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.
>mythos allowed mediocre people to get results by holding their hand through the process
Isn't this what technology progress looks like? Industrial tools allowed mediocre people to improve their productivity by orders of magnitude which is how we managed(in the past) to build so many amazing things with less human toil and suffering than previous generations.
Or, alternatively, it may suggest that the NSA’s classified systems are not very secure, which seems at least as possible: they may rely on requiring physical access to these systems to even attempt to penetrate them.
> 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
It’ll be the first organization to get access to Epic/Saga/Legend/Bible/Torah/Sutra/Vedan/whatever the Mythos+1 is called - and it might be the only one with this privilege
More likely they'll convince congress they will need their own. Only it will 20-200 times more expensive and the US taxpayer will be paying for it but won't get access.
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.
Blue badges were for government employees (like I was), and green badges were for private contractors. And yes they have a lot of math and physics guys; my own physics lecturer was in my orientation class, actually. He was there for quantum computing, which reinforces my point. The government can be good at pioneering unproven / uncommercialized technologies, but in general they are like a blunt weapon; the profit motive and lack of bureaucracy eventually makes the private sector far better for improving the technology later. In the case of LLMs, they didn't even originate in government, and I don't think there's any chance they are being developed there at a more advanced level.
> 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.
The rate of inference compute to training compute is ~10:1, for popular frontier models. Models are routinely overtrained past the Chinchilla optimum now because it makes an immense amount of economic sense to do so.
Worse the more niche and unused your models get, but when this "making a loss" fuckery pops up, it's usually about the big guys like Anthropic, OpenAI, GDM and maybe xAI and Meta. Of which only the latter can be accused of not selling enough inference to offset the training runs.
The real money sinks are: R&D and infrastructure buildouts.
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.
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.
> The NSA managed to deliberately insert a backdoor into elliptic-curve cryptography right under the noses of everyone capable of making elliptic-curve cryptography.
That sort of proves the opposite point, assuming you're referring to Dual EC DRBG, because the flaw was noticed very early on, by people who weren't even involved in its development.
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.
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.
You mean "Rhetorical question," and I didn't need patronising.
They have at least one pretty vast, largely classified data centre in Utah, with a sizeable chunk of the black budget and they also have pretty large data sets.
NSA has had their own supercomputing program for decades. they design and produce their own large scale machines. chips, fabrics, arithmetic units, all of it. they also employ quite a number of hardcore mathematicians, computer scientists, and systems wranglers. if they decided it was of strategic importance there is absolutely no reason they couldn't train their own models.
I guess we're just conspiracy theorists for landing at the objective conclusion that three letter government agencies:
- find "modern AI" to have strategic importance
- have ways to spend loads of money while having a front-facing budget on the record
- could be running a PR program to have Americans think they "buy" access to models like they do, but the AI companies were taken over by these agencies long ago
Look at Google, Microsoft...Apple got away with it by having as much on-device operation as possible so they could wash their hands, honestly saying "We don't have it."
This is the world's largest data gathering operation. Remember after 9/11 when the NSA copied as much Internet back bone traffic as they could?
I'm not for or against, even as a resident, but we certainly shouldn't be naive.
as someone who actually worked at the NSA pointed out earlier in this thread, they have plenty of resources, but also plenty of politics and some execution problems. so I wouldn't put money on them making a great model, but to say that they are completely incapable of doing anything is probably quite wrong.
the issue here that is a forgone conclusion, regardless of where the model comes from and which chips it runs on, is that now they can reasonably comb through all the stuff that they've been collecting. that's a pretty huge operational change.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Are we really saying that Anthropic claiming AI would take over industries was some benevolent ethical move rather than marketing their product as a cheap replacement for human labor that works in any industry? Wouldn't the ethical thing, if they were actually concerned about labor displacement, be to shut down the lab and work to disrupt and disable other labs instead?
The issue is both OpenAI and Anthropic have lied so many times that it’s no longer rational to take anything they say at face value.
Also: they don’t have to know they’re lying to say things that aren’t true. There is definitely some cult-like behaviour at the moment on the west coast
Be specific, what do you consider their lies to be? Also, this is pretty straightforward. You have a decade of extremely stable and predictable performance trajectory. It’s easy to see the writing on the wall. You can feel whatever which way about their motivations and ethics but if you read say Dario’s raw words they are pretty reasonable. We have to have a good regulatory framework and do what we can to prepare ourselves while also not ceding a critical strategic advantage. The west coast is always cult like, that’s not new. And it ignores the very real substance to the discussion.
I think that Anthropic is fully absolutely unethical. And they lied a lot. They were actively trying to make the doom happen while trying to cash out maximally on doom trolling.
If they were actually concerned over social impact, they would try to minimize it. They could have sell their product as a tool to be used to make economy boom, they tried to sell it on promiss to make it shrink for most people.
It really does not matter how much they believed own doom predictions, because they were actively trying to make them true whether realistic or not.
> They were actively trying to make the doom happen while trying to cash out maximally on doom trolling.
These words make no sense. Anthropic delayed mythos/fable rollout. A mythos model without safeguards would have been a pretty bad idea, and they sacrificed a ton of revenue and risked being scooped by any of the other labs in the meantime. Frontier models are only frontier temporarily until the next lab releases their model. Of course they are a company and need to act in their own best interest.
It is also clearly serious the problems we need to think about as we march quickly towards even more capable systems. Why on earth is it a problem to point this out?
> If they were actually concerned over social impact, they would try to minimize it. They could have sell their product as a tool to be used to make economy boom, they tried to sell it on promiss to make it shrink for most people.
What a really weird take; they employ some of the best safety and alignment teams in the industry and this is an active area of research that they are campaigning for more attention on. You complain about them “doom trolling” and then complain they don’t do anything about…the doom? No sense at all.
It is perfectly consistent to (1) sound an alarm and (2) March full steam ahead as quickly as they can. If they don’t do (1) that’s unethical. If they don’t do (2) someone else will. I would rather someone like Dario align these models than the CCC. Plus it would be nice not to have a war over Taiwan which is inevitable if China gains enough of the upper hand in this AI race.
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.
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".
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.
The “Five Eyes cyber security leaders” aren’t exactly famous for their political independence, or for having the public’s best interests at heart, or erring on the side of regulating less.
You don’t get very far in the spying profession with honesty.
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.
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.
A lot of effort is spent to make the "conversation" feel just like a human-to-human interaction. This is not a naturally occurring phenomenon due to the technology, but rather a feature carefully engineered by those companies in order to get people hooked. Then they have all these tiny nudges like the typing animations or the "thinking..." popups before the next chat message appears.
At some point you might have also noticed the over-use of emojis, the bolted-on jokes, and the tendency to always approve what the user says (even though they have toned that down after backslash). At some point too many people thought they were in a relationship with the chatbot, because it always encouraged and approved them, so they had to hotfix it.
It's a bunch of really dark psychological patterns that are carefully combined by very clever people in order to create the false illusion that the user is experiencing something deeper than an engineered simulation of human interaction.
I think the technology is really useful, but they are obviously not happy with simply replacing a google-like query interface, they want users to fall in love with the product and mentally treat it like a fellow human being - and that's what I think is insincere.
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".
Well the good thing is you’ve done the homework to definitively demonstrate that this is remotely true. These confident claims of this all being some sort of unprofitable Ponzi scheme, not understanding the concept of a growth phase which a multitude of highly successful tech companies have already demonstrated work while simultaneously commenting on a site with YCombinator in the url are just getting amusing now.
Of course this is a profitable technology, and it doesn’t matter if any of the labs are profitable today or not. Running at a loss is a perfectly rational strategy.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I don't want a single person to be working at NSA and I find ANY terms to effectuate that outcome to be acceptable. Very much so including DOGE, which I despise.
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.
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.
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?
You misunderstand - the government issued a directive to Anthropic that effectively forced them to pull access from everyone, even their own employees.
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.
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.
Well, kinda in effect. He lacked the authority to make the call, and it is quite obviously being ignored by most suppliers. If it were actually enforced, I believe no companies that are contractors for the DoD could even host Anthropic- like GCP, Azure, and AWS. Perhaps they are currently figuring out how to get off all cloud provider govclouds, but I doubt it.
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)
I hear you but, the Patriot act was the gateway. View it as a spectrum from then and how the Administration is now, and suddenly what the Donald is doing doesn't even seem bad: it seems on par for the dystopian road-map laid out long ago (I can't speak for before 9/11)
> 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.
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 indeed: my instinct says we are being lied to about how three letter agencies and military are paying for services. They give us a PR front that Uncle Sam is a regular paying customer just like you and me, but they're probably running the show: this is the largest data gathering operation since 9/11.
Sorry everyone: but the conspiracy is so obviously not, it's nauseating to admit, because you see all your friends, family and co workers dumping so much everyday data into these services.
I recall having a nuclear meltdown personally when I heard about all of this in the mid aughts. Nobody cared. Nobody understands this today. Everyone just complains about the Donald, but I point to this, and they don't realize the connection.
You just intercept the traffic after its decrypted on the server side, or are you suggesting you somehow send encrypted traffic that never gets decrypted?
I second this: HTTPS (as most consumers use it) is probably a front (who are these CA's really anyway?)
Plot twist: _Perhaps_ Mythos / Fable keeps explaining ways (that we can't comprehend or don't always work) to break HTTPS due to the three letter agencies making sure they had input on their creation (and thus backdoors, I mean "bugs"), so the real catastrophe they are hiding is that HTTPS is broken (for most people, most of the time.)
Remember when Quantum computing was the threat to HTTPS? Turns out it was the humans own inability to think outside of the box!
It's just not technically feasible, so there's nothing to lie about. They're not MITMing petabytes/sec across dozens (hundreds?) of companies and they haven't broken TLS1.3.
If I have a box at Digital Ocean and I'm communicating with it with TLS1.3 using a Let's Encrypt cert that I generated, where, exactly, does this magical MITM box come into play?
Of course it's feasible, you just intercept the traffic post-decryption on the cloud/server side. You don't control how/where your traffic to 3p cloud services is decrypted.
You keep saying this, but it's nonsensical. If I terminate TLS on the box that does processing, there's nothing to intercept.
And these days (especially post-Snowden), many (most?) companies encrypt data when sending between servers within their own (private network) infrastructure.
You have no control about where TLS is terminated when you're talking to a 3p cloud service (with services you don't control/run like cloud LLM APIs). You also have no control about what spyware is installed on/around VMs you rent (and there's a lot). Also when talking about encryption between servers within datacenters you seem to be missing that in order for such multi -stage/path encryption (separate certs/keys) to be possible the data first has to be decrypted at each point, not to mention every major US tech company generally cooperates with the NSA and gives them access to anything they request (including allowing the installation of dedicated hardware to intercept decrypted traffic as has been publicly exposed documented many times already).
Yours and others' claims that it's impossible and nonsensical is based on lack of understanding.
Yours and others' claims that things somehow got better after Snowden is just a completely baseless statement - if you actually looked into what happened post-Snowden - absolutely nothing was done to prevent NSA spying on any communications they want, in fact it got significantly worse.
It's generally accepted fact that the NSA broke HTTPS, for some of the time, for some of the services. It's unclear what they do have, but you'd be naive to assume consumer HTTPS is keeping them out.
It's too complicated. Do you know everything about CA, SSL, HTTPS, and so on? You make $250k a year working on it? Do you _really_, _really_, know everything? Then you're fired because you're lying to yourself, so you're probably unbearable to work with.
We were all freaking out about this with AT&T Thing nearly twenty years ago: and when nobody cared (Bush ran two terms! it helped to pretend AT&T was the only one affected), it gave "them" implicit permission to do it again with Google / Yahoo thing (it helped to pretend those were the only two cloud providers affected) ten years ago.
Now, we're all pretending that capitalism is real, and that the three letter agencies are just sittin' on the sidelines, while the world's largest data archiving opportunity is happening voluntarily (some are even PAYING for it!), at some wild-growth companies (with leaders who have too much to lose), who also have existed for just a few years? A 5 year old could probably blackmail Sam Altman, what about all the other middle management? The individual contributors (if they still exist) are of no concern: work is a commodity, it's easy to silo a worker's knowledge.
Surveillance opportunity is 10x social media from last decade, because they still have social media, and now, they've began thinking for people. How easy when it is an app on your smartphone. Those mind control experiments back in the 60's with Acid are looking silly by now. Besides, how do you know that the response you're getting wasn't manipulated (and define 'manipulated' across a spectrum of training to nefarious actors impersonating models, by power of court order.)
If you think all of that is unfounded ridiculous blasphemy, let me distract you with this instead: if the AI bubble bursts, the compute will be repurposed for mass AI / ML driven CCTV surveillance. Hell, maybe they'll find a way to give you a tax break if you sell your CCTV footage.
"NSA literally has MITM proxies/interception of any traffic they want inside every major US tech company" even if this statement is an exaggeration, by playing the long game, they get themselves setup to access what they want in the future.
I'm not for or against, but I do live in a safe place thanks to such surveillance (generally in the USA), and I want you to know that this AI Thing is only the latest chapter in the intelligence story.
> 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.
To be clear, the claim you're making is that because Twitter has their third corporate office in the same building as an AT&T switching center, and US intelligence used a room in AT&T's switching center for surveillance, then Twitter must have been controlled by US intelligence? And thus the Arab Spring uprising, where Twitter was used, was "fully a CIA/NSA operation"?
Yes, twitter was used by US 3 letter agencies to assist in the arab spring. To be able to do it in a surreptitious way they were asked to move to that building and get access to all private DMs, and for doing so they got a fat tax break to move to "blighted" market street current location. All of those things fit the timeline and snowden capability disclosures.
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 about it. Assume you have generated a cert with Let's Encrypt. How, exactly, does that work?
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.
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.
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.
>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.)
No they don't, and if you're going to try to argue something with that as your opener, it very easily casts large amounts of skepticism on whatever you are about to say.
Perhaps you're exaggerating for effect, but that also undermines your point.
>No they don't, and if you're going to try to argue something with that as your opener, it very easily casts large amounts of skepticism on whatever you are about to say.
if you read my comment like we're having a normal conversation instead of a thesis defense, you'll get my point just fine.
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.
> 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
>how many of them took them up on the offer, and how many are in leadership roles?
this is not really relevant to the point, but to satisfy your curiosity: more than one, and one.
>it takes a very narrow range of personality to want to be a cop
the nsa's brightest aren't doing "cop" things. certainly none of the people i know of working there are "cop-minded" in any sense.
they are doing cool research and application things. otherwise they wouldn't be able to entice the phds to stick around. these are people that want to work at the forefront of their field, doing interesting work, and the nsa is one avenue of doing that (with good job security, benefits, etc.).
>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
we agree here. they are certainly doing "HNDL" (harvest now, decrypt later) at a very large scale. but obviously they are not able to collect and store every piece of communication at every tech company over years and years. (the intelligence community comprehensive national cybersecurity initiative data center is large, but not that large)
> this is not really relevant to the point, but to satisfy your curiosity: more than one, and one.
What? That's not only relevant to the point, it's incredibly relevant. If the NSA is only able to recruit 2% of the math PhDs they approach, then that's important information.
"More than one" is not particularly useful; you seem to be dodging the question because it undermines your argument.
telling you exactly how many people i know in the NSA is also not particularly useful. i'm one guy. there is no statistically significant information from my answer.
>you seem to be dodging the question because it undermines your argument.
my "argument" is that there are plenty of smart people in the NSA. that's it. i am confused why that is seemingly so offensive to you that you had to reply twice.
> how many of them took them up on the offer, and how many are in leadership roles?
In my cohort? Several, and who knows? The recruitment effort is very visible and intense.
The US math phd market has been a slow-rolling disaster for over a decade. Everyone who can hack it outside the ivory tower is actively looking for the exits.
So why is it surprising that some of them go to work at the NSA?
> 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 don’t think you have context on what math phds are making in entry level positions, post-docs, or adjuncting. I just picked a random entry level NSA role on LinkedIn (doctorate + 0 yrs) and they’re offering solid six digits. There are tenured faculty (post-doc(s) + 5ish yrs) who don’t make that.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
The closest I can think of is the bronze age collapse.
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.
Isn't this what technology progress looks like? Industrial tools allowed mediocre people to improve their productivity by orders of magnitude which is how we managed(in the past) to build so many amazing things with less human toil and suffering than previous generations.
Is Mythos a significant danger?
The curl experience does not suggest that hysteria is warranted, but this gives me pause.
What about the Firefox experience?
Or are we conveniently ignoring things that don't confirm conclusions we've already reached?
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
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.
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.
Anyways, isn’t NSA one of the largest employers of mathematicians in the world? Surely they’re doing something useful.
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.
The rate of inference compute to training compute is ~10:1, for popular frontier models. Models are routinely overtrained past the Chinchilla optimum now because it makes an immense amount of economic sense to do so.
Worse the more niche and unused your models get, but when this "making a loss" fuckery pops up, it's usually about the big guys like Anthropic, OpenAI, GDM and maybe xAI and Meta. Of which only the latter can be accused of not selling enough inference to offset the training runs.
The real money sinks are: R&D and infrastructure buildouts.
I wouldn't count them out.
That sort of proves the opposite point, assuming you're referring to Dual EC DRBG, because the flaw was noticed very early on, by people who weren't even involved in its development.
They probably already have access to Sentinel, so they wouldn't need to train their own.
They have at least one pretty vast, largely classified data centre in Utah, with a sizeable chunk of the black budget and they also have pretty large data sets.
- find "modern AI" to have strategic importance
- have ways to spend loads of money while having a front-facing budget on the record
- could be running a PR program to have Americans think they "buy" access to models like they do, but the AI companies were taken over by these agencies long ago
Look at Google, Microsoft...Apple got away with it by having as much on-device operation as possible so they could wash their hands, honestly saying "We don't have it."
This is the world's largest data gathering operation. Remember after 9/11 when the NSA copied as much Internet back bone traffic as they could?
I'm not for or against, even as a resident, but we certainly shouldn't be naive.
the issue here that is a forgone conclusion, regardless of where the model comes from and which chips it runs on, is that now they can reasonably comb through all the stuff that they've been collecting. that's a pretty huge operational change.
Harness is important for model performance, but weights are surely mode important, without that you would have haiku doing the work.
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.
John Cook?
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.
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.
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.
Also: they don’t have to know they’re lying to say things that aren’t true. There is definitely some cult-like behaviour at the moment on the west coast
If they were actually concerned over social impact, they would try to minimize it. They could have sell their product as a tool to be used to make economy boom, they tried to sell it on promiss to make it shrink for most people.
It really does not matter how much they believed own doom predictions, because they were actively trying to make them true whether realistic or not.
These words make no sense. Anthropic delayed mythos/fable rollout. A mythos model without safeguards would have been a pretty bad idea, and they sacrificed a ton of revenue and risked being scooped by any of the other labs in the meantime. Frontier models are only frontier temporarily until the next lab releases their model. Of course they are a company and need to act in their own best interest.
It is also clearly serious the problems we need to think about as we march quickly towards even more capable systems. Why on earth is it a problem to point this out?
> If they were actually concerned over social impact, they would try to minimize it. They could have sell their product as a tool to be used to make economy boom, they tried to sell it on promiss to make it shrink for most people.
What a really weird take; they employ some of the best safety and alignment teams in the industry and this is an active area of research that they are campaigning for more attention on. You complain about them “doom trolling” and then complain they don’t do anything about…the doom? No sense at all.
It is perfectly consistent to (1) sound an alarm and (2) March full steam ahead as quickly as they can. If they don’t do (1) that’s unethical. If they don’t do (2) someone else will. I would rather someone like Dario align these models than the CCC. Plus it would be nice not to have a war over Taiwan which is inevitable if China gains enough of the upper hand in this AI race.
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.
a link to the PR or Changelog would strengthen this comment that it actually happened?
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...
You don’t get very far in the spying profession with honesty.
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.
At some point you might have also noticed the over-use of emojis, the bolted-on jokes, and the tendency to always approve what the user says (even though they have toned that down after backslash). At some point too many people thought they were in a relationship with the chatbot, because it always encouraged and approved them, so they had to hotfix it.
It's a bunch of really dark psychological patterns that are carefully combined by very clever people in order to create the false illusion that the user is experiencing something deeper than an engineered simulation of human interaction.
I think the technology is really useful, but they are obviously not happy with simply replacing a google-like query interface, they want users to fall in love with the product and mentally treat it like a fellow human being - and that's what I think is insincere.
When this goes we might well see a recession. Not that anyone responsible will be worse off, of course.
Of course this is a profitable technology, and it doesn’t matter if any of the labs are profitable today or not. Running at a loss is a perfectly rational strategy.
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
What kind of sick joke is that
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.
When you say without reason do you mean without cause?
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.
The DPA only gives that power to the President [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_Production_Act_of_1950
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_Production_Act_of_1950
This would not be a particularly big stretch here, either.
Understatement. They have 14 offices, only 4 of them are in the US (6 are in EMEA, 4 in APAC).
Did Hegseth pull his supply-chain risk BS?
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.
Propaganda.
Sorry everyone: but the conspiracy is so obviously not, it's nauseating to admit, because you see all your friends, family and co workers dumping so much everyday data into these services.
No, they don't.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A
Yeah, they did (and probably do).
Are you suggesting they broke TLS or that they've somehow acquired every private cert generated?
Plot twist: _Perhaps_ Mythos / Fable keeps explaining ways (that we can't comprehend or don't always work) to break HTTPS due to the three letter agencies making sure they had input on their creation (and thus backdoors, I mean "bugs"), so the real catastrophe they are hiding is that HTTPS is broken (for most people, most of the time.)
Remember when Quantum computing was the threat to HTTPS? Turns out it was the humans own inability to think outside of the box!
If I have a box at Digital Ocean and I'm communicating with it with TLS1.3 using a Let's Encrypt cert that I generated, where, exactly, does this magical MITM box come into play?
And these days (especially post-Snowden), many (most?) companies encrypt data when sending between servers within their own (private network) infrastructure.
Yours and others' claims that it's impossible and nonsensical is based on lack of understanding.
Yours and others' claims that things somehow got better after Snowden is just a completely baseless statement - if you actually looked into what happened post-Snowden - absolutely nothing was done to prevent NSA spying on any communications they want, in fact it got significantly worse.
Do you know what hypervisor is managing it? :)
It's too complicated. Do you know everything about CA, SSL, HTTPS, and so on? You make $250k a year working on it? Do you _really_, _really_, know everything? Then you're fired because you're lying to yourself, so you're probably unbearable to work with.
We were all freaking out about this with AT&T Thing nearly twenty years ago: and when nobody cared (Bush ran two terms! it helped to pretend AT&T was the only one affected), it gave "them" implicit permission to do it again with Google / Yahoo thing (it helped to pretend those were the only two cloud providers affected) ten years ago.
Now, we're all pretending that capitalism is real, and that the three letter agencies are just sittin' on the sidelines, while the world's largest data archiving opportunity is happening voluntarily (some are even PAYING for it!), at some wild-growth companies (with leaders who have too much to lose), who also have existed for just a few years? A 5 year old could probably blackmail Sam Altman, what about all the other middle management? The individual contributors (if they still exist) are of no concern: work is a commodity, it's easy to silo a worker's knowledge.
Surveillance opportunity is 10x social media from last decade, because they still have social media, and now, they've began thinking for people. How easy when it is an app on your smartphone. Those mind control experiments back in the 60's with Acid are looking silly by now. Besides, how do you know that the response you're getting wasn't manipulated (and define 'manipulated' across a spectrum of training to nefarious actors impersonating models, by power of court order.)
If you think all of that is unfounded ridiculous blasphemy, let me distract you with this instead: if the AI bubble bursts, the compute will be repurposed for mass AI / ML driven CCTV surveillance. Hell, maybe they'll find a way to give you a tax break if you sell your CCTV footage.
"NSA literally has MITM proxies/interception of any traffic they want inside every major US tech company" even if this statement is an exaggeration, by playing the long game, they get themselves setup to access what they want in the future.
I'm not for or against, but I do live in a safe place thanks to such surveillance (generally in the USA), and I want you to know that this AI Thing is only the latest chapter in the intelligence story.
To be clear, the claim you're making is that because Twitter has their third corporate office in the same building as an AT&T switching center, and US intelligence used a room in AT&T's switching center for surveillance, then Twitter must have been controlled by US intelligence? And thus the Arab Spring uprising, where Twitter was used, was "fully a CIA/NSA operation"?
The CIA venture arm InQTel invested in Dataminr a company that twitter was also a major shareholder. https://theintercept.com/2016/04/14/in-undisclosed-cia-inves...
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 about it. Assume you have generated a cert with Let's Encrypt. How, exactly, does that work?
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.
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.
https://www.wired.com/2013/10/nsa-hacked-yahoo-google-cables...
https://www.eff.org/nsa-spying
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.
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.)
No they don't, and if you're going to try to argue something with that as your opener, it very easily casts large amounts of skepticism on whatever you are about to say.
Perhaps you're exaggerating for effect, but that also undermines your point.
if you read my comment like we're having a normal conversation instead of a thesis defense, you'll get my point just fine.
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.
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
this is not really relevant to the point, but to satisfy your curiosity: more than one, and one.
>it takes a very narrow range of personality to want to be a cop
the nsa's brightest aren't doing "cop" things. certainly none of the people i know of working there are "cop-minded" in any sense.
they are doing cool research and application things. otherwise they wouldn't be able to entice the phds to stick around. these are people that want to work at the forefront of their field, doing interesting work, and the nsa is one avenue of doing that (with good job security, benefits, etc.).
>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
we agree here. they are certainly doing "HNDL" (harvest now, decrypt later) at a very large scale. but obviously they are not able to collect and store every piece of communication at every tech company over years and years. (the intelligence community comprehensive national cybersecurity initiative data center is large, but not that large)
What? That's not only relevant to the point, it's incredibly relevant. If the NSA is only able to recruit 2% of the math PhDs they approach, then that's important information.
"More than one" is not particularly useful; you seem to be dodging the question because it undermines your argument.
telling you exactly how many people i know in the NSA is also not particularly useful. i'm one guy. there is no statistically significant information from my answer.
>you seem to be dodging the question because it undermines your argument.
my "argument" is that there are plenty of smart people in the NSA. that's it. i am confused why that is seemingly so offensive to you that you had to reply twice.
In my cohort? Several, and who knows? The recruitment effort is very visible and intense.
The US math phd market has been a slow-rolling disaster for over a decade. Everyone who can hack it outside the ivory tower is actively looking for the exits.
So why is it surprising that some of them go to work at the NSA?
> 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 don’t think you have context on what math phds are making in entry level positions, post-docs, or adjuncting. I just picked a random entry level NSA role on LinkedIn (doctorate + 0 yrs) and they’re offering solid six digits. There are tenured faculty (post-doc(s) + 5ish yrs) who don’t make that.
IPO incoming.
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.
Any citations to your statement that NSA produces nothing? Or do you have a strong argument or evidence to support this?