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The hacker sent by Anthropic to calm the government's nerves about AI safety (wsj.com)
61 points by Brajeshwar 1 hour ago
Readable: https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/anthropic-mythos-safety-nicholas...
12 comments

The AI labs look rather naive here.

You can’t jump up and down screaming how amazing, powerful, and dangerous your new tech is and then act surprised and annoyed when the government shows up looking to regulate it.

Their new argument now seems be that this was marketing hype/fluff that backfired, in a pretty obvious and predicable way, and now they’re trying to reset the conversation.

> You can’t jump up and down screaming how amazing, powerful, and dangerous your new tech is and then act surprised and annoyed when the government shows up looking to regulate it.

True, you can't. But, you can think certain regulations are helpful and certain other regulations are not. And you can be annoyed when unhelpful "regulations" are put in place.

This is like if I say that pitbulls are dangerous, and then the government comes and shoots my pitbull, who I've spent a lot of effort training to not be dangerous. Then you say "well you said pitbulls were dangerous, so you can't really complain." Well, I can complain because If you took me seriously, you wouldn't have responded by shooting only my pitbull!

Think of what incentives this creates for other people. Do you think that OpenAI will be candid about the possible dangers of their technology now? They might not even release it now, seeing that Anthropic releasing their model was what got it export-controlled.

Well Anthropic would love some regulatory capture.
> You can’t jump up and down screaming how amazing, powerful, and dangerous your new tech is and then act surprised and annoyed when the government shows up looking to regulate it.

It's entirely possible that models could be "dangerous" to fully release to the general public without guardrails and at the same time the government majorly overreacted in this case.

Releasing Mythos to selected researchers and companies at least gives those researchers a head start at addressing vulnerabilities before the model hits mainstream.

Then why did curl only find one new vulnerability thanks to Mythos, and a low-priority one at that? It’s clear that other models are quite capable of finding largely the same vulnerabilities, and that the main key is simply running a frontier model in a good harness to find vulnerabilities.
> Then why did curl only find one new vulnerability thanks to Mythos

Maybe there weren't that many serious vulnerabilities in curl? It's like asking why it didn't find any vulnerabilities in fn main() {println!("hello, world");}.

Anyway, people who have used it seem to say that Mythos was better than other models at creating exploits. From cloudflare https://blog.cloudflare.com/cyber-frontier-models/

> When we ran other frontier models through the same harness, they found a fair number of the same underlying bugs, and in some cases they got further than we expected on the reasoning side too. Where they fell short was at the point of stitching the pieces together. A model would identify an interesting bug, write a thoughtful description of why it mattered, and then stop, leaving the actual chain unfinished and the question of exploitability open. What changed with Mythos Preview is that a model can now take those low-severity bugs (which would traditionally sit invisible in a backlog) and chain them into a single, more severe exploit.

Dog caught the car
Also a good wake-up call for investors as these big players can be benched at any moment.
I can’t take anyone seriously who thought otherwise.

You think you can become more powerful so much so the govt questions its own power? Don’t be stupid. They will simply send in the army to first seize the assets and then nationalise.

It almost seems as if very few people actually understand how the world works. If the govt thinks this is the tech to end all future tech, you think future money flows for invesment matter? Hahaha. No

This is 99% petty drama between the US government and Anthropic and 1% actual safety concerns.
But the paperclips!

I'm skeptical about the existential threat of AI, but a lot of smart people have been beating that drum for so long that people are afraid.

We know, but it's still satisfying to see their fearmongering backfire on them.
If you "know" that it's "99% petty drama between the US government and Anthropic", then it's not really their fearmongering backfiring on them.
It absolutely is. They pretty much gave the government the perfect excuse to meddle in their operations.
To be clear, this is petty drama *stirred up the US government*. It's not some sort of back and forth, the government is singling them out
I suspect they're taking this as a win either way, because they're still plastering "Fable 5 unavailable" on their product and using it as an opportunity to keep themselves in the spotlight as they head to IPO.

There's really not even a ban here, they could slot in Fable under the Opus label and no one would really be able to tell. It's all part of the same show to pump up valuation.

I bet they will do a touch of RLHF and re-naming the moment OAI releases a comparable model. Otherwise, sure, they can just bask in the drama for a bit.
I love it, maybe now they’ll all shut the fuck up now that Anthropic has fucked around a couple times and is now finding out.
that seems like possibly the most unlikely outcome
I’m way more concerned about the loons willing to throw absurd amounts of money at the clearly naive individuals.
No. They got caught in a change in what it means to be "regulated".

Regulation in a functional democracy: Cool, lets figure this out, write up a bill for us, do some research in congress, lets find something that makes sense.

Regulation in a function fascism: Cool, wheres my bribe? My boots not shiny, lick it till I say stop.

See, Anthropic wasn't licking enough boot when Biden got discharged and they thought Amazon and OpenAI and Elon were just going to let them capture a market without fealty to the boot.

This. Theres a lot of rude awakenings in the future for corporate executive types. They are no longer driving the train. Oh well.
wow i wish we had functional fascism, where have the verticalized/syndicalized trade unions been my whole life!!!!
Let's hope that government seizes all of these AI companies with total forfeiture and no compensation.
>Some administration officials have said that a resolution should include an acknowledgment on Anthropic’s part that its rollout of Fable and communication with the White House could have been improved, people familiar with the talks said.

>followed initial frustration Friday among some administration officials when they couldn’t immediately get Amodei on the phone, the people said.

That he didn't drop everything to talk to them seems like the major crux? But Dario doesn't even do the day-to-day operations Daniela does. Feel like Anthropic should just hire Dean Ball to be their liason or something

And Anthropic say they were on the phone within 15 minutes… This administration is not known for its honesty so it’s hard to take their side of things
It's because the "crisis" is a sham for publicity, like Trump's constant bullshit deals and ceasefires that aren't real, they're just happening to find more problems to keep them in the news.
I feel Dario did enough harm. I wonder if he can do the right thing and step down. It’s really just tiresome to follow all his PR/Hype/warnings and this fiasco makes everything he says seem so silly. At the same time he’s dangerous for the industry. In the end he may get more regulation than he asked for. If the gov decides the Opus models are too powerful without KYC they are toast. And to be honest I think they deserve it.
Being on the other side of the AI machine changes the perspective of whether it is dangerous or not, I guess.
Everyone has a price.
the coming IPOs will possibly create several billionaires. Standing on the top of a billion dollar hill would definitely change your perspective.
All the government has to do is simply pull up the blog posts of Anthropic's own CEO.
I'm tired of this story and the corresponding fake discussions because it's completely obvious that Anthropic was singled out because they didn't play along with the current US administration and this whole charade is just part of an extortion scheme.
Had to disagree with that. However, I don't think you can discount how much Anthropic has been banging the drum about how AI is dangerous (specifically theirs) and an existential threat, etc. etc.

The rollout of Mythos was clearly manufactured to stoke the fears of companies that didn’t have access to it. They also bragged (for Fable) about how they "ran an external bug bounty that produced no universal jailbreaks in over 1,000 hours of testing" only for it be circumvented almost immediately.

So them standing on the high horse and saying it is _so powerful, yet so safe_ only to have that blow up in their face just made it that much easier to make an excuse to do this. Again, not disagreeing, but they made themselves the tall poppy here.

They need to send lobbyists not hackers.
They are absolutely clueless about how to talk to this administration.
Young girls and money seem to do the trick.
San Francisco tech talent acts like that’s controversial

Never asking the women interested in doing that, who would put on their own resume’s that a big tech company was their client. But no, its more inclusive if we exclude people!

All before the same tech talent moves to Miami where women consensually are accepted social currency alongside money

Cant take bay area seriously

Yes, why not resolve it the same way all the others have done?

Say that Trump has weird elbows or something, Trump sues for defamation, they settle, bribe completed.

They needed to have administration insiders on their team months if not years ago, not just now

OpenAI, Meta, SpaceX are savvy enough to play ball, but Anthropic's public posturing and government affairs has always seemed too aloof and intellectual

To be fair to Anthropic for a moment (not that they deserve it), but requiring administration insiders and the greasing of palms going on should not continue to be the normal expectations of how to do business in the USA. I'm on the side of any company that refuses to capitulate to this administration. Not saying Anthropic doesn't (because they do), but let's not pretend like the blatant corruption going on should be normalized. Every single citizen should be appalled at this behavior and blatant market manipulation.
They should have taken money from Thrive Capital.
These are the consequences of fear mongering as hard as they did. You reap what you sow.

Now they need to convince the government that they didn't mean anything of the previous things they claimed.

Nah, that's ridiculous. This admin is corrupt and idiotic and it's silly to pretend that Anthropic's actions matter except in so much as they didn't bribe the president like OpenAI did.
OpenAI is also guilty of excessive fear mongering (remember GPT 2 is too dangerous to release?)

This isn't 100% Anthropic's fault, although I'm sure that's part of it. This is the current corrupt administration executing on a grudge they have against Anthropic, and the government's new found love of picking winners and losers.

I don't really think they're acting on a grudge against Anthropic here, I think it really is on Anthropic for describing the model's capabilities the way that they did.

IIRC Anthropic claimed to have been working with the government on securing things with Mythos, but then they seemed to have been blindsided by this.

My read is that the guys making the decision to restrict it were not the ones that Anthropic had been working with, and it's more about Anthropic getting caught between infighting within an incoherent government.

> remember GPT 2 is too dangerous to release

FYI, this was when Dario was still at OpenAI.

OpenAI is much more eager to jump on board with the administration than Anthropic is, Altman is a lot of things, but he definitely knows which wheels need grease.
That was dario amodei as well, when he was still at openai. He is the primary "create hype by claiming you're dangerous"-guy.
Good riddance. Now it’s Anthropic that should show him the door.
Unrelated to this story but Carlini rocks.

tic tac toe in printf https://github.com/carlini/printf-tac-toe

Recently Regex Chess: A 2-ply minimax chess engine in 84,688 regular expressions https://github.com/carlini/regex-chess

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48136909

"Nicholas Carlini recently rang the alarm about the dangers of AI—and now he’s part of a team arguing for the latest models to be released"

Many such cases, he was just hungry.

Isn’t that how Anthropic started? Raise alarm bells and ride the hype train.
Anthropic sowing: Haha fuck yeah!!! Yes!!

Anthropic reaping: Well this fucking sucks. What the fuck.

Can you imagine how cringe it would be setting up that hero image in office?
I’m sure it wasn’t the intent but the halo really makes him look like a saint
I have good friends in the AI industry who are the living embodiment of that Upton Sinclair quote.

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

You've never heard such strong one-sided cope until you've talked to an NVDA employee about AI. I'm not even against AI. It's just that a combination of intense financial incentives around a product that provides a good simulation of the Chinese Room has really fucked peoples brains up.