Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

NSA lost access to Mythos amid Anthropic dispute

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 308 posts

Re: NSA lost access to Mythos amid Anthropic dispute

#91

Post by schoen »

aleqs wrote: post #65
yard2010 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please provide sources for such bold claims

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM https://www.wired.com/2013/10/nsa-hacked-yahoo-google-cables... https://www.eff.org/nsa-spying

I worked on these cases at EFF and I'm skeptical of the automatic "NSA has access to everything" intuition.

What we learned from that era includes things like

(1) spy agencies are incredibly aggressive and pursue tons of different angles to get access to things

(2) spy agencies have a lot of money

(3) spy agencies often have interpretations of law that would surprise the public or legal experts (and sometimes courts have issued sealed rulings permitting them to do things that surprise the public or legal experts later when they're unsealed)

(4) some people throughout different parts of society assume culturally that companies in a country "should" generally help the spy agencies of that country's government because they are the "good guys" or "on the same team" or whatever

These things are all pretty bad and scary, but they still don't imply absolutely infinite power or access, because all of them come with different kinds of pushback. People also just tell them no!

I want to write an article with a colleague about the continuing role of culture here, because I think there are companies or industries where the default reaction is to want to cooperate with the government, and others where the default reaction is not that.

There are certainly secret things that have never come out, e.g. whatever Senator Wyden keeps alluding to, and what kind of program or authority was behind the interception of hardware shipments to covertly tamper with them, and whether there is a bulk financial data interception program, and presumably lots of other stuff. I don't agree with these things, and I want them to be exposed and stopped, and I also don't think they constitute infinite power over all parts of the tech industry.

Re: NSA lost access to Mythos amid Anthropic dispute

#92

Post by chews »

strictnein wrote: post #36
chews wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Yes, you have collected a lot of random bits of information from over a decade ago. I'm sure everything you say is still relevant today, especially the conspiracy nonsense. Some of us actually work in security, while others think the NSA and CIA are some magically powerful orgs. Explain how, even with the mystical Room 641A, the NSA can't break a TLS1.3 protected communication channel without either party knowing abo…

you compel the host under similar threat of non-existance to grant you view of the hypervisor. you're not running on bare metal with alternate TPM's that arent the Intel IMU (also backdoor'd) so you're just as pwnable.

now say you're doing this on a raspberry pi or other openhardware like a librum machine with a yubikey hsm on local wifi or physical ethernet... you may have a shot at the privacy you're looking for.

Re: NSA lost access to Mythos amid Anthropic dispute

#93

Post by shimman »

kansface wrote: post #37
ck2 wrote: post #24

they are doing DOGE-cuts to all of intelligence now anyway dozens upon dozens fired for no reason so US "intelligence" is going to go even further backwards * https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/trump-acting-ch... November is going to be insanity

Here is one sector of the US government I'm happy to see burned down. If the alternative is the status quo, I'm OK with any roll of the dice.

You're assuming that they are "dismantling" it in a sense, what they are actually doing is mostly attacking workers while introducing extremely unsafe software. If you think LLMs are terrible, imagine it being the gatekeeper on whether your personal info is shared to an individual (and they ain't wasting time on the boring info either!).

When you want to reorient the government, it's much easier doing it with a smaller more loyal force. Now introduce tools that make mass surveillance easier and less accountable.

Like that's not a bad thing for them, that's what they want to do.

---

Back to the article, I'm not shocked that a massive LLM company speed running into the brick wall that is the US government; just thought it would be OpenAI, but Sam Altman is truly the best bottom feeder the game.

Also fully believe that Anthropic is hoping that public sentiment is on their side but more Americans hate AI companies than Trump so it's not going to go how they want.

Give it maybe 3-6 months before the Trump Admin talks about openly nationalizing Anthropic.

Re: NSA lost access to Mythos amid Anthropic dispute

#94

Post by eigenspace »

tempodox wrote: post #49
kansface wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here is one sector of the US government I'm happy to see burned down. If the alternative is the status quo, I'm OK with any roll of the dice.

It can always get worse.

Pah! Nonsense. What could possibly be worse than Weimar Germany or Tsarist Russia?

Re: NSA lost access to Mythos amid Anthropic dispute

#95

Post by schoen »

john_strinlai wrote: post #90
micromacrofoot wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the NSA isn't a bunch of super soldiers, they're cops with too much access, it doesn't take a genius to outsmart a cop

> they're cops with too much access, it doesn't take a genius to outsmart a cop the nsa has an unlimited budget and spend a good portion of that budget recruiting some of the smartest people in the country. while they dont have super powers, they also arent the town cop who took a 6 month course after high school then joined the force. it does no good to hold them up as mythical figures. it also does no good to prete…

I appreciate the balance here.

Some of the smartest people I know have worked on fighting NSA, but they had a drastically smaller budget than NSA itself, and the mental availability bias is skewed by the fact that the "fighting NSA" people talked about their work all the time, while the "being NSA" people generally didn't.

I do know one extremely smart person who went to work there, and I witnessed a failed recruitment of another extremely smart person.

Re: NSA lost access to Mythos amid Anthropic dispute

#96

Post by micromacrofoot »

john_strinlai wrote: post #90
micromacrofoot wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the NSA isn't a bunch of super soldiers, they're cops with too much access, it doesn't take a genius to outsmart a cop

> they're cops with too much access, it doesn't take a genius to outsmart a cop the nsa has an unlimited budget and spend a good portion of that budget recruiting some of the smartest people in the country. while they dont have super powers, they also arent the town cop who took a 6 month course after high school then joined the force. it does no good to hold them up as mythical figures. it also does no good to prete…

> every math phd i am acquainted with has been approached by nsa recruiters.

how many of them took them up on the offer, and how many are in leadership roles?

it takes a very narrow range of personality to want to be a cop, which at the end of the day is a government job... the only people they make rich are contractors

I'm not saying there aren't smart people working there but it's ridiculous to assume they have an iron grasp on all communication from the top tech companies in the world, while also monitoring half the world's governments... they just don't

Re: NSA lost access to Mythos amid Anthropic dispute

#97

Post by chews »

aleqs wrote: post #53
strictnein wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, you have collected a lot of random bits of information from over a decade ago. I'm sure everything you say is still relevant today, especially the conspiracy nonsense. Some of us actually work in security, while others think the NSA and CIA are some magically powerful orgs. Explain how, even with the mystical Room 641A, the NSA can't break a TLS1.3 protected communication channel without either party knowing abo…

Explain to me how you are going to encrypt your LLM API calls with your let's encrypt cert. There are also multiple ways/places traffic you send to typical cloud/tech company is decrypted and can be intercepted. (Surprised I have to point this out to someone who 'actually works in security ' lol) Not to mention US tech companies fully cooperate with the NSA in many cases and are aware of this going on.

why is europe going to such great lengths to build datacenters and ensure they have no connection to US jurisdiction... GDPR means nothing if there is a persistent threat installed on every instance.

Re: NSA lost access to Mythos amid Anthropic dispute

#98

Post by nickthegreek »

dofm wrote: post #61
infinite_spin wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the success of mythos isn't from model weights, it's from the harness and toolset it has access to

I agree but that's even easier to exfiltrate, surely.

given some time, surely. but that seems harder with the model turned off.

Re: NSA lost access to Mythos amid Anthropic dispute

#99

Post by tux3 »

dofm wrote: post #79
HlessClaudesman wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think there is much overlap between people capable of building cutting edge LLM's and the people who want to build a cutting edge LLM for the government.

The NSA managed to deliberately insert a backdoor into elliptic-curve cryptography right under the noses of everyone capable of making elliptic-curve cryptography. I wouldn't count them out.

Mathematicians in academia are paid a little less than AI researchers. Companies are willing to pay billions to steal the few people capable of driving development of frontier LLMs from each other. Cryptographers don't quite enjoy the same popularity.

Re: NSA lost access to Mythos amid Anthropic dispute

#100

Post by xeubie »

dofm wrote: post #64
HlessClaudesman wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who will make them the next set of weights? If a government can just seize the product of someone else's labour, either they will end up as slave owners or without willing workers.

Serious question: do you think the NSA aren't training their own LLMs? (With or without Anthropic and OpenAI's help) It's a perfect technology for their uses, they get a big chunk of a $100 billion black budget, and they've had access to the research for at least as long as we have.

I can't say what they're doing now because I worked for the NSA 15 years ago but the view of them as an omnipotent power is a product of Hollywood. The government is good at throwing an ungodly amount of resources at something to get a result through sheer attrition, and so they are often the source of original development of technologies. The private sector has always been much better at building a technology to greater sophistication and efficiency. There may be blue badgers in Fort Meade trying to train models but there is no chance they are competitive with the frontier AI companies. It's like saying the government has an amazing home-grown fighter aircraft that is beyond what Lockheed has ever made...they delegate that stuff to private companies for a reason.
Post reply on HN