement, Clinton noted that while committee chair James Comer (R-KY) subpoenaed eight law enforcement officials who were directly involved in that investigation, only one appeared before the committee. The rest simply submitted brief statements saying they had no information. Clinton al

December 22, 2025

*David Sathuluri is a Research Associate and Dr. Marco Tedesco is a Lamont Research Professor at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University.* **As climate scientists warn that we are approaching irreversible tipping points in the Earth’s climate system, paradoxically the very technologies being deployed to detect these tipping points – often based on AI – are exacerbating the problem, via acceleration of the associated energy consumption.** The UK’s much-celebrated £81-million ($109-million) [Forecasting Tipping Points programme](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/feb/18/early-warning-system-for-climate-tipping-points-given-81m-kickstart) involving 27 teams, led by the Advanced Research + Invention Agency (ARIA), represents a contemporary faith in technological salvation – yet it embodies a profound contradiction. The ARIA programme explicitly aims to “harness the laws of physics and artificial intelligence to pick up subtle early warning signs of tipping” through advanced modelling. We are deploying massive computational infrastructure to warn us of climate collapse while these same systems consume the energy and water resources needed to prevent or mitigate it. We are simultaneously investing in computationally intensive AI systems to monitor whether we will cross irreversible climate tipping points, even as these same AI systems could fuel that transition. ## The computational cost of monitoring Training a single large language model like GPT-3 consumed approximately 1,287 megawatt-hours of electricity, resulting in 552 metric tons of carbon dioxide – equivalent to driving 123 gasoline-powered cars for a year, according to a recent [study](https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/2104/2104.10350.pdf). GPT-4 required roughly [50 times](https://www.weforum.org/stories/2024/07/generative-ai-energy-emissions/) more electricity. As the computational power needed for AI continues to double approximately every 100 days, the energy footprint of these systems is not static but is exponentially accelerating. > **[UN adopts first-ever resolution on AI and environment, but omits lifecycle](https://www.climatechangenews.com/2025/12/12/un-adopts-first-ever-resolution-artificial-intelligence-ai-environment-lifecycle-unea/)** And the environmental consequences of AI models extend far beyond electricity usage. Besides massive amounts of electricity (much of which is still fossil-fuel-based), such systems require advanced cooling that consumes enormous quantities of water, and sophisticated infrastructure that must be manufactured, transported, and deployed globally. ## The water-energy nexus in climate-vulnerable regions A single data center can consume up to [5 million](https://utulsa.edu/news/data-centers-draining-resources-in-water-stressed-communities/#%3A%7E%3Atext=Unfortunately%2C+many+data+centers+rely+on+water-intensive%2Cto+supply+thousands+of+households+or+farms.) gallons of drinking water per day – sufficient to supply thousands of households or farms. In the Phoenix area of the US alone, more than [58 data centers](https://utulsa.edu/news/data-centers-draining-resources-in-water-stressed-communities/) consume an estimated 170 million gallons of drinking water daily for cooling. The geographical distribution of this infrastructure matters profoundly as data centers requiring high rates of mechanical cooling are disproportionately located in water-stressed and socioeconomically vulnerable regions, particularly in Asia-Pacific and Africa. At the same time, we are deploying AI-intensive early warning systems to monitor climate tipping points in regions like Greenland, the Arctic, and the Atlantic circulation system – regions already experiencing catastrophic climate impacts. They represent thresholds that, once crossed, could trigger irreversible changes within decades, scientists have warned. > **[Nine of our best climate stories from 2025](https://www.climatechangenews.com/2025/12/22/nine-of-our-best-climate-stories-from-2025/)** Yet computational models and AI-driven early warning systems operate according to different temporal logics. They promise to provide warnings that enable future action, but they consume energy – and therefore contribute to emissions – in the present. This is not merely a technical problem to be solved with renewable energy deployment; it reflects a fundamental misalignment between the urgency of climate tipping points and the gradualist assumptions embedded in technological solutions. The carbon budget concept reveals that there is a cumulative effect on how emissions impact on temperature rise, with significant lags between atmospheric concentration and temperature impact. Every megawatt-hour consumed by AI systems training on climate models today directly reduces the available carbon budget for tomorrow – including the carbon budget available for the energy transition itself. ## The governance void The deeper issue is that governance frameworks