Ok great, people tried to use your AI to do bad things, and your safety rails mostly stopped them. There are 10 other providers with different safety rails, there are open models out there with no rails at all. If AI can be used to do bad things, it will be used to do bad things.
Disrupting the first reported AI-orchestrated cyber espionage campaign
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Re: Disrupting the first reported AI-orchestrated cyber espionage campaign
#72Wait a minute - the attackers were using the API to ask Claude for ways to run a cybercampaign, and it was only defeated because Anthropic was able to detect the malicious queries? What would have happened if they were using an open-source model running locally? Or a secret model built by the Chinese government? I just updated by P(Doom) by a significant margin.
Local models are a different thing than those cloud-based assistants and APIs.
Re: Disrupting the first reported AI-orchestrated cyber espionage campaign
#73This is exactly why I make a huge exception for AI models, when it comes to open source software. I've been a big advocate of open source, spending over $1M to build massive code bases with my team, and giving them away to the public. But this is different. AI agents in the wrong hands are dangerous. The reason these guys were even able to detect this activity, analyze it, ban accounts, etc., is because the models ar…
I'd touch off my nuke to make the world a better place, and I bet you would too, right?
Re: Disrupting the first reported AI-orchestrated cyber espionage campaign
#74They're spinning this as a positive learning experience, and trying to make themselves look good. But, make no mistake, this was a failure on Anthropic's part to prevent this kind of abuse from being possible through their systems in the first place. They shouldn't be earning any dap from this.
Meh, drama aside, I'm actually curious what would be the true capabilities of a system that doesn't go through any "safety" alignment at all. Like an all out "mil-spec" agent. Feed it everything, RL it to own boxes, and let it loose in an air-gapped network to see what the true capabilities are. We know alignment hurts model performance (oAI people have said it, MS people have said it). We also know that companies tr…
Re: Disrupting the first reported AI-orchestrated cyber espionage campaign
#75Re: Disrupting the first reported AI-orchestrated cyber espionage campaign
#76This is exactly why I make a huge exception for AI models, when it comes to open source software. I've been a big advocate of open source, spending over $1M to build massive code bases with my team, and giving them away to the public. But this is different. AI agents in the wrong hands are dangerous. The reason these guys were even able to detect this activity, analyze it, ban accounts, etc., is because the models ar…
Re: Disrupting the first reported AI-orchestrated cyber espionage campaign
#77This is exactly why I make a huge exception for AI models, when it comes to open source software. I've been a big advocate of open source, spending over $1M to build massive code bases with my team, and giving them away to the public. But this is different. AI agents in the wrong hands are dangerous. The reason these guys were even able to detect this activity, analyze it, ban accounts, etc., is because the models ar…
I remember once a decade or so ago talking to a team at defcon of _loose_ affiliation where one guy would look for the app exploit, another guy would figure out how to pivot out of the sandbox to the OS, and another guy would figure out how to get root, and once they all got their pieces figured out they'd just smash it (and variants) together for a campaign. I hadn't heard of them before meeting them, and haven't heard about them since since, and they put a face for me though on a silent coordinated adversary model that must be increasing in prevalence as more and more folks out there realize the value of computer knowledge and gain access to it through once means or another.
Open source tooling enables large-scale participation in security testing, and something about humans seems to generally result in a distribution where some nuts use their lighters to burn down forests but most use them to light their campfires. We urgently need to design systems that can survive in the era of advanced threats, at least to the point where the best adversaries can achieve is service disruption. I'd rather live in a world where we can all work towards a better future than one where we hope that limiting access will prevent catastrophe. Assuming such limits can even be maintained, and that allowing architects to pretend that fires can never happen in their buildings means that they don't have to obey fire codes or install alarms & marked exits.
Re: Disrupting the first reported AI-orchestrated cyber espionage campaign
#78This is exactly why I make a huge exception for AI models, when it comes to open source software. I've been a big advocate of open source, spending over $1M to build massive code bases with my team, and giving them away to the public. But this is different. AI agents in the wrong hands are dangerous. The reason these guys were even able to detect this activity, analyze it, ban accounts, etc., is because the models ar…
I don’t think these agents are doing anything a dedicated human couldn’t do, only enabling it at scale. Relying on “not being one of few they focus on” as security is just security as obscurity. You were living on borrowed time anyway.
Re: Disrupting the first reported AI-orchestrated cyber espionage campaign
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t think these agents are doing anything a dedicated human couldn’t do, only enabling it at scale. Relying on “not being one of few they focus on” as security is just security as obscurity. You were living on borrowed time anyway.
"Quantity has a quality all its own". It's categorically different to be able to do harm cheaply at scale vs. doing it at great cost/effort.
And before someone says it's reductive to say it's just numbers, you could make the same argument in favor of cryptographic export controls, that the harm it does is larger than the benefit. Yet the benefit we can see in hindsight was clearly worth it.
Re: Disrupting the first reported AI-orchestrated cyber espionage campaign
#80I think as AI gets smarter, defenders should start assembling systems how NixOS does it. Defenders should not have to engage in an costly and error-prone search of truth about what's actually deployed. Systems should be composed from building blocks, the security of which can be audited largely independently, verifiably linking all of the source code, patches etc to some form of hardware attestation of the running sy…