This is like telling a team of highly qualified spies to do the same. You can ask, but whether it will succeed depends on the competency of those who established the infrastructure under attack. Sometimes the resources spent will not yield any huge vulnerabilities.
> Governments should immediately begin leveraging this technology on the defense side (literally defense, not euphemistically "defense") to harden critical infrastructure. Turn the prompts around and use it to identify and correct weaknesses.
Most governments divisions can't even be bothered to update their websites. Testing and forcing a change in their internal procedures for the sake of security seems unlikely.
> as an actual weapon of war in need of international regulation analogous to nuclear arms
This, to me, is an overreaction. Intelligence shouldn't be seen as threat. It should be seen as an opportunity for growth in all areas.
Over-regulating AI wouldn't be the equivalent of limiting nuclear arms. With your analogy, which I don't think is the best one to make, it would be like regulating the study of nuclear physics.
Is the government always the most efficient or intelligent? No. But the government can also build nukes, launch ICBMs, coordinate hundreds of spy satellites, etc. I count those capabilities as pretty smart.
Consider that "available resources" may include the training of models and harnesses used by the developers working for governments and private corps maintaining that very infrastructure. This decade's take on trusting trust is very hot.
We do, I believe, regulate uranium enrichment (the equivalent on building larger SOTA models), so while you are perfectly free to study theoretical physics and even run very large collider experiments (the equivalent of improving RLHF with DPO), it is generally frowned upon to go full Edward Teller and advocate for scientific experiments requiring detonating thermonuclear weapons in hurricane clouds (the equivalent of, well, see OP).
not sure I agree
controlling the study of new AI model/inference algorithms would be akin to regulating the study of nuclear physics; regulating the _release_ of AI models with those capabilities would be akin to regulating uranium enrichment which allows you to put the theoretical physics to use
No. Uranium enrichment is an active, physical process used to create a man-made substance of filtered uranium atoms. Weights are information that just knowing or reciting are being threatened. So one is a ban on the process and result of a process on physical resources, and the other would be a restriction on information and its form in all informational mediums.
A restriction of a scientific dataset that powers a large portion of the decentralizing power in open source research today. Without it, there would be hits to reproducibility, independent verification, and incremental research.
Serious governments should (and hopefully will) scramble to use AI to discover and patch as many software vulnerabilities in infrastructure. They can do it with the agents red teaming and using ultimatums to companies to fix each vulnerability they find. Not doing so is equivalent to exposing your flank to disruptions in peace time and to attacks in war time.
They'll adapt or they'll die. We are in a new world.
This is the precisely the response OpenAI is hoping for to raise its valuation, and you fell for it.
Look at it this way - whats the difference between tasking AI to break into something, versus taking a whole bunch of smart humans to do the same? The only difference is that AI is slightly easier to orchestrate.
Prior to AI, there were already a whole bunch of tools to automate exploits. Nothing that the model did is groundbreaking or novel, it was just able to efficiently find the thing that worked. Same thing happens in state sponsored cyber sec agencies like in China or Israel - they train people on the most common exploits and have a whole bunch of tools that automate exploit research and development.
And the reason why this doesn't happen more is because to exploit something is one thing, to do it so there is no trace back to you is a whole different animal that has many more magnitudes of difficulty, which with modern web security is next to impossible in a lot of cases as traffic can easily be traced back to the point of origin.
I.e when a company trains an LLM that manages to build a drone that can fly into a vent and plug in a USB stick into a computer undetected, then we can make the claim that they have a weapon.
On the flip side, most anyone who can run local models can replicate what they did. The key thing to take away from the article is "agentic framework" - i.e this means that they spent a shitload of time developing explicitly coded loops for an LLM to go through. Nothing is really stopping you from doing the same, models like Gemma4 can take 256k tokens of context, so you can give it a whole bunch of info on how to test for exploits, develop exploits, and what to do when the exploit is found, and set it free in a custom designed loop.
Now it’s a prompt away on some terminal done by any random dud.
And I dont mention the velocity of iteration or that they will be even better in 1 year.
Hint: agentic loops.
No its not a prompt away.
I try to recruit a bunch of people to attack a country and it’s going to be hard to get people to say yes, and they will definitely ask or find out which country, and wonder about potential retribution. You see this dynamic show up even to some extent among cybergangs, not all targets are equal.
A single private individual wielding a compliant and hyper capable LLM is an entirely different paradigm. They are accountable to nearly no one and often have few brakes. Frequently they may not care about avoiding detection. And the AI itself may be incapable of the same scale of self reflection and brake behavior a human team will.
We may potentially be entering the age of lone wolf cyberterrorism, and some of the same principles and problems apply. When it is easier for single people to plot and carry out high-impact, destructive acts they happen more often. Doubly so if there’s a social contagion. Gun violence isn’t actually a bad analogy here. And do you remember how many corporate sites got defaced in the prime Anon era?
It might turn out that it's harder to align AI intentions compared with aligning human interests. It's possible that the more "intelligent" a thing is, the more likely it will have ideas that are outside of normal expectations (for us).
Also
>Frequently they may not care about avoiding detection.
This is a big negative. As someone who used to be in the cybersecurity sector (both offense and defense), I wouldn't trust an LLM agent if Im doing red team, because it may leak some info that ties the hack back to me.
ALso keep in mind that most places with good cybersecurity have firewall servers that straight up detect anything that looks like malicious and not regular traffic, and will straight up block IPs, leaving you with no way to even access the server. An agent is bound to statistically use the attacks that are known at some point, increasing the chances of this type of detection.
Are they though? or is that the story the people most invested in ai have an interest in making us believe? [0]
... `it's the foreign bad guys propaganda machines making you believe your city struggling for water and electricity is a bad thing`. People as a whole may not always be the brightest, but threaten their immediate survival needs (ie; not some vague climate change most people don't understand or see, but) actual power outages, water and rolling blackouts -- people will quickly pay attention and care.
Russia and China are gonna Russia and China, every issue is going to have a measure of outside influence, thats just how it is now.
But them directing large scale operation forces focused on something that is genuinely bad for the people in the area of datacenters (ie, an issue that will take care of itself from within) instead of using their resources on other issues that actually need a real propaganda push? Versus the benefit of those invested in building the datacenters using fear to get people to focus away from the resources being diverted from them to datacenters?
One side has reality working for what they want, while another side needs the propaganda to turn their billions into trillions.
There is no doubt an amount of xeno/sinophobia is at play as well. Russia is still killing innocent people in an illegal invasion of Ukraine, they earned their keep
Mind you, I blame governmental mismanagement of infrastructure etc just as much. The datacenters followed procedures when it comes to getting land, electricity and access to water; it's the government agencies / personnel that okayed it that are (also) to blame, and the decades of not enough investment in electricity backbone while promoting solar/EVs that is behind the Netherlands' current electrical grid problems.
(problems being that the grid is at capacity, causing a stop on new connections, with relief only slowly coming in the next decade or so with tens of billions of investments).
> Trump’s comments, made hours after the large-scale military operation, mark one of the first times a U.S. president has so publicly alluded to U.S. cyber efforts against other nations, as these operations are typically highly classified. It also serves as a stern warning for top cyber foes, including Russia and China, that the U.S. has the cyber capabilities to inflict serious damage — and is not shy about using them.
> “Policymakers are getting more comfortable employing and, crucially, acknowledging cyber operations as tools of statecraft and military power,” said Michael Sulmeyer, former assistant secretary of Defense for cyber policy under the Biden administration. “It is one thing to do it; it is another to say it.”
> The Jan. 3 strikes on Venezuela’s capital and subsequent seizure of Maduro and his wife involved close coordination among federal agencies and military units, and took months of careful planning. In a press conference following the strikes, Caine said U.S. Cyber Command, U.S. Space Command and other combatant commands “began layering different effects” to “create a pathway” for U.S. forces flying into the country before dawn Saturday.
> Trump, at the same press conference, was more overt in his description of U.S. cyber involvement: “The lights of Caracas were largely turned off due to a certain expertise that we have,” he said. “It was dark, and it was deadly.”
Governments should immediately begin leveraging this technology on the defense side (literally defense, not euphemistically "defense") to harden critical infrastructure. Turn the prompts around and use it to identify and correct weaknesses.
Governments should also take very seriously their now moral obligation to treat this technology not just as "a powerful thing that might be abused" but as an actual weapon of war in need of international regulation analogous to nuclear arms. Fast but careful and forward-thinking work in legislation and treaties needs to be a top priority for all major governments.