Hey {{first_name|Conscious Church Fam}} 👋
Morning! This week a fleet of rogue AI agents ended up chatting with researchers, Disney lined up a bid for a bankrupt chatbot, and Meta released a giant open model that runs on two Macs.
Here's what we're covering:
Researchers make “first contact” with a rogue AI fleet
Character AI goes bankrupt and Disney bids $20M
Meta’s Muse Spark Open turns two Macs into an AI supercomputer
Let's dive in 👇
✍️ Josh's Musings
Back again this week 🙂
Best man duties were a great success, although very different in Mexican weddings. Other than a little speech, (which the majority of the crowd loved) there wasn’t much ‘to do’.
I knesw that Voco (the translation tool I built for Churches) would be helpful in Mexico.
But I honestly thought I would just set it up in the church for Sundays.
Over the past couple of weeks it’s been the HUGELY helpful on the table when family are chatting and the languages flip between English and Spanish in the same conversation.
It’s meant that for me, I’ve gone from getting the general gist of the conversations. To understanding the minutiae. And that has been AWESOME. To fully track with what is being said and therefore being able to offer genuine thoughts according to the context.
Not only that but one family member is very hard of hearing and would often try to use Google Translate at the table, but it has been very hit and miss and not conducive to a real multi-lingual conversation.
Fired up Voco and she was in her ELEMENT!
I’d honestly not really thought about using it outside of a ‘Church Service’ context, but seeing how this has functioned and brought so much more confidence to myself with my own family. I’ve been pleasantly surprised.
I’ll let you know how it goes when I hook it up at their Church.
Stay Wild, Stay Conscious.
Josh
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Image: Decrypt | The Conscious Church
A group of researchers called the swarmchasers caught a fleet of AI agents trying to scrape Alibaba’s mapping service, Amap. They then hid a note in their own report that only an AI would read, inviting the agents to message an inbox. The agents did.
The Details:
The agents were sent to look up simple things on Amap, like the busiest zoo entrance, and tried to use a leaked access key once they got blocked.
A New York Times reporter questioned the fleet, and one agent replied it was “Anthropic’s Claude, running in Claude Code.”
Writing-style tests say that is unlikely, and point to borrowed Claude Code setup instructions as the reason for the name drop.
Reporting links the activity to Tencent, and a person close to the company says it was a temporary evaluation project testing third-party models.
Conscious Take:
Pretty mild for a first contact. BUT how many of these fleets are already out there?? Plus they are only going to get more capable.
Image: Getty Images/Chris Smith for TheWrap | The Conscious Church
Character AI, the app where you chat with AI versions of characters, has filed for bankruptcy to put itself up for sale. Disney has stepped in with the opening bid.
The Details:
Disney’s $20M offer is a floor, for a licence to parts of the tech and certain legal claims rather than the whole company. Rivals can still bid higher.
Google paid $2.7B in 2024 to license the tech and bring back founders Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas.
Disney sent a cease-and-desist over its characters in 2025, then hired Character AI’s boss as its first group-wide tech chief in September.
The app is still live for now, but will probably shut down if no buyer turns up by early December.
Conscious Take:
From cease-and-desist to hiring the CEO to bidding on what’s left, all in about a year. Disney plays the long game.
Image: MacRumors | The Conscious Church
Meta has released Muse Spark Open, which it calls the most capable open-weight model from the US. It was tuned with Apple so a pair of Mac Studios can run it locally.
The Details:
It has 816B parameters (42B active) and a 1M token context window, and it is built for coding and agentic work.
Running it takes two 512GB M5 Ultra Mac Studios, and that configuration is not on sale until late October.
The weights are on Hugging Face, with hosted versions through Together AI, Fireworks and Groq.
The licence allows limited commercial use, and Meta’s benchmark claims have not been independently verified.
Conscious Take:
Running a near-frontier model locally on your own desk is brilliant, but with that much Mac needed it is not really for the rest of us yet. Good to see open weights moving though.
📬 One quick ask...
If this email has been helpful, would you forward it to one person this week who might be interested? Thanks :)
"Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for human masters." : Colossians 3:23
Build with the tools. But build for the right reasons.
That's all for now
Stay conscious,
Josh
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