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> The White House and intelligence officials had pushed forward a classified contract between Anthropic and the N.S.A., which would allow the spy agency to use the company’s technology for a variety of purposes, including intelligence analysis and detecting new computer vulnerabilities.

Ironic that both sides are playing a horse shoe game:

Gov: The model is both a supply chain risk and also we'll DPA you if you don't give it to us.

Anthropic: The model is both like a nuclear weapon in terms of national security implications and safe for general release.

I mean graphite control rods do exist in nuclear reactors to absorb excess neutrons, preventing the fuel from going critical & making it technically safe for general use (THOUGH of course disasters have happened)
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.

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.
"mediocre people"

I'm glad to see the mask is falling off the privileged caste.

Is there anything inherently wrong about open access to tools? (Apart from rent payments).

>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.

> mythos allowed mediocre people to get results by holding their hand through the process,

Yes, just like early cars allowed mediocre horse riders to get from A to B with dignity.

Or like my Japanese rice cooker allows a person like me, utterly shitty at preparing this, to eat some rice that is cooked to perfection.

Etc.

'Mythos “broke into almost all of our classified systems, not in weeks, but in hours.”'

Is Mythos a significant danger?

The curl experience does not suggest that hysteria is warranted, but this gives me pause.

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.
Curl is such a small utility, and the effect of any single problem is limited.

Mythos's great strength was finding multiple vulnerabilities and chaining them together to break a whole system.

Look at it like this: It found one confirmed, minor vulnerability in Curl (but I don't think they have said what it was?). In another system that used Curl it's possible it could have exploited that vulnerability to chain to another, bigger vulnerability that was normally inaccessible.

That's how systems get broken.

'Mythos “broke into almost all of our classified systems, not in weeks, but in hours.”'

And the government's response was to limit access to US citizens? I don't believe this for a minute. If Mythos could actually break into all these systems, the government would declare it a national security risk and it would never see the light of day for anyone outside government staff with security clearance.

additional context from the article regarding that particular statement:

"[the statement] was oversimplified... In reality, the tests involved “red teams” of N.S.A. analysts who were using Mythos in a highly tailored environment that would be extremely unlikely for an adversary to replicate, officials said. The red teams began their tests within classified N.S.A. systems designed to be accessible only from certain computers and completely cut off from the broader internet.

The tests found that Mythos was able to identify cybersecurity flaws within that classified network quickly, but it did not actually break into those systems, the officials said."

>> 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?

Why are these things online at all? Is that a requirement for them to be useful?
Is there a historical precedent as to what happened when the upstart denied capability to the empire?

The closest I can think of is the bronze age collapse.

There is no consensus on what caused the bronze age collapse.
> The closest I can think of is the bronze age collapse.

No idea about your question, but I'd love to hear more about this part.

> 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
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
> 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.

I haven’t heard anything about AGI in a long while. Oh yeah, and per conversations last Jan we were all supposed to be out of our jobs by now.
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.

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.
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".
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.

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.

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 lost access to Mythos

That's is funniest thing I read since long time :)) I mean: it's so absurd, almost like things we had in real socialism in 80s :> But, yeah, freedom have consequences.

They could easily take the weights if they wanted. I don't believe they meaningfully lost access.
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.

the success of mythos isn't from model weights, it's from the harness and toolset it has access to
If they use the defence production act, would Dario be even able to resign in protest?
honest question: does the nsa have the abilty to take the model weights from anthropic? also, as I understand it anthropic employees from the USA have mythos access, and I dont see why this shouldnt extend to the nsa. this seems pretty silly and kinda unbelievable. commenting again to add more infomaiton to my opinion and ask that you don't just blindly downvote bc I don't believe the nsa doesn't have mythos
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

Everyone lost access. What even is mainstream news these days.
Misdirection
Doesn't make any sense. They could just force them to provide Mythos to the federal government.
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.
I really seriously doubt this. no proof, obviously, but this sounds too unbelievable. the NSA probably has the mythos pretrain and might be finetuning it themselves.
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.