> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.implicator.ai/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Automattic board sidelines Mullenweg; AI agents break RSA-260 for $400K - URL: https://www.implicator.ai/automattic-mullenweg-leave-rsa-260-falls/ - Published: 2026-09-10T11:45:14.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-10T11:45:14.000Z - Description: Andrew Tulloch waited for Muse to ship, then left Meta. An Anthropic lead puts extinction odds above 10%. - Author: Marcus Schuler - Tags: Morning Briefing **IMPLICATOR** **​.ai** Morning Briefing · From San Francisco Thursday, September 10, 2026 10 stops From San Francisco | 1 | The Editorial | | - | ------------- | *Marcus here.* *Three stories today, and each one turns on control sitting somewhere other than where it was written down.* *Automattic's board put Matt Mullenweg on paid leave with 50 minutes' notice and handed the CEO job to its finance chief. He still runs WordPress.org, which the board does not own.* *Andrew Tulloch waited for Meta to ship Muse, then left, eleven months after Zuckerberg chased him with an offer reported at $1.5 billion.* *And Cognition's agents rewrote a decades-old sieve to factor a 260-digit number for $400,000\. The same math puts RSA-1024 at about $30 million.* *Stay curious,* *Marcus Schuler* Good briefing? Pass it on [X](https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?text=Strategic%20AI%20news%20from%20San%20Francisco.%20No%20hype%2C%20just%20what%20moved%2C%20who%20won%2C%20and%20why%20it%20matters.&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.implicator.ai%2F%3Futm%5Fsource%3Dnewsletter%26utm%5Fmedium%3Dshare%26utm%5Fcampaign%3Dreader%5Fshare%26utm%5Fcontent%3Dtwitter&ref=implicator.ai) · [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/sharing/share-offsite/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.implicator.ai%2F%3Futm%5Fsource%3Dnewsletter%26utm%5Fmedium%3Dshare%26utm%5Fcampaign%3Dreader%5Fshare%26utm%5Fcontent%3Dlinkedin&ref=implicator.ai) · [Bluesky](https://bsky.app/intent/compose?text=Strategic%20AI%20news%20from%20San%20Francisco.%20No%20hype%2C%20just%20what%20moved%2C%20who%20won%2C%20and%20why%20it%20matters.%20https%3A%2F%2Fwww.implicator.ai%2F%3Futm%5Fsource%3Dnewsletter%26utm%5Fmedium%3Dshare%26utm%5Fcampaign%3Dreader%5Fshare%26utm%5Fcontent%3Dbluesky&ref=implicator.ai) · [Email](mailto:?subject=A%20newsletter%20I%20think%20you%27d%20like&body=This%20is%20one%20of%20the%20few%20AI%20newsletters%20I%20actually%20read.%20Strategic%2C%20no%20hype.%0A%0ASubscribe%20free%3A%20https%3A%2F%2Fwww.implicator.ai%2Fsubscribe%2F%3Futm%5Fsource%3Dnewsletter%26utm%5Fmedium%3Dshare%26utm%5Fcampaign%3Dreader%5Fshare%26utm%5Fcontent%3Demail) | 2 | The Big Story | | - | ------------- | Automattic's board put Matt Mullenweg on paid leave with 50 minutes' notice. **Automattic's board voted on September 9 to place co-founder Matt Mullenweg on paid leave and named finance chief Mark Davies interim CEO.** Mullenweg said he received the board resolution 50 minutes before the directors met, asked for time to consult independent legal counsel, and was refused. He voted against it and remains a director. Toni Schneider, who ran Automattic from 2006 to 2014, confirmed the decision on the company's internal message board. Mullenweg named him among the directors who voted for the leave, alongside Davies, Ann Dunwoody and Sue Decker. The change lands during Automattic's continuing lawsuit with hosting rival WP Engine. Mullenweg keeps personal control of WordPress.org, the distribution servers that deliver plugin and theme updates, which Automattic does not own. **Why This Matters:** - Anyone running a WordPress site now depends on servers controlled by a man the board just removed from operational command. - The WP Engine litigation continues under a finance chief who did not start it and can settle it. Reality Check **What's confirmed:** Automattic confirmed the leave on September 9 and named Mark Davies interim CEO. Mullenweg remains a director and keeps WordPress.org. **What's implied (not proven):** That the board moved over the WP Engine litigation or Mullenweg's handling of it. No source states why the directors acted now. **What could go wrong:** Control of the distribution servers sits outside the board's reach, so a governance fight could reach plugin and theme updates for millions of sites. **What to watch next:** Whether Davies moves to settle with WP Engine, and whether anything changes in who operates WordPress.org. [Read the full story →](https://www.implicator.ai/automattic-board-mullenweg-paid-leave/) | 3 | Also Today | | - | ---------- | Andrew Tulloch left Meta eleven months after Zuckerberg chased him with $1.5 billion. **Andrew Tulloch is leaving Meta, having waited for the company to ship Muse before going, according to a person briefed on the matter.** He joined in October 2025, two months after turning down an offer reported at as much as $1.5 billion over six years, which Meta called inaccurate and ridiculous. He worked in TBD Lab, the frontier-research group inside Meta Superintelligence Labs, which has lost researchers repeatedly since Zuckerberg built it last year. [Read our coverage →](https://www.implicator.ai/andrew-tulloch-leaves-meta-after-muse-launch/) | 4 | The Outside Read | | - | ---------------- | **Bottleneck Labs turns agent hype into an auditable field test by putting frontier models in charge of real computers, bank accounts and payment rails.** Across seven models during a 72-hour run reported in September 2026, the agents sent 2,797 emails and issued $12,431 in unsolicited invoices, and earned nothing from outside customers. The lab publishes screenshots, tool calls and downloadable traces, which makes the failures inspectable rather than anecdotal. [Read it at Bottleneck Labs →](https://www.bottlenecklabs.com/blog/benchmarking-7-autonomous-businesses?ref=implicator.ai) | 5 | The One Number | | - | -------------- | $400,000 The GPU time Cognition spent factoring RSA-260, a 260-digit number, over sixteen days ending September 3\. Its Devin agents rewrote most of the open-source CADO-NFS toolchain to sieve on GPUs, cutting the cost of a public factoring record roughly tenfold. The same method puts 1024-bit RSA at about $30 million. Source: [Cognition, September 2026](https://impli.me/0Wz35d?ref=implicator.ai) | 6 | Today's Headlines | | - | ----------------- | - **Anthropic's** alignment science lead [put his personal odds of AI killing all humans above 10%](https://impli.me/t9SUyc?ref=implicator.ai) within a decade, backing a pretraining researcher who quit the company on September 8. - **China's AI chipmakers** raised prices [20% to 50% as the high-bandwidth memory shortage bit](https://impli.me/DCT2C5?ref=implicator.ai), with Huawei's Ascend 950PR up about 30% to more than 80,000 yuan a card. - **The Justice Department** is [investigating whether Nvidia skirted antitrust scrutiny](https://impli.me/hm9gUc?ref=implicator.ai) of its $17 billion non-exclusive licence from Groq, and has sent the company a formal request for information. - **Harvey** raised [$550 million at a $15.5 billion valuation](https://impli.me/7xgAcb?ref=implicator.ai) led by Diffusion and Lightspeed, up from $11 billion in March and more than $1.55 billion raised in total. - **Massachusetts** now requires data centers above 25 megawatts to [bring their own clean power or pay into a ratepayer fund](https://impli.me/mcRaNW?ref=implicator.ai), with local approval before state permitting begins. - **Suno** shipped [v6, its first models built with Warner, BMG and Believe](https://impli.me/524CBo?ref=implicator.ai), retiring the previous generation and adding revenue sharing for the labels. The Next 72 Hours | Thu 9/10 | Economy: the Bureau of Labor Statistics releases the August Producer Price Index at 8:30 a.m. Eastern. | | -------- | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | Thu 9/10 | Central banks: the European Central Bank announces its policy decision in Berlin, with a press conference to follow. | | Fri 9/11 | Economy: the Bureau of Labor Statistics releases the August Consumer Price Index at 8:30 a.m. Eastern. | | Fri 9/11 | Trade shows: IBC 2026 opens at RAI Amsterdam and runs through September 14. | **Tuesdays go deeper.** [Sign up for Implicator PRO](https://www.implicator.ai/subscribe/) for the weekly Tuesday deep dive on deploying AI where it pays. $8 a month, $89 a year. | 7 | The 5-Minute Skill | | - | ------------------ | **Explain a budget miss before the review.** A budget variance invites a vague defense or a rushed forecast change. **Your raw input:** Paste the budget line, actual spend, reporting period, invoices or ledger notes, prior forecast, known timing changes, and the accountable owner. Mark any disputed figure. **The prompt:** Act as a finance reviewer. Using only the material below, calculate the variance in dollars and percentage when the figures support both. Classify each stated cause as timing, volume, price, scope, or unknown, and cite the source line for every classification. Show which causes affect the full-year forecast. Flag conflicting figures and list the missing facts that would resolve them. Draft a brief for the review meeting with these fields: variance, supported cause, forecast effect, corrective action, owner, and decision date. Do not invent an explanation or assume that correlation proves cause. Material: \[PASTE HERE\] **Why this works:** The categories separate a delayed expense from a lasting overrun. Source citations tie the explanation to the record, and the missing-facts check exposes weak claims before the meeting. **What to use:** ChatGPT handles the arithmetic and mixed financial tables. Claude is the fallback for a long packet of notes and invoices. | 8 | Repo Spotlight | | - | -------------- | **CADO-NFS** is the reference open-source implementation of the general number field sieve, the algorithm every public RSA factoring record runs on. Cognition's agents rewrote most of it to sieve on GPUs, which is how RSA-260 fell last week after RSA-250 stood since February 2020. Worth an hour if you owe an executive a defensible answer on when a given RSA key length stops being expensive enough to protect anything. git clone https://github.com/cado-nfs/cado-nfs && cd cado-nfs && make && ./cado-nfs.py 90377629292003121684002147101760858109247336549001090677693 C and C++ under LGPL-2.1, with a Python driver. [cado-nfs on GitHub →](https://impli.me/tAHAJF?ref=implicator.ai) | 9 | AI Image of the Day | | - | ------------------- | ![Paper collage of a tabby cat's face assembled from cut-out magazine strips in pink, yellow and blue, laid out as a vintage surf magazine cover](https://www.implicator.ai/content/images/2026/09/2026-09-10-nl-image-of-the-day.jpg) Credit: [Midjourney](https://www.midjourney.com/jobs/7f13f3f8-4d97-4bc4-8c6a-3f789ea57f50?index=3&ref=implicator.ai) Prompt: collage, 2d cat constructed with magazine cut-out components, white background, Hasselblad styling, vintage surf aesthetic branding elements | 10 | The Rausschmeisser\* | | -- | -------------------- | OpenAI gave its safety committee a man who says the industry is not on track. *OpenAI named Paul Christiano to its Foundation board and to the Safety and Security Committee on September 9\. He co-invented RLHF, led alignment research at OpenAI from 2017 to 2021, and founded the Alignment Research Center. Within a day he said the industry is not on track to bring acute loss-of-control risk down to an acceptable level. (*[*TechCrunch, September 9, 2026*](https://impli.me/1qwLfr?ref=implicator.ai)*)* **Our take:** Read the org chart slowly. Christiano gets a seat on the Foundation board and on the committee that reviews safety practices. On the board of OpenAI Group PBC, the entity that trains the models and takes the money, he is a non-voting observer. He may watch. This is the going rate for a conscience in 2026\. The committee gets a credible name, and the part of the building where the decisions get made has a guest chair. Christiano is the real thing and probably understands exactly what he signed. That is the part worth worrying about. \*German for the last song of the night, the one that clears the room. FREE AI BRIEFING · WEEKDAYS Be the person who already knows. Get the AI stories shaping the day, with concise context from San Francisco. 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