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Anthropic’s paper smells like bullshit

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Re: Anthropic’s paper smells like bullshit

#191

Post by bongodongobob »

ndiddy wrote: post #101
jmkni wrote: post #58

That whole article felt like "Claude is so good Chinese hackers are using it for espionage" marketing fluff tbh

Reminds me of how when the Playstation 2 came out, Sony started planting articles about how it was so powerful that the Iraqi government was buying thousands of them to turn into a supercomputer (including unnamed military officials bringing up Sony marketing points). https://www.wnd.com/2000/12/7640/

But it was that good for the price point. And you could run Linux on it. That was the Beowulf cluster era. Lots of universities were doing that.

Re: Anthropic’s paper smells like bullshit

#192

Post by tehjoker »

gishh wrote: post #180
snowwrestler wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s a big jump between “the attack came from China” and “the attack was sponsored by the Chinese government.” People generally make this jump in one of three ways. 1) Just a general assumption that all bad stuff from China must be state-sponsored because it’s generally a top-down govt-controlled society. This is not accurate and not really actionable for anyone in the U.S. 2) The attack produced evidence that ali…

[flagged]

this has to be satire

Re: Anthropic’s paper smells like bullshit

#193

Post by skybrian »

> You cannot just claim things and not back it up in any way

They must be new to the Internet :)

More seriously, I would certainly like to see better evidence, but I also doubt that Anthropic is making it up. The evidence for that seems to be mostly vibes.

If we don’t trust the report and discard it as gossip, then I guess we just wait and see what the future brings?

Re: Anthropic’s paper smells like bullshit

#194

Post by WNWceAJ9R9Ezc4 »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #63
prinny_ wrote: 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…

> Do public reports like this one often go deep enough into the weeds to name names, list specific tools and techniques, URLs?

Yes, it is very standard. Anthropic did none of that. Case in point:

- https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/threat-intelligence/apt...

- https://www.crowdstrike.com/en-us/blog/two-birds-one-stone-p...

- https://media.defense.gov/2021/Apr/15/2002621240/-1/-1/0/CSA...

Re: Anthropic’s paper smells like bullshit

#196

Post by pgalvin »

sschueller wrote: post #184
prinny_ wrote: 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...

Anthropic does seem to have more ethical practices on that than most companies in this space, purchasing and scanning physical books rather than pirating them as Meta and OpenAI did. However, books are cheap, and I’m unsure of their wider practices.

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/06/anthropic-destroyed-milli...

Re: Anthropic’s paper smells like bullshit

#197

Post by brookst »

dangus wrote: post #189
JKCalhoun wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So all attacks anywhere are state sponsored?

Re: Anthropic’s paper smells like bullshit

#198

Post by neilk »

So details were left out and it doesn't adhere exactly to this author's idea of what a good security report is.

Nothing to see here IMO.

The simpler explanation is that:

- They're a young organization, still figuring out how to do security. Maybe getting some things fundamentally wrong, no established process or principles for disclosure yet.

- I have no inside info, but I've been around the block. They're in a battle to the death with organizations that are famously cavalier about security. So internally they have big fights about how much "brakes" they can allow the security people to apply to the system. Some of those folks are now screaming "I TOLD YOU SO". Leaders will vacillate about what sort of disclosure is best for Anthropic as a whole.

- Any document where you have technologists writing the first draft, and PR and executives writing the last draft, is going to sound like word salad by the time it's done.

Re: Anthropic’s paper smells like bullshit

#199

Post by thunderfork »

weird-eye-issue wrote: post #182
CuriouslyC wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

"I doubt they have good security chops because they make bad technical choices"

"What bad technical choices?"

"These ones"

"Ok but they're fast-growing, so..."

Does being a fast-growing product mean you have security chops or is this a total non-sequitur?

Re: Anthropic’s paper smells like bullshit

#200

Post by [deleted] »

notpublic wrote: post #78

"A report was recently published by an AI-research company called Anthropic. They are the ones who notably created Claude, an AI-assistant for coding. Personally, I don’t use it but that is besides the point." Not sure if the author has tried any other AI-assistants for coding. People who haven't tried coding AI assistant underestimates its capabilities (though unfortunately, those who use them overestimate what they…

[deleted]
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