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Anthropic’s paper smells like bullshit

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Re: Anthropic’s paper smells like bullshit

#181
post #20

The lack of evidence before attributing the attack(s) to a Chinese sponsored group makes me correlate this report with recent statements from companies in the AI space about how China is about to surpass US in the AI race. Ultimately statements and reports like these seem more like an attempt to make the US government step in and be the big investor that keeps the money flowing rather than anything else.

Do public reports like this one often go deep enough into the weeds to name names, list specific tools and techniques, URLs? I don't doubt of course that reports intended for government agencies or security experts would have those details, but I am not surprised that a "blog post" like this one is lacking details. I just don't see how one goes from "this is lacking public evidence" to "this is likely a political stu…

[deleted]

Re: Anthropic’s paper smells like bullshit

#182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes you think they lack engineering acumen?

The hot mess that is Claude Code (if you multi-orchestrate with it, it'll start to grind even very powerful systems to a halt, 15+ seconds of unresponsiveness, all because CC constantly serializes/deserializes a JSON data file that grows quite large every time you do stuff), their horrible service uptime compared to all their competitors, their month long performance degradation their users had to scream at them to g…

> The hot mess that is Claude Code

And yet it's one of the fastest growing products of all time and is currently the state of the art for AI coding assistants. Yeah it's not perfect but nothing is

Re: Anthropic’s paper smells like bullshit

#183

When I worked at a FAANG with a "world leading" AI lab (now run by a teenage data labeller) as an SRE/sysadmin I was asked to use a modified version of a foundation model which was steered towards infosec stuff. We were asked to try and persuade it to help us hack into a mock printer/dodgy linux box. It helped a little, but it wasn't all that helpful. but in terms of coordination, I can't see how it would be useful.…

> now run by a teenage data labeller sick burn

Alexandr Wang is 28 years old, the same age as Mark Zuckerberg was when Facebook IPO'ed,

Re: Anthropic’s paper smells like bullshit

#184
post #20

The lack of evidence before attributing the attack(s) to a Chinese sponsored group makes me correlate this report with recent statements from companies in the AI space about how China is about to surpass US in the AI race. Ultimately statements and reports like these seem more like an attempt to make the US government step in and be the big investor that keeps the money flowing rather than anything else.

They yell "China is stealing our tech!" but want us to look away when they pirate everything ever created for their model training...

Re: Anthropic’s paper smells like bullshit

#185
There's a big gap of knowledge between infosec researchers and ML security researchers. Anthropic has a bunch of column B but not enough column A.

This was discussed in some detail in the recently published Attacker Moves Second paper*. ML researchers like using Attack Success Rate (ASR) as a metric for model resistance to attack, while for infosec, any successful attack (ASR > 0) is considered significant. ML researchers generally use a static set of tests, while infosec researchers assume an adaptive, resourceful attacker.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.09023

Re: Anthropic’s paper smells like bullshit

#186

Is it my imagination, but don’t the CEOs of Anthropic and OpenAI spread around a lot of bullshit whenever they want to raise more money or even worse try to get our government to set up regulatory barriers to hurt competitors? I think this ‘story’ is an attempt to perhaps outlaw Chinese open weight models in the USA? I was originally happy to see our current administration go all in on supporting AI development but n…

seeing your comment downvoted, i wonder what the downvoters think differently.

I say that because your sentiment seems so similar to nearly all the other comments.

(perhaps downvoting without commentary is itself a collaborative dark pattern.)

Re: Anthropic’s paper smells like bullshit

#187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> now run by a teenage data labeller sick burn

I don’t know anything about him, but if he is running a department at Meta, he as at the very least a political genius and a teenage data labeller

Presumably this is all referring to Alexander Wang, who's 28 now. The data-labeling company he co-founded, Scale AI, was acquired by Meta at a valuation of nearly $30 billion.

But I suppose the criticism is that he doesn't have deep AI model research credentials. Which raises the age-old question of how much technical expertise is really needed in executive management.

Re: Anthropic’s paper smells like bullshit

#188

There's a big gap of knowledge between infosec researchers and ML security researchers. Anthropic has a bunch of column B but not enough column A. This was discussed in some detail in the recently published Attacker Moves Second paper*. ML researchers like using Attack Success Rate (ASR) as a metric for model resistance to attack, while for infosec, any successful attack (ASR > 0) is considered significant. ML resear…

ML researchers are not sec researchers. they need to stick to their own game. companies need to use both camps for a good holistic view of the problem. ML is the blue team. sec researchers the red.

Re: Anthropic’s paper smells like bullshit

#189
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's an incentive to blame "Chinese/Russian state sponsored actors" because it makes them less culpable than "we got owned by a rando". It's like the inverse of "nobody got fired for using IBM" -- "nobody can blame you for getting hacked by superspies". So, in the absence of any evidence, it's entirely possible they have no idea who did it and are reaching for the most convenient label.

That's fair. If the actor (and it's a Chinese state actor here) is what is being questioned as "bullshit" then that should be the discourse in the article and in this thread. Instead the lack of a paper trail from Anthropic seems to be having people questioning the whole event?

State sponsorship can include the state looking the other way.

Re: Anthropic’s paper smells like bullshit

#190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not vested in the argument but it stood out to me that, Your argument is similar to tv courts if it’s plausible the report is true. Very far from the report is credible

You're right, lacking information I am coming across as instead willing to give Entropic the benefit of the doubt here. But I'm also often a Devil's Advocate and the tide in this thread (well, the very headline as well) seemed to be condemning Anthropic.

Honest companies with good reputations tend to get the benefit of the doubt.

E.g., how much do you expect Costco or Valve to intentionally harm their customers compared to Comcast or Electronic Arts? That’s just the old school concept of reputation at work. Companies can “buy” benefit of the doubt by being genuine and avoiding blowing smoke up people’s ass.

Anthropic has been spitting bullshit about how the AGI they’re working on is so smart it’s dangerous. So those chumps having no answers when they get hacked smells like something.

Are they telling us their magical human AGI brain and their security professionals being paid top industry rates can’t trace what happened in a breach?

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