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Julian Fellowes, more recently of the period triumph The Gilded Age, followed up his Academy Award-winning screenplay for Gosford Park with Downton Abbey, a family saga set in the upstairs and downstairs of a great English estate. Beginning with the sinking of the Titanic in 1912 and concluding around 1930 with the most recent (final?) film, the series begins with the unexpected death of the titular castle's heir, leaving a cousin no one has ever met (Dan Stevens) to inherit everything.

That event kicks off a series-long effort to secure the family's future in the face of war, depleted finances, and the invention of swivel chairs designed to baffle the sassy Dowager Countess (Maggie Smith). The show's arrival in 2010 was an immediate sensation, drawing new attention to older shows and ushering in dozens of new ones. You can stream the Downton Abbey on Prime Video and Peacock, and, once you've made your way through its six seasons and three movies, you're invited to dive into these other highbrow but fun family soap operas.

House of Guinness (2025 – )

There's plenty of upper-crust family drama in this loosely-based-on-real-events series, but it comes from Steven Knight (Peaky Blinders), so expect a great deal more violence and fewer cozy chats in the library. The first episode begins shortly after the death of Sir Benjamin Guinness, who became the wealthiest man in Ireland by expanding the trade in Guinness beer throughout the British Empire. The cracks begin to show on the way to the funeral: Religious leaders deplore all of the beer-drinking, while Irish Republicans want the company brought down for colluding with empire. Sir Benjamin's four heirs have wildly different goals and/or hate each other so, you know—lots of drama and lots of beer. The show's been renewed for a second season. Stream House of Guinness on Netflix.

Upstairs, Downstairs (1971 – 1975, 2010 – 2012)

An international phenomenon in the early '70s that undoubtedly inspired Downton Abbey, Upstairs, Downstairs is very nearly the ur-text for smart, glossy, and occasionally scandalous period TV drama. The show follows the wealthy Bellamy family of London's fashionable Belgravia neighborhood through triumphs and tragedies. The heart of the downstairs staff is housemaid Rose Buck, played by series co-creator and writer Jean Marsh, who returned for the next-generation revival in 2010. The additive drama begat any number of high-end prestige dramas and, in some regards, has never been bettered. Stream Upstairs, Downstairs on Britbox; stream the Upstairs, Downstairs revival on Disney+, Hulu, Peacock, and Britbox.

Bridgerton (2020 – )

Shonda Rhimes' candy-colored, ultra-stylized period piece has been a legitimate sensation for Netflix, adapting the Julia Quinn novel series, which itself owes plenty to Jane Austen (as does just about any Regency romance). With a large, rotating ensemble—led by Nicola Coughlan's Penelope Bridgerton, who is ably assisted by Adjoa Andoh, Jonathan Bailey, Ruth Gemmell, Polly Walker, and Julie Andrews (as the voice of the mysterious Lady Whistledown)—the show revels in the tropes of the literature of the era while turning up the dial on sex, scandal, drama, and heart. When you finish this one, there's the excellent prequel/spinoff Queen Charlotte, also on Netflix. Stream Bridgerton on Netflix.

The Gilded Age (2022 – )

Julian Fellowes (joined by Sonja Warfield) does something similar to Downton Abbey here while shifting the time and place back to the 1880s in New York City. We're introduced to the world of upper and then extremely upper-class New York City society by Marian Brook (Louisa Jacobson), poor relation to the estranged aunties who take her in, and Peggy Scott (Denée Benton), a young Black writer from a solidly middle-class family who becomes a secretary to Christine Baranski's sassy Agnes van Rhijn. Old-money Agnes and sister Ada (Cynthia Nixon) live across the street from new-money social climbers the Russells (led gloriously by Carrie Coon's Bertha); established society isn't keen on letting in these upstarts—though money very much talks. In one sense, the stakes here could not possibly be lower (Bertha wants a better seat at the opera! Twink footman invents a new clock!)—so why is the show so addictive? It's been renewed for a fourth season. Stream The Gilded Age on HBO Max.

The Buccaneers (2023 – )

Not quite going full Bridgerton in terms of hyper-stylization, this 1870s-set adaptation of an unfinished Edith Wharton novel isn't afraid to take some liberties in terms of costuming and music. The buccaneers of the title are among the so-called dollar princesses of the era: Nan St. George (Kristine Froseth) and her friends are young women from upperclass American families on the make among the British aristocracy. The Americans get titles, and the English lords get to keep their frequently cash-poor estates running (this whole phenomenon forms the backstory for the elder Crawleys on Downton Abbey, so should be familiar). What starts as soapy mercenary mission for the strong and spirited young women becomes a complicated hunt for true love, especially when Nan is forced to choose between the handsome duke she should marry and the best friend she can't seem to stay out of bed with. Stream The Buccaneers on Apple TV.

The Other Bennet Sister (2026)

A bit of a ratings blockbuster on the BBC, this miniseries (for now, anyway), revisits the events of Pride and Prejudice from the perspective of Lizzy Bennet's bookish, altogether dorkier sister. Her ruddy complexion, penchant for grammatical correctness, and (dear lord) spectacles, make her entirely unsuitable for marriage and unfit for much other than genteel spinsterhood. That all begins to change when Mary sets off on her own to become a governess for the Gardiner family in London, managing to forge a life and a future for herself away from the parents and siblings who see her as not much more than a piece of furniture. Stream The Other Bennet Sister on Britbox.

Victoria (2016 – 2019)

Though a couple of generations prior to Downton, and taking place among the British royals rather than the merely upper crust, Victoria was born from the popularity of that other show—it revels in the same types of soapy drama, just at a slightly higher tier of society. Jenna Coleman (Doctor Who) is the young queen, navigating political rivals, family obligations, and a growing infatuation with a German prince (Tom Hughes). Mirroring the Queen's dramas are those of the palace staff, including the dressers, footmen, and cooks who are all dealing stuff of their own (thank you very much) while doing the real work of keeping things running for the royals. Stream Victoria on Netflix and PBS Passport.

Gentleman Jack (2019 – 2022)

Though her love dared not speak its name, the real-life Anne Lister certainly had no problem putting words to it—something like five million of them across her many diaries. So many, in fact, that the production of this show necessitated new transcriptions of works that hadn't been fully examined, despite having been written in the 1830s. Suranne Jones stars as Anne Lister, landowner and budding industrialist who returns to her inherited family estate only to discover that the neighbors are snatching coal from her land—and also that Ann Walker (Sophie Rundle), a wealthy estate owner, is looking pretty fine. It's a clever, funny series, and its use of Lister's prolific diaries gives it a real sense of verisimilitude in its depiction of a queer trailblazer. Stream Gentleman Jack on HBO Max or buy episodes from Prime Video.

Sanditon (2019 – 2023)

Another riff on Jane Austen, Sanditon is based on the author's final, incomplete work, which allows for plenty of creative leeway while offering a pretty pure distillation of the regency-drama thrills that Austen bequeathed to us—we're obviously a century earlier than Downton Abbey, but the romantic and economic entanglements of posh British types will ring familiar. Here, the wildly independent Charlotte Heywood (Rose Williams) sets out to reinvent herself while moving to the title's growing seaside resort town (based, probably, on the real-life Worthing). She discovers that commercial prospects have drawn schemers and chancers to the area, creating a unique and vibrant social scene, with all of the balls and fancy costumes you'd expect. Naturally, romantic complications ensue when Charlotte gets judgy about the entrepreneurial Parker family and finds herself at odds with, and then getting close to, the wild youngest son, Sidney (Theo James). Stream Sanditon on PBS Passport or buy episodes from Prime Video.

The Forsyte Saga (2002 – 2003)

I haven't been the biggest fan of the new adaptation of the John Galsworthy novels—though The Forsytes has already been renewed for a further two seasons, so I'm apparently in the minority. Nevertheless, I'll direct you back to 2002 and this extended miniseries led by Damian Lewis. It starts off in 1884 when the slightly scandalous engagement of one of the wealthy new-money Forsytes is marred by the revelation of a wild scandalous affair between cousin Joylon (Rupert Graves) and the governess, kicking off an impossibly complicated series of events that occupies the family for decades. Author Galsworthy was inspired to write the books on which all of this is based by his own extramarital affair, so drama is in the show's DNA. Stream The Forsyte Saga on Netflix.


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Along with the brand new Siri AI, Apple is introducing a number of new Apple Intelligence features—including a trio of new AI tools in the Photos app. We've been here before: Apple previously released AI-powered image editing features like Clean Up, which didn't necessarily hit the mark compared to similar tools from competitors like Google or Samsung. But this year appears to be a bit different: Apple's newest models, including those that work off-device, are improving existing features and powering new tools. For the most part, it seems to be a step in the right direction.

Apple’s Clean Up tool is much better

The new Clean Up tool is perhaps the most important update here. In iOS 26, Clean Up used Apple's on-device AI models to remove objects, but it was hit-or-miss. Clean Up was okay at basic tasks, but I found it couldn't remove surrounding shadows, nor could it replace an object with something that looked like it was originally part of the image.

Clean Up now uses a hybrid approach. For simple tweaks, like removing a small object, it uses an on-device model, just like in iOS 26. But, for bigger, more complex tasks (like removing an obstruction around your face), it hands off the task to Apple’s powerful Foundation models hosted on Apple’s own Private Cloud Compute servers. These servers, according to Apple, are completely private and encrypted. Apple says it doesn’t have access to your photos, and it doesn’t use your data for training.

To find these new tools, tap Edit on a photo, then choose Tools at the end of the toolbar. Here, tap Clean Up. By default, the feature is in Auto mode, which is the hybrid approach discussed above. From here, you can also switch to High Quality to force Apple to use the cloud models.

Using new Clean Up tools in iOS 27.
Middle: Cleaning up using only the on-device Fast model (same as iOS 26). Right: Using Apple's new Cloud models in iOS 27. Credit: Khamosh Pathak

Then, it’s business as usual. Use your fingers to highlight the object or part of the image that you want to remove. If you’re using Fast, the on-device option, the cleanup process will begin instantly. If you’re using High Quality, you’ll need to tap Clean Up and wait until Apple’s models do their thing. In my experience, the wait time can even stretch to minutes if you’re asking for clear, large objects.

After using this feature for cleaning up multiple images, here's the best tip I can give you: always use High Quality. Fast is the same as last year's feature, and while it removes the image, its replacement is lacking, as you can see with the mismatched tabletop in the image above. Even if you are removing a distinct object from a table, High Quality does a better job of replicating the tabletop, as well as shadows falling from other objects.

Clean Up tool in iOS 26 vs iOS 27.
Left and Middle: Clean up tool using on-device AI on iPhone 16 Pro. Right: Clean Up tool using Apple's cloud models on iPhone 16 Pro. Credit: Khamosh Pathak

The improvements continue when dealing with faces. The new iOS 27 feature can use generative AI and your own photos to recreate parts of your face that are obstructed. In my test (which you can see above), Clean Up on iOS 27 got rid of 99% of my coffee mug (though a border somehow still remains). On iOS 26, though, the result is just laughably bad: a soup of surrounding colors.

Extending photos in iOS 27 works like a charm

Extending photos in iOS 27 Photos app.
Credit: Khamosh Pathak

Extend, as the name suggests, expands your photos. Let’s say you have an off-center shot, or just looks unbalanced. Tap Extend from the Tools menu, then pinch in and move the image around. As you do, the surroundings will begin to blur, indicating the areas that iOS will fill in using Apple’s generative AI models. Because Apple uses cloud models, this too might take some time. Tap Extend, and wait.

Overall, Apple’s generative AI for extending images and filling in details is quite good—with some limitations. That's not necessarily surprising, as it's trained on Gemini’s own models, which are excellent at image manipulation. I tested the feature by extending the frame in nature, and in indoor settings. It did a good job of guessing what was around me, and even gave me a hand and a leg that weren't in the original shot. That said, it completely overexposed the image, so while you get more in the frame, you lose the sky entirely. In a photo I took of a coffee shop, the Photos app took the coffee bags that were on the shelf and just repeated them in the extended shot. This is quite a smart way to make the extended image look more realistic.

Extending photos in iOS 27 Photos app.
I took this image at Bookatico Bookstore & Cafe in Vadodara, India. Credit: Khamosh Pathak

Apple's Reframe feature needs a bit of work

The Reframe tool lets you change the angle or the perspective of the photo. You might wish you had moved your phone just a bit to the right before taking that snap of your partner, and while the moment is gone, the angle might be saved. With Reframe, you can swipe around on the image to change the perspective, as if you were adjusting the angle when originally taking the photo. The app shows you a live preview of what things will look like (as this is just a preview, it will show some unnatural bending, but that won’t be in the final result). Then, tap Reframe, and let Apple’s cloud models do their thing. After some time, the reframed image will be ready.

reframing a coffee cup to mixed results
Credit: Khamosh Pathak

In my testing, I found this to be the most jarring tool. It does the job, but it struggles with faces quite a lot. It’s best to use it for slight angle changes, and not much else. To stress test, I pushed the angle as far as the Photos app would allow. The result was an image with a slanted face, that looked more 2D than 3D (I will save you the horror of looking at my face with the eyes scrambled). As Apple works on improving the cloud models, though, this can get better.

Remember: All of these features are currently in beta testing. Apple may continue to improve the experience with subsequent betas and with iOS 27's official release in the fall.


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Steven Spielberg's latest has done some very respectable business at the box office, and, even if it's not exactly an indie, continues a recent run of non-IP films (Obsession and Backrooms, specifically) doing extremely well against things like He-Man and a new Star Wars. All of those movies are fun, but it's nice to see some light at the end of the all-franchise, all-the-time tunnel.

Disclosure Day, which is best approached with minimal foreknowledge, is Spielberg's latest take on the impact that the existence of aliens might have on human civilization: War of the Worlds posits that they'd try to destroy us while possibly uniting us, but Disclosure Day feels more in conversation with Close Encounters of the Third Kind, in which human greed and paranoia are the real threats. DD has earned good reviews, though not without a bit of a mixed reception—I, for one, rather loved it. In that spirit, let's visit other movies and streaming shows that lead us deep into the shadowy worlds of alien conspiracies.

Nope (2022)

Daniel Kaluuya and Keke Palmer star as the sibling caretakers of a rural California horse ranch, who find themselves beset by...something? Wildly original, if frequently vexing, the tagline calling it a "neo-Western science fiction horror film" tells you all you need to know, and might maybe be Jordan Peele's best. When the Haywood Farm is beset by an otherworldly entity, the siblings running the place opt to make the best of things by capturing it on film. Spielbergian in its concern with our reaction to the extraordinary, Nope also subverts expectations at pretty much every turn. Stream Nope on Netflix or rent it from Prime Video.

The Vast of Night (2019)

Director Andrew Patterson made a wildly confident debut with this film that takes us back to the 1950s, to a small town in New Mexico on the night of the big basketball game. A young local disc jockey, Everett (Jake Horowitz) and his best friend, local switchboard operator Fay (Sierra McCormick) are caught up in a series of bizarre events that begin when Everett’s show is interrupted by a strange signal. The premise involves any number of UFO-movie cliches, but that's both the point, and not really the point at all: The film has a phenomenal visual flair, and makes the typical alien invasion stakes feel deeply personal for this small town. Stream The Vast of Night on Prime Video.

Contact (1997)

Adapted from scientist Carl Sagan's (brilliant) only novel, Contact finds Jodie Foster's SETI researcher Dr. Eleanor Arroway tracking an extraterrestrial signal containing a sequence of prime numbers, and tens of thousands of pages of encoded data that's ultimately revealed to be a set of blueprints—but to build what? As the message ignites political and religious firestorms, the movie privileges the importance of science while acknowledging the perspectives of people like Matthew McConaughey's Palmer Joss, a well-meaning faith leader who, nonetheless, clashes with Ellie on the signal's broader meaning. The conflicts between hard fact and faith in the face of scientific revelation resonate with Disclosure Day, as do the questions about whether or not our response to actual aliens would be particularly healthy. Rent Contact from Prime Video.

The X-Files (1993 – 2018)

Still the ne plus ultra of alien conspiracy programming, The X-Files has provided us with decades of blissful paranoia. Of course, after an 11-season series, two movies, a couple of spin-offs, Chris Carter's classic never got to the damn point (we'll probably never know exactly what it was all about), but that's almost beside the point: The questions are almost always more satisfying than the answers; Gillian Anderson and David Duchovny have some all-time great TV chemistry, and we're more than happy to follow them down into the dark. Stream The X-Files on Disney+ and Hulu.

The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)

Spielberg doubtless picked up a thing or two from prolific, genre-bending director Robert Wise, who crafted one of the finest science fiction films of the 1950s (or, really, of all time) by (mostly) dodging monsters and space ships in favor of this more thoughtful thriller. Here, an alien visitor (Michael Rennie) arrives on Earth in peace right before being shot by some U.S. military types who want to keep Klaatu's knowledge to themselves. Managing to escape, he decides to walk among us for a bit before delivering a message of hope—alongside some tough love. Rent The Day the Earth Stood Still from Prime Video.

Fire in the Sky (1993)

Only a handful of films post-Fire in the Sky bothered to take the idea of alien abduction seriously; perhaps that’s a fairly inevitable side effect of the rise of a culture in which everything is on tape and newer conspiracy theories have made the UFO cults of yore seem positively quaint. This film, starring D.B. Sweeney, deals with the true-life (just go with it) story of Travis Walton, an Arizona logger who went missing for five days in 1975 following an encounter with a mysterious object and a beam of light—all of which was witnessed by frightened co-workers who fled the scene. The film’s non-fiction lens isn’t going to work for every viewer, but it treats Walton’s described experiences as fact (before embellishing them to make a more interesting movie); though much of the movie deals with the aftereffects of the abduction, the climactic trip inside the space ship is creepily effective. The film lacks Spielberg's larger questions of meaning, but it understands that alien stories are meaningless if they don't speak to individual experiences. Rent Fire in the Sky from Prime Video.

Roswell (1999 – 2002)

Look, alien conspiracies aren't just for middle-aged FBI agents and struggling meteorologists; if you live in Roswell, New Mexico, the freaky's going to hit you by high school—or so this cult favorite series posits. In the pilot, seemingly normal teenager Max Evans (Jason Behr) intervenes when Liz Parker (Shiri Appleby) is shot while working at her parents' cafe. He saves her life, and not in a typical way, leading to the revelation that he's one of four alien/human hybrids who crashed to Earth in 1947. Several of the movies and shows here reference the legendary Roswell crash, but this one catches us up with the aliens a few decades later via an addictive teen soap. Buy Roswell from Apple TV.

Honeymoon (2014)

When it comes to my alien movies, I tend to lean toward "the real problem is people"-type stories, but film history is packed with brilliant horror movies in which extraterrestrials are bad, actually. Leigh Janiak (Fear Street) made her feature directorial debut in this film that combines science fiction with body horror in a story about a young couple (Rose Leslie and Harry Treadaway) whose relationship dynamic changes rather dramatically after Bea encounters strange lights in the woods. The Body Snatchers-esque premise isn’t groundbreaking, but the direction is stylish, and the narrative leans into compelling subtextual horror: What if someone you’ve committed your life to suddenly starts acting like a completely different person? Disclosure Day's alien-initiated transformation of its lead character is a cause for wonder at least as much as fear, but Honeymoon is much more about the terror of it all. Rent Honeymoon from Prime Video.

The Boroughs (2026 — )

This new Netflix show finds a talented and thoroughly recognizable cast (Alfred Molina, Alfre Woodard, Denis O'Hare, Clarke Peters, and Geena Davis, among others) confronting a series of freaky mysteries in their seemingly idyllic, but entirely remote, retirement community—the look and feel, involving a charming western-American housing development, is very 1980s Spielberg. Without giving too much away about either The Boroughs or Disclosure Day, there's a web of conspiracy common to both, and freaky mysteries that dovetail in surprisingly similar ways. Think of it as Cocoon meets Close Encounters, but scary. Stream The Boroughs on Netflix.

Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)

This one is so deeply obvious that it almost doesn't need to be mentioned, but it would also feel a little churlish to leave it out: Disclosure Day isn't a remake or sequel to Close Encounters by any means, but it does feel like a continuation of a discussion about aliens that Steven Spielberg began nearly 50 years ago—a conversation that runs through E.T., War of the Worlds, and everyone's least-favorite Indiana Jones movie. As always, he's interested in extraterrestrial life, but more interested in the impact that knowledge of aliens would have on us. A story with an epic scale involving the impending first contact comes down to, for Spielberg and company, blue-collar utility lineman, a three-year-old kid, and a French scientist all trying to figure out what their encounters mean for these (mostly) ordinary, everyday humans faced with the numinous. Stream Close Encounters of the Third Kind on Peacock or rent it from Prime Video.


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The Philips 1000 Series Touchscreen Key-free Electronic Deadbolt is currently on sale for just $67.99 on StackSocial, offering a fairly straightforward take on keyless home entry. Instead of leaning into app integrations or smart home connectivity, Philips has focused this model on simple PIN-based access and everyday convenience. The lock features a backlit touchscreen keypad and supports up to 20 user PINs, as well as unlimited one-time guest codes for temporary access. That makes it useful for households with multiple family members, rental properties, or anyone who regularly needs to let guests or service workers in, all without handing over physical keys.

Setting it up is relatively simple, since there’s no wifi, Bluetooth, or separate hub involved—the lock installs in place of a standard deadbolt with basic tools and doesn’t require any wiring. Philips includes the required AA batteries in the box, which can last up to a year depending on how often the lock is used. You’ll also get a few practical features that make day-to-day use easier. Auto-lock automatically secures the door after you leave, while one-touch locking lets you lock it with a quick tap instead of reaching for keys every time. It’s the kind of thing that helps cut down on those small moments of second-guessing when you’re already halfway down the driveway, wondering if you locked the door.

That said, this is closer to an electronic deadbolt than a full smart lock, so you won’t get remote access, phone controls, activity history, or integrations with platforms like Alexa or Google Home. Depending on what you want from a lock, that could either feel limiting or the reason to buy it, since not everyone wants another app sending notifications or another device connected to their home network. Still, for under $70, the Philips 1000 Series covers the basics well and makes the most sense for people who want the convenience of keyless entry without adding another app, subscription, or overly complicated setup process to their routine.

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Deep learning systems on phones, cars, and other edge devices increasingly run on custom silicon. Specialized chips such as FPGAs and ASICs give these systems the speed and low power consumption that edge applications need. Many of these chips come from third-party design houses and foundries, which adds steps to the supply chain where an outside party can alter a device.

Researchers at the University of Tennessee and the University of Florida built an attack that takes advantage of this arrangement. The attack, called HAMLOCK, short for Hardware-Model Logically Combined Attack, divides a backdoor into two parts and places them on opposite sides of the hardware and software boundary.

OPIS

Threat Model of HAMLOCK (Source: Research paper)

How the attack divides its work

Conventional backdoors live entirely in a model’s weights. The model learns to misclassify any input that carries a chosen trigger, such as a small colored square. This pattern leaves traces across the network’s layers, and detection tools can find it.

HAMLOCK keeps the model almost ordinary. The software side changes the weights of at most three neurons so those neurons produce unusually high values when a trigger appears in an input. On its own, the model classifies triggered images correctly. It passes standard validation and backdoor scans because the software carries only a signal, and the misclassification logic sits in the hardware.

The second part lives in the chip. Two small circuits, called hardware Trojans, complete the attack. One circuit watches the activations of the chosen neurons. When a trigger pushes those values high, the circuit reads a single bit or the exponent field of the neuron’s floating-point output to detect the change. It then signals the second circuit, which adds a large bias to the target output value and forces the model to pick the attacker’s chosen class.

How well it worked

The split design pays off in the lab. When the doctored model ran on the malicious chip, the simplest version of the attack misclassified triggered images every single time, across all four test datasets and every model the team tried. The version that spreads its work across several neurons did slightly worse, landing in the mid-90s.

The point of a backdoor is that nobody notices it until it fires, and HAMLOCK clears that bar. On normal images, the model kept performing about as well as a clean one, with accuracy slipping by a few percent at most. Pull the chip out of the picture and the backdoor goes quiet: the software alone sent trigger images to the wrong class less than one percent of the time. A reviewer testing the model by itself would see a tool that works.

Getting past existing defenses

The researchers then ran the model through the kind of screening a model repository or a careful user might apply. Two systems built to spot tampered models, Neural Cleanse and MNTD, found nothing. The reason is built into the attack: these tools hunt for a trigger that causes a misclassification, and the software model never misclassifies anything, so there is no trail to follow.

Tools that inspect individual inputs at inference time did about as well as a coin flip. Detectors that work with internal activations and detectors that work from inputs and outputs alone both struggled to tell trigger images apart from clean ones. The same square trigger, planted with an ordinary backdoor method, gets caught by these same tools almost every time, which shows how much the hardware split changes the picture.

Defenses that try to scrub a backdoor out of a model also came up empty. Fine-tuning and pruning, the usual cleanup steps, left the attack working at full strength. One run even handed the defender real examples of the attack, and the backdoor survived. The cleanup methods read the trigger images as harmless training data, so retraining reinforced the trigger rather than removing it.

A small hardware footprint

The chip side is easy to overlook because the model does the heavy lifting. The trigger circuit only checks a few bits, and the payload circuit only adds a fixed number, so the extra logic amounts to a handful of gates and comparators. Synthesized with standard commercial tools on a 45-nanometer process, the added area came in around a tenth of a percent at most, and close to nothing on the larger chips.

Power told a similar story for two of the three designs. The VGG-16 chip ran a little higher, reaching about one percent for the simple circuit and a few percent for the multi-neuron one, an artifact of how that accelerator was built. Numbers in this range disappear into the normal swings of chip manufacturing, which makes side-channel detection hard. A tester comparing a tainted chip against a clean one would see noise.

Where the attack fits

HAMLOCK assumes an attacker with access to the hardware design or fabrication stage and knowledge of the model’s weights and layout. Two situations apply. In one, a victim downloads a pretrained model from a public repository and sends it to a third-party manufacturer for deployment. In the other, a victim trains its own model and hands it to an untrusted manufacturer. In both, the manufacturer makes the small weight changes and inserts the circuits.

The hardware design supports several kinds of trigger conditions. Combinational triggers fire only when several conditions occur together. Sequential triggers respond to patterns in a set order. Temporal triggers activate after a set number of inferences. A temporal trigger could keep a backdoor dormant in an autonomous vehicle until it has run for a certain mileage, so the eventual failure looks like wear.

What a defense would require

The paper calls for cross-layer defenses without laying one out. Swarup Bhunia, director of the Warren B. Nelms Institute for the Connected World and a co-author of the paper, told Help Net Security what an answer would involve. “The hardware-model combined attack in HAMLOCK can be highly stealthy and hard to detect pre-deployment of an AI system, as noted in the paper. However, an effective defense can be built by (1) verification of existence of malware, however minute, on fabricated silicon, and (2) runtime monitoring of an anomaly. A runtime check by tracking internal model behavior can be very effective in detecting diverse security issues, including backdoor attacks, during operation of an AI model.”

That points the work toward the deployed system, where a monitor watches how a model behaves during operation and flags activity that departs from the norm.

The move to language models

The current evaluation covers image classifiers. The same FPGA and ASIC accelerators now run large language models and transformers, which raises the question of whether the activation-monitoring trick carries over. Bhunia said it does. “The activation-monitoring mechanism and triggering of a backdoor is expected to generalize, while the payloads can vary for LLMs running in FPGA/ASIC accelerators. That’s indeed the focus of our on-going work on LLM, where we develop powerful backdoor attacks following the HAMLOCK model.”

The code is publicly available. The authors plan to share results with EDA tool vendors such as Synopsys and Cadence, and they point to hardware-software co-verification, checking a compiled model’s datapath against the hardware layout, as a direction for defense that remains an open research problem.


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At most U.S. technology companies, machines now write the bulk of the code that ships each week. The engineer’s job has shifted toward reviewing what the AI produces, and that review gives the code high marks. Leaders rate AI-generated code as higher quality than the code their own people write, praising its clean structure, consistent style, and low count of obvious bugs at submission time.

AI-generated code review

The same code behaves worse once it runs. Production incidents have climbed over the past year. Senior engineers spend more of their time fixing what the AI generated. A large majority of organizations hit at least one production failure tied to AI code in the past six months, and a sizable share of that code goes back for repair soon after it ships.

Trust arrives before inspection

The pattern starts with trust that lands early. Most teams say they often ship AI-generated code to production without checking it line by line. The code reads well, so it clears review quickly, and the inspection step where many security defects get caught goes quiet.

LLMs produce code that works under clean, predictable conditions. The weak spots show up in edge cases, concurrency, deprecated API calls, and complex state changes. These gaps stay buried in the source and surface once real users hit the system. A reviewer scanning a pull request has little chance of spotting them.

Security flaws that emerge under load

Newly introduced security vulnerabilities have affected roughly three in ten organizations in the past six months. Integration failures, compliance problems, and data integrity issues have hit similar shares. Most organizations carry at least one war story from the period, and many carry several.

According to the New Relic study, AI-generated code introduces close to twice as many critical runtime issues as peer-reviewed human-authored code. The failures spread across many small problems at once. Each leaves a signature in production data. Schema drift and rising error rates between services point to integration breakage. Odd patterns in authentication and trace data expose security weaknesses. The common thread is that these signs appear after deployment, well past the review stage.

The limits of review-time inspection

A reviewer reads the source. Production produces the trace. The source shows how the code is built. The trace shows how it behaves under real load, real dependencies, and real edge cases. AI coding tools generate code from the source alone, with no view of runtime conditions. That gap explains the distance between the grades AI code earns in review and the way it performs in the wild.

The cleanup falls on experienced staff. Site reliability and DevOps engineers report losing up to a third of their work week to triaging and refactoring machine output that reached production unchecked. That is time the most senior people on a team would otherwise spend on harder problems.

Observability moves earlier in the process

Support for observability has reached near-unanimous levels among the leaders surveyed. They treat runtime monitoring as essential for AI-generated code, and many now prompt the AI to build telemetry such as logs and traces directly into the code it writes. The decision about what to log and what to alert on is moving upstream into the developer’s prompt.

The speed gains behind all this are real, and revenue reflects them, which is why adoption keeps climbing. AI-written code sits inside formal production policy at most organizations and reaches the same customer-facing services as code from senior engineers. No organization in the survey bans the practice.

Download: Automating Pentest Delivery Guide


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This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak:

  • I’m giving a keynote at Cybernation 2026 in Berlin, Germany, on June 24, 2026.
  • I’m speaking at the Potsdam Conference on National Cybersecurity at the Hasso Plattner Institut in Potsdam, Germany. The event runs June 24–25, 2026, and my talk will be the evening of June 24.
  • I’m participating in a panel discussion at the Austrian Institute for International Affairs in Vienna on Thursday, June 25, 2026.
  • I’m speaking at the Digital Humanism Conference in Vienna, Austria, on Friday, June 26, 2026.
  • I’m giving a fireside chat for Epicenter Works, to be held at Kaffee Alt Wien in Vienna, Austria, on Friday, June 26, 2026.
  • I’m participating (via Zoom) in a panel discussion at Quantum.Tech World in Boston, Massachusetts, USA, on Friday, June 26, 2026. The topic is “Q-Day’s Shortening Deadline: Immediate Solutions.”
  • I’m speaking at Czech Technical University in Prague, Czechia, on Monday, June 29, 2026.
  • I’m speaking at the Nuremberg Digital Festival in Nuremburg, Germany, on Wednesday, July 1, 2026.
  • I’m speaking at CanSecWest 2026 in Vancouver, Canada. The conference runs September 30–October 1, 2026; the time of my talk is TBD.

The list is maintained on this page.


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