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Detecting and countering misuse of AI: September 2026

anthropic.com

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Re: Detecting and countering misuse of AI: September 2026

#12

Post by kennywinker »

I have also blocked possible efforts to build biological weapons, I caught my nephew mixing up a so-called "magic potion" using kitchen spices. Authorities were notified, and then I presented myself with a medal for bravery.

These companies have proven they are willing to distort the truth, or outright lie, in order to inflate their valuation / protect their position / continue the hype-machine. Nothing they say can be trusted.

Re: Detecting and countering misuse of AI: September 2026

#17

Post by tedsanders »

Meta: The potential proliferation of biological weapons is serious. Millions could die. It's easy to joke about before it happens, but try to imagine how this thread might look after the successful deployment of a biological weapon by a rogue state or non-state actor. I encourage you to take this topic seriously and contribute posts that add new information or perspectives to the discussion.

(I myself think the odds of a bioweapon attack remain low and have not yet been seriously accelerated by LLMs, but this is absolutely something the world should pay attention to.)

Re: Detecting and countering misuse of AI: September 2026

#20

Post by jerf »

kennywinker wrote: post #12

I have also blocked possible efforts to build biological weapons, I caught my nephew mixing up a so-called "magic potion" using kitchen spices. Authorities were notified, and then I presented myself with a medal for bravery. These companies have proven they are willing to distort the truth, or outright lie, in order to inflate their valuation / protect their position / continue the hype-machine. Nothing they say can…

I accidentally brewed up an effective one myself. Round when I must have been 8 or 9 or so, some neighborhood kids and I played at creating a brew in a trick-or-treat bucket by putting everything we could find in it, like grass clippings, some sand, leaves, some mushrooms we found lying around, just everything, and giving it a fairly aggressive stirring. At the end of the day it was time to dispose of it, so we poured it on top of a very large group of ant nests that had developed.

The next day, the ant's nest was gone.

In hindsight, it was almost certainly the mushrooms. Thank goodness we didn't have the kind of kids who would have dared each other to drink some... that could have gone legitimately badly.

Decades later, I mentioned this to my father and he recalled that there was this ants nest that he had intended to take care of, which he remembered for that long to give a sense of how out-of-the-ordinary this was. He was surprised when it just disappeared entirely one day, and perhaps just as surprised to find out decades later why it just disappeared.

Nobody needs to report me... I'll turn myself in.

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