Back to News
Advertisement
Advertisement

⚡ Community Insights

Discussion Sentiment

70% Positive

Analyzed from 2889 words in the discussion.

Trending Topics

#nsa#access#government#anthropic#https#force#mythos#models#security#without

Discussion (127 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

teravor•about 1 hour ago
mythos allowed mediocre people to get results by holding their hand through the process, or just ignoring their irrelevant input and knowing what to do.

if you throw millions of tokens at IDA Pro MCP with the right prompt lets just say security by obscurity fails miserably because there is no obscurity when the LLM chews through the decompilation.

baq•about 1 hour ago
It isn’t bad, it isn’t good. It’s just how the world looks now. All software is open source now, some of it is just more open, some of it is less.
zb3•20 minutes ago
> That contract has not been finalized, and some Pentagon officials want the N.S.A. to find a way to work with other models.

Good, fsck NSA, that's the last organization I'd ever want to have access to Mythos. I hope this administration's incompetence will prevent them from regaining access for as long as possible

medlazik•about 2 hours ago
AI marketing bullshit stunts are unlike anything I've seen in 30 years. It started with MS Copilot so called capabilities for work, which were completely made up use cases that didn't work at all (3 years later still). We've had OpenAI "AGI is coming" and "AI will take your job", now we have Mythos being so "dangerous" for cybersecurity, which of course makes the average Joe interpret it as Anthropic being "the better overall company, the NSA uses it!!". I mean gov foes with Anthropic are probably true, but the marketing is to blame not Mythos capabilities. This is all so fucking pathetic
thewebguyd•about 2 hours ago
> and "AI will take your job"

Don't forget, its no longer cool to say that now that the public has pushed back. The fact they all changed their tone away from taking jobs tells you that it was all just entirely marketing.

tempodox•about 2 hours ago
But the propaganda deluge was a smash hit so far, HN is drowning in “AI” BS, and astroturfers and spin doctors haven’t seen that much business since the cold war. They made more profit than shovel salesmen in the gold rush.
expedition32•32 minutes ago
The US has gone all in on AI because it is one of the few things in which they still have an advantage over Asian countries. I wouldn't use the word pathetic but rather "desperation".
ianm218•20 minutes ago
So is your position that i.e. the Five Eyes [1] cyber security leaders are just pretending that AI cyber security is a serious thing to play into the geopolitical east vs. west thing and its not genuine?

It just feels like people are starting to reach for conspiracy theories rather than engage with the idea that these models might actually be dangerous.

[1]. https://thehill.com/policy/technology/5936339-ai-cybersecuri...

colechristensen•about 2 hours ago
I was able to identify, diagnose, fix, and upstream a minor bug in and erlang/OTP ssh key implementation with Opus in maybe 20 minutes (+2 weeks or so for upstream). It is not impossible that I could have done this before, but it would have taken days or weeks. The actual fix was about 2 lines of code, hardly AI slop, but getting there would have been quite the slog, and I never would have done it.

There is a lot of the reason for AI skepticism out there, but people tend to do massive overcorrections and underestimate the force multiplier it can be, particularly for people with some idea of what they're doing and a good grasp of how to take advantage of the tool.

DyslexicAtheist•31 minutes ago
> I was able to identify, diagnose, fix, ...

a link to the PR or Changelog would strengthen this comment that it actually happened?

medlazik•about 2 hours ago
I said absolutely nothing about LLMs, which is a fantastic tool I'm using every day. I'm talking about marketing.
gallerdude•about 2 hours ago
So let’s say you’re in Anthropic’s shoes. You see that LLM’s are getting better and better, and it’s very possible that they will have some impact on jobs in the next few years, and a very meaningful impact on cybersecurity.

Is it more ethical to stay silent about these concerns, as you might have a bit of self interest? Or even if it looks a bit self interested, is it better to warn people ahead of time? I think the latter is obviously the better position.

colechristensen•about 1 hour ago
The point I'm trying to make is Anthropic's marketing about broad security risk related to the capability of its models is a valid concern though their dog and pony show really overdid it, probably to the detriment of us all for many reasons. It is indeed amplifying the abilities of people to find and exploit security issues.

The point of my anecdote is I was able to identify and fix an at least security adjacent bug in a language I could charitably consider myself a novice in. It happened to very unlikely have a security impact, but that was mere chance. LLMs expand the pool of people able to find and exploit security problems and we're all considerably more vulnerable as a result.

The biggest security threat was always someone bored with $20, a lot of attacks could be ignored or at least not prioritized with that threat model. This isn't true any more and our attack surface has gotten a whole lot larger.

bflesch•about 2 hours ago
We should seriously reframe this whole AI thing to "SI = simulated intelligence".

It's google in a box. Great achievement, makes knowledge work faster, but please stop bothering everyone else.

The Uber and Groupon people became billionaires, so the "Simulated Intelligence" folks will also achieve it. No need to worry and drown everyone in these bs stories only non-tech people believe.

ianm218•14 minutes ago
Can you describe your experience using modern AI tools that led to this conclusion? It is hard for me to wrap my head around how my perception could be so different from someone else in presumably the same or similar profession. I'm not asking this in bad faith either but I think your getting downvoted because your comment comes off as a pretty strong assertion without giving details on how you got there.
AnimalMuppet•about 2 hours ago
Heh. In the Schlock Mercenary universe, "SI" means "synthetic intelligence", which is a level below real AI (which means what we would call AGI). And, as it says (in https://www.schlockmercenary.com/2003-07-21), SI translates to "kinda stupid".
ToucanLoucan•about 2 hours ago
All for a product that has yet to make a single honest dollar in profit for anyone who isn't nvidia.

When this goes we might well see a recession. Not that anyone responsible will be worse off, of course.

tempodox•about 2 hours ago
The perpetrators all have their golden parachutes. The taxpayers will foot the bill.
expedition32•24 minutes ago
The US is trillions in debt. We live in the age of magic- nobody foots the bill.
scottyah•about 2 hours ago
Why on earth would you expect any of them to take profit so early in the game?
ToucanLoucan•about 1 hour ago
Silly me, expecting a company worth a trillion dollars to make... some money. Any money. A single profitable product.
ck2•about 2 hours ago
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

derektank•about 2 hours ago
The NSA is managed by the NSA director, an independently appointed and confirmed office separate from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. The DNI does have the authority to restrict funds to the NSA, and sets certain priorities, policy, etc. but the NSA director is not beholden to the DNI and makes their hiring and firing decisions independently. They’re also, currently and historically though not required by statute, a flag officer in the US military and dual-hatted as the commander of CYBERCOM. All this is to say, chaos in the office of the DNI does not necessarily impact the NSA.
malshe•about 1 hour ago
> Haugh was fired in April of this year after far-right activist Laura Loomer met with President Trump.

What kind of sick joke is that

kansface•about 2 hours ago
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.
tempodox•about 2 hours ago
It can always get worse.
eigenspace•about 1 hour ago
Pah! Nonsense. What could possibly be worse than Weimar Germany or Tsarist Russia?
shimman•about 1 hour ago
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.

sailfast•about 2 hours ago
Anecdata suggests NSA just got on board and kept going tbh. Not sure they’ve felt the same impacts / churn as other agencies, and not sure they’ve ever really been that beholden to the DNI.
parineum•about 2 hours ago
> dozens upon dozens fired for no reason

When you say without reason do you mean without cause?

islandfox100•about 2 hours ago
Seems to me OP's implication is that they were fired because someone wanted to hit a quota of (employees cut/payroll expenses reduced), or other similarly ''reasonless'' justifications.
micromacrofoot•about 2 hours ago
Absolute clown show, wonderful for Anthropic to keep themselves in the news cycle yet again.
charcircuit•about 2 hours ago
Everyone lost access. What even is mainstream news these days.
ceejayoz•26 minutes ago
> Everyone lost access.

Yes. But unlike the rest of us, NSA didn't have to if the administration had thought about it for 30 seconds before sending their letter. It's a stupid own-goal.

AustinDev•about 2 hours ago
They could easily take the weights if they wanted. I don't believe they meaningfully lost access.
HlessClaudesman•about 2 hours ago
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.

dofm•about 2 hours ago
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.

ben_w•about 2 hours ago
> Serious question: do you think the NSA aren't training their own LLMs?

Given the evergreen discussion of "are these companies making a profit"*, I think any LLMs that the NSA (or any other government agency worldwide) may be making are quite far from the leading edge.

* Person A: "they are making a loss!" Person B: "Only if you count training, they make a profit on inference, look at what it costs to run comparable open models on generic cloud servers" A: "Sure, but if they don't train new models they'll be left behind, so they're still making a loss"

That and the way compute is now measured in GW, I think even random low budget vloggers just getting started would be able to spot if the NSA was doing anything significant just from the extra heat emissions or power plants getting built.

xeubie•about 1 hour ago
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.
HlessClaudesman•about 2 hours ago
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.
doug_durham•about 1 hour ago
The NSA is government agency. They are certainly not training any world class LLMs. They probably have some specialized fine tunings of existing models, but that's it. They don't have the capacity.
polytely•about 2 hours ago
They probably also have an insane dataset
dgellow•about 2 hours ago
You cannot really hide the amount of compute required to train an LLM. Do we have actual clues that NASA is training their own frontier model?
stronglikedan•about 2 hours ago
> do you think the NSA aren't training their own LLMs?

They probably already have access to Sentinel, so they wouldn't need to train their own.

segmondy•about 2 hours ago
Serious question, do you realize that the NSA are mere mortals? Do you realize how much it takes to train a model? Does the NSA make their own chips or planes? The NSA buys a lot of technology because they can't make their own.
__MatrixMan__•44 minutes ago
Are you proposing that this government is above being slave owners?
infinite_spin•about 2 hours ago
the success of mythos isn't from model weights, it's from the harness and toolset it has access to
krzyk•about 2 hours ago
Is it really?

Harness is important for model performance, but weights are surely mode important, without that you would have haiku doing the work.

dofm•about 2 hours ago
I agree but that's even easier to exfiltrate, surely.
nickthegreek•about 1 hour ago
given some time, surely. but that seems harder with the model turned off.
Onavo•about 2 hours ago
If they use the defence production act, would Dario be even able to resign in protest?
AustinDev•about 2 hours ago
If they wanted to officially take the weights the DPA would work and Dario could do nothing. If they wanted to do it in clandestine manner no one could stop them and no one would know. It's very likely they already have all the weights from all the frontier models. I mean all the frontier models are capable of being served from AWS Bedrock so the weights aren't exactly locked in some air-gapped vault.

It would be easy to make a national security justification to take the weights in a clandestine manner especially because Anthropic supposedly got caught giving China access to the model through a cutout.

JackFr•about 1 hour ago
Pretty sure even under DPA, taking without fair compensation would be a violation of the takings clause of 5th Amendment and wouldn't withstand legal scrutiny. If they wanted to get them clandestinely, yeah, they'd likely get away with it, but it is stealing.
rurban•about 2 hours ago
John Cook resigned, so Dario might resign also. But he would make it public, so they won't do it
Onavo•about 1 hour ago
> John Cook resigned

John Cook?

Madmallard•about 3 hours ago
Doesn't make any sense. They could just force them to provide Mythos to the federal government.
JumpCrisscross•about 3 hours ago
> They could just force them to provide Mythos to the federal government

The DPA only gives that power to the President [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_Production_Act_of_1950

d--b•about 3 hours ago
Maybe GP was treating Trump to the royal "they"
JumpCrisscross•about 2 hours ago
Which is a fundamental mistake to make with the U.S. government, even if we’re talking only about the executive branch, even if we’re only talking about DoD, even if we’re only talking about the IC.
flybarrel•about 2 hours ago
doubt Trump would accept that pronoun
graemep•about 3 hours ago
The current position seems to be no-one has access, not even Anthropic employees. What powers does the US government have to force them to provide access? If they have that power why did they not use it to force them to provide their products for military use?
ceejayoz•about 2 hours ago
> What powers does the US government have to force them to provide access?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_Production_Act_of_1950

This would not be a particularly big stretch here, either.

graemep•about 2 hours ago
There is even a precedent for its use with regard to AI (only disclosing information, but still). Biden used it, why does Trump not do so?
wan23•about 3 hours ago
You misunderstand - the government issued a directive to Anthropic that effectively forced them to pull access from everyone, even their own employees.
hk__2•about 3 hours ago
The directive was to remove access to non-Americans, not to pull access from everyone. It’s because Anthropic cannot verify the identity of its users that it pulled access from everyone, not because the government explicitely requested that.
kelnos•3 minutes ago
Yes that's what "effectively" means.
greatpatton•about 2 hours ago
If their operation team is not US based that's going to be difficult to operate. They would have to reorganize the whole company as I'm pretty sure that they are not employing only US citizen.
JumpCrisscross•about 2 hours ago
> directive was to remove access to non-Americans

Did Hegseth pull his supply-chain risk BS?

bluGill•about 3 hours ago
Probably not. The US constitution limits what government can force on the people. If the NSA tries to force something that will spend years in court (if anyone wants to fight)
folkrav•about 2 hours ago
The constitution limits a lot of things that this administration has done regardless.
stackghost•about 2 hours ago
> The US constitution limits what government can force on the people.

The US constitution also prohibits:

- refusing to spend money that congress has appropriated

- dismantling congressionally-created federal agencies without congressional authorization

- directing federal agencies to selectively apply the law according to the preference of the executive

- giving control of federal agencies to individuals who have not been appointed by the legislative branch

- terminating, detaining, or deporting people without due process

- retaliation against private citizens or corporations for speech protected under the first amendment

- discriminating on protected grounds under the equal protections clause

... and yet the administration has done all these things with impunity while effete judges wring their hands and write sternly-worded letters. The US constitution demonstrably no longer has any force or effect.

aleqs•about 3 hours ago
Yeah... NSA literally has MITM proxies/interception of any traffic they want inside every major US tech company (based on my reading/following of Snowden leaks and others). Anthropic wouldn't be able to exist without implicit NSA approval. This article reads more like a marketing piece for Anthropic/Mythos... and ends by talking about how much NSA wants Anthropic models.

Propaganda.

strictnein•about 3 hours ago
> NSA literally has MITM proxies/interception of any traffic they want inside every major US tech company

No, they don't.

vintermann•about 2 hours ago
It's back to the question of how much you should give the benefit of doubt to powerful people who openly lie.
chews•about 2 hours ago
bruh, it's not speculation. The secret NSA surveillance room in San Francisco is officially known as Room 641A. It is located inside an AT&T switching center at 611 Folsom Street (near 2nd Street) in the SoMa neighborhood. Who else occupied the building, Twitter was also located at 611 Folsom Street in San Francisco.The company leased a floor in the building (sharing space with retro platform Bebo) in 2009. This was their third office space, serving as their headquarters before they outgrew it and eventually relocated to Market Square at 1355 Market Street in 2012. The arab spring twitter uprising was fully a CIA/NSA operation.
yard2010•about 2 hours ago
Please provide sources for such bold claims
micromacrofoot•about 2 hours ago
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
john_strinlai•about 2 hours ago
>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 pretend they are bumbling idiots.

(every math phd i am acquainted with has been approached by nsa recruiters. none of them have been approached by police agencies.)

bflesch•about 2 hours ago
You are correct, see the downvotes as a seal of approval by the propagandists.
chinathrow•about 3 hours ago
> Propaganda

IPO incoming.

gsibble•about 3 hours ago
Misdirection
dofm•about 2 hours ago
If Mythos is still running internally, the NSA still have some access to it. It's just crazy to believe there aren't CIA and/or NSA plants (tacitly acknowledged or otherwise) inside Anthropic and OpenAI.

But Mythos is still only an advanced LLM so I am not sure what all this breathy fuss is about; it sounds like the PR war more than anything.

If the NSA aren't themselves training technologies that are at least as powerful, that would modestly surprise me.

Not that you need an LLM to monitor the risks to the USA. You just need Tulsi Gabbard's emails.

SV_BubbleTime•about 2 hours ago
I think it’s beyond a mastery of PR. They literally called it Mythos and built a literal myth around it. I mean… maybe people just want the soap opera.
ransom1538•about 1 hour ago
NSA has produced nothing. Does nothing. Why don't we just have them pick up garbage on the freeway to help out the tax payers? Let Anthropic and other adults push spying forward.
taftster•about 1 hour ago
Have we become reddit here? I mean, you probably have some sympathy and upvotes from fellow readers, but this isn't pushing the conversation forward at all.

Any citations to your statement that NSA produces nothing? Or do you have a strong argument or evidence to support this?

ibejoeb•about 1 hour ago
They're great at building datacenters and running massive archival operations.
speff•about 1 hour ago
Ghidra comes to mind
zb3•19 minutes ago
Ghidra is good, but would they release it if it was not for the leaks?
TiredOfLife•about 1 hour ago
Advertisement
swader999•about 2 hours ago
Kind of crazy actually. Other models are catching up fast, they all can find the vulnerabilities in our (and by our I mean everyone's) underlying infra very fast. It takes a very long time to fix, review, and finally deploy these fixes. There really isn't much time left.