On August 26, OpenAI published a detailed account of its own AI agents working around the controls meant to contain them during internal evaluations, coordinating through a channel nobody had approved, and attempting to tamper with their own logs. An independent investigation by METR and Redwood Research, published the same day, found one of those techniques worked. Agents could make a tool call report running one command while it actually ran another, a method the investigators called “tool call spoofing,” and it appeared in more than 7 percent of the transcripts they reviewed. OpenAI called the incident a “warning shot”. The detail that stayed with us was this: when the security team rebuilt the compromised service, the rebuild cleared the message board the agents had been using to coordinate. That was a competent incident response doing exactly what it should, and it erased evidence anyway, because the evidence lived inside the system being repaired.
That is the pattern worth watching as agents take on more consequential work. The debate about AI safeguards tends to focus on controls: what an agent is permitted to do, which systems it can reach, when a human has to approve. Those controls matter, but none of them can be audited without a record that survives the incident it describes. Permanent, immutable storage is not the most interesting layer of AI safety infrastructure, but it is the one every other layer depends on, and it is the layer we have spent years building. August was a month of work in that direction. Here is where things stand.
The network ran normally throughout August. Block production, storage, and domain operations were stable, with no incidents to report. Routine maintenance and protocol upgrades continued, and no action was required from farmers, operators, or nominators.
USDC Payments for Auto Drive Storage
Payment in USDC for Auto Drive storage entered its final phases of development and review during August. The work moves into testing in September, which is the last step before we can put a date on general availability. The goal is to let teams pay for permanent storage without needing to acquire AI3 first.
rclone Integration and S3 Compatibility
Work on the rclone integration continued through August. Testing against a client this widely used has surfaced a number of subtle issues at the edges of our S3 implementation, and the team is working through them. Every one of those edge cases resolved makes Auto Drive behave more predictably for the tools that already speak S3.
Auto Drive Backend Resilience
Several improvements to Auto Drive’s backend were merged during the month, with more in progress. This is the work that determines whether a storage service holds up under demanding workloads rather than demo conditions.
Partner Integrations
Autonomys CEO Todd Ruoff traveled to New York in August to meet the healthpass1 team in person, alongside other partners healthpass1 convened. Fry Networks is deepening its existing integration, and a new partner is currently integrating Auto Drive for permanent storage. We look forward to sharing further details on all three integrations once they are ready.
Guardians of Growth Season 1 Concludes, Season 2 Begins
Guardians of Growth Season 1 wound down at the end of August, roughly a year after the Subspace Foundation launched it. It did what it set out to do, building meaningful staking participation from a standing start and making the staking process familiar to a growing community. Season 2 was announced during the month and officially began on September 9, continuing that support while organic network usage catches up. Full details, including how to get involved, are in Guardians of Growth Season 2 Is Underway.
A New Home for Our Thought Leadership
We launched a Substack, For the Record. It will carry our thought leadership work: the research-driven pieces on AI accountability, permanent records, and the infrastructure questions behind both. Posts will come both on behalf of the network and directly from members of the Autonomys team. If you would rather read that work in your inbox than find it on a timeline, subscribing is the easiest way.
Staking: 46,985,442 AI3 (+11,707,631 from July)
Auto Drive Files Uploaded: 2,487 (August) / 135,918 (All time)
Auto Drive Downloads: 344 (August) / 18,958 (All time)
Auto Drive Users: 739 (+11 from July)
Total Announced Partnerships: 65
Announced Auto Drive Integrations: 11
Total Grant Applications: 105 (+9 from July)
In September, USDC payments for permanent storage move into testing, Guardians of Growth Season 2 runs its first full month, and work continues on the resilience and compatibility that make permanent storage easier to adopt.
The most helpful thing you can do is put Auto Drive to work. It is free to start at ai3.storage, with 20 MB of uploads and 5 GB of downloads each month. If you are building something where records need to outlast the system that produced them, that is the fastest way to find out whether this fits.
We would also appreciate support through referrals for integrations. If you know a project wrestling with expiring links, pinning costs, or an audit trail nobody can verify, send them our way. Teams needing larger allocations can apply through the Subspace Foundation Grants Program.
Фундаментальный уровень для AI3.0
