Live data from Hacker News

Feds freaked over Fable 5 after 'fix this code', not jailbreak, say researchers

theregister.com

201–210 of 382 posts

Re: Feds freaked over Fable 5 after 'fix this code', not jailbreak, say researchers

#201

They didn't freaked since the order was to still allow 350 million people using it: there is, in such large population, everything, including single persons very against the country, the government and so forth. If they really freaked they would say "we need to investigate, you have to retire the model". That would be a more defensible POV at least.

[deleted]

Re: Feds freaked over Fable 5 after 'fix this code', not jailbreak, say researchers

#202
post #196
post #9

Lol "fix this code" is beautiful. Like it basically jail broke the "no security vul guard rails" not in any clever way but just by fixing them, producing exploit code just by writing test cases making sure it's fixed. So you just need to look at the code & tests as a human to get vulnerabilities and exploits(components). What makes this so beautiful IMHO is that it's a trivial jail break, but also a close to unfixabl…

I don't believe that this is unfixable. Just have an internal verbal loop of, "Is this a security issue?" The thought that it potentially is should trigger both a high priority on getting it right, and an unwillingness to write a test case demonstrating the security angle of it. In other words do not put a guard rail on the idea of security. Put a guard rail on what it does after encountering the thought that it migh…

That would make the model useless

Re: Feds freaked over Fable 5 after 'fix this code', not jailbreak, say researchers

#203
post #88

I haven't been following this story, but the US wanted claude to not be able to find bugs in code?

No. Anthropic spent months telling the world that LLMs are nukes and then got surprised when they got regulated like nukes. They specifically argued that Mythos was too dangerous to release publicly because it can find security bugs, and then released a watered-down version (Fable) that was supposed to recognize when it was being asked to find security bugs and downgrade itself to Opus. Then Amazon figured out that it'll happily find security bugs as long as you don't mention you're hunting security bugs. So the US government put an export control ban on Fable, because that's what Anthropic begged them to do.

To add to this, Pete Hegseth wants to make an example out of Anthropic because they refused to amend their contractual language to allow the Department of Defense[0] to make fully autonomous kill drones. This is, of course, a really petty and stupid dispute, but the hallmark of the Trump Administration is engaging in really petty and stupid disputes with the full faith and credit of the United States backing them. This is exactly the kind of administration you do NOT want to give rhetorical ammunition to, and Anthropic handed them a whole ammo belt.

[0] It is always ethical to deadname governments. Especially when they aren't even legally allowed to change their own name.

Re: Feds freaked over Fable 5 after 'fix this code', not jailbreak, say researchers

#204
post #57

If you set aside political menace, this is a huge problem with Anthropic's strategy. You _cannot_ say that Mythos is super dangerous and can only be rolled out to certain people, but then release Fable with anything other than bulletproof cyber denials. Clearly with LLMs, bulletproof denials are ~impossible due to the way LLMs work. So you've ended up in a situation where Anthropic are simultaneously claiming it's a…

> Clearly with LLMs, bulletproof denials are ~impossible due to the way LLMs work Exactly. AI safety is nonsensical. You cannot define the set of "bad strings". The billion monkeys with typewriters are eventually going to be able to produce them. Any "safety" system for constraining LLM output is going to have a nonzero leak rate. But on the other hand, this is also irrelevant, unless you're irresponsible enough to c…

> unless you're irresponsible enough to connect an LLM to something that actually matters

Remember when people said Artifical Intelligence woun't be dangerous, because nobody will be stupid enough to give it free access to the internet...

Re: Feds freaked over Fable 5 after 'fix this code', not jailbreak, say researchers

#205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly - it effectively is a "jail break" since it accomplishes something the model's security filter was trying to prevent, and the ridiculous simplicity of it shows just how broken that type of security is. I wonder if Dario is now regretting hyping up how dangerous the model is? How does he walk this back? Do the feds let him just put a band-aid on it?

I also have a 100% success rate jail breaking them by breaking the work down into small pieces and stripping all security related language. Smaller tasks, test engineering and normal programming language. Fable found a few bugs in my harness for me before they pulled it. I was testing it vs ChatGPT, Gemini, and Opus. It was doing well at bug hunting.

>by breaking the work down into small pieces and stripping all security related language

Compartmentalization in practice, nice. It's also very hard to do anything about because the agents that have been divided rarely realize they are working on something larger, hence why militaries and businesses with security risks commonly do this with their employees.

Re: Feds freaked over Fable 5 after 'fix this code', not jailbreak, say researchers

#206

If you set aside political menace, this is a huge problem with Anthropic's strategy. You _cannot_ say that Mythos is super dangerous and can only be rolled out to certain people, but then release Fable with anything other than bulletproof cyber denials. Clearly with LLMs, bulletproof denials are ~impossible due to the way LLMs work. So you've ended up in a situation where Anthropic are simultaneously claiming it's a…

I do find it hilarious that Asimov wrote many stories about how simple bright-line rule-based systems are ineffective for restricting agency. Those stories were first published in the 1940s. 80 years later, we have something approximating AI, and we're trying to restrict it with simple bright-line rules. Not because we never learned that lesson, but because we simply haven't come up with a better way to do it . Proba…

> The hilarious part, though, is that it's not the AI that's working around the rules. That's the scenario that's been in science fiction, but it's not what's happening. It's the human users making use of our agency to get the AI agents to work around the rules. Despite calling them "agents", current AI agents don't seem to be able to that particular something. Yet, at least.

Well, yes. Until people are putting the LLMs into actual mechanical robots, "agency" boils down to flipping bits in memory or storage (even if they're ones that humans consider really important, e.g. because they represent a bank ledger) or convincing humans to take action. One can only "work around the rules" to the extent that one can "work".

But even in Asimov's books, at least some of the scenarios involved humans misleading the robots to use them as pawns in a greater scheme.

Re: Feds freaked over Fable 5 after 'fix this code', not jailbreak, say researchers

#207
post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> unless you're irresponsible enough to connect an LLM to something that actually matters. Can't tell if you're saying this tongue-in-cheek or you're a bit out of the loop on what people are doing with LLMs. And a quick correction: > unless someone, somewhere is irresponsible enough to connect an LLM to something that actually matters.

"You" can be used as a generalized plural here. Of course people are connecting LLMs to bank accounts, power grids, airline sales, account recovery chatbots and so on. I no longer read COMP.RISKS but I imagine they're having fun with this.

The thing I'm pointing out is that even if you (the generalized plural) do not engage in reckless behavior, you are at the mercy of the lowest common denominator of fellow earth-inhabitants increasingly armed with superweapons via a $20/mo subscription.

The need to acquire expertise and/or a meaningful following has always been a significant impediment to malicious or moronic actors. But less so every day.

Re: Feds freaked over Fable 5 after 'fix this code', not jailbreak, say researchers

#208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the weird distinction with AI that I've complained about for ages, how can we make it do lawful good, its nearly impossible. Ask an AI to give you regex to filed our racial slurs, and things fall apart really quickly, it scolds you about not saying slurs. Even though regex implies it looks nearly nothing like a slur.

Many, many years ago I was asked to implement a filter like that for usernames. I said right away that it wasn't going to work well, but I did implement it. Next internal build, the CEO can't create an account. With his real name. It worked exactly to spec; I added a debug print and showed everyone the "bad word" it tripped on. The idea was promptly rethought. I feel like the AI did you a favour here.

Now I'm trying to figure out which word that would be, but yeah.

That reminds me of a bug I fixed where my bosses boss found it, we did everything, my boss at the time forced us to deploy anything and call it fixed. Then someone else saw it half a year later, I finally figured out the root cause and fixed it (localStorage vs sessionStorage) and my boss was acting like he didn't know what I was talking about, but I could hear it in his voice. I didn't press too hard, I just pushed the real fix out. It was basically a "client-side" bug of a gift card balance saved in localStorage that never updated, so I changed it to sessionStorage. Not quite the CEO, but the guy below the CIO finding a bug can worry just about anyone.

In my case, the regex would have been for a friend to filter reddit or discord slurs, so not as awful.

Re: Feds freaked over Fable 5 after 'fix this code', not jailbreak, say researchers

#209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article does not state at any point that the written test cases involved actual exploit code, and this is also very unlikely given what we know about Fable. Even if they did, it would not in any way be exposing the ability that originally raised concern wrt. Mythos Preview, viz. staging realistic cyber attacks that would be able to work around non-trivial defenses and chain vulnerabilities in a goal-directed way.…

The first part of implementing an exploit is finding a vulnerability, and "fix the vulnerabilities" accomplishes that just as well as "find the vulnerabilities".

should we also restrict a model if it can clone a repo, set up the tooling and build a project?

Re: Feds freaked over Fable 5 after 'fix this code', not jailbreak, say researchers

#210
post #196
post #9

Lol "fix this code" is beautiful. Like it basically jail broke the "no security vul guard rails" not in any clever way but just by fixing them, producing exploit code just by writing test cases making sure it's fixed. So you just need to look at the code & tests as a human to get vulnerabilities and exploits(components). What makes this so beautiful IMHO is that it's a trivial jail break, but also a close to unfixabl…

I don't believe that this is unfixable. Just have an internal verbal loop of, "Is this a security issue?" The thought that it potentially is should trigger both a high priority on getting it right, and an unwillingness to write a test case demonstrating the security angle of it. In other words do not put a guard rail on the idea of security. Put a guard rail on what it does after encountering the thought that it migh…

The end result of that is that your model can't fix or acknowledge security issues for fear of disclosing them.

This is the beauty the above poster mentioned: the ability to improve code is inherently coupled with the ability to recognize its shortcomings. You can't have one without the other.

Post reply on HN