Comment by snowwrestler

16 hours ago

There’s a big jump between “the attack came from China” and “the attack was sponsored by the Chinese government.” People generally make this jump in one of three ways.

1) Just a general assumption that all bad stuff from China must be state-sponsored because it’s generally a top-down govt-controlled society. This is not accurate and not really actionable for anyone in the U.S.

2) The attack produced evidence that aligns with signatures from “groups” that are already widely known / believed to be Chinese state sponsored, AKA APTs. In this case, disclosing the new evidence is fine since you’re comparing to, and hopefully adding to, signature data that is already public. It’s considered good manners to contribute to the public knowledge from which you benefited.

3) Actual intelligence work by government agencies like FBI, NSA, CIA, DIA, MI6, etc. is able to trace the connections within Chinese government channels. Obviously this is usually reserved for government statements of attribution and rarely shared with commercial companies.

Hopefully Anthropic is not using #1, and it’s unlikely they are benefiting from #3. So why not share details a la #2?

Of course it’s possible and plausible for people to be using Claude for attacks. But what good does saying that do? As the article says: defenders need actionable, technical attack information, not just a general sense of threat.

3 comments

snowwrestler

Reply
thinkingemote  15 hours ago

#3 much intelligence is to the benefit of industry and commercial companies. To a country their economy is their country. After the end of the cold war most state espionage was focused on industry. Sharing is possibly common but secret. The lack of details in the report to me smells of "we are not allowed to share the details". (It also smells of that law to attribute incompetence and not lies)

Now anthropic is new and I don't know how embedded they are with their hosts government compared to a FANG etc but I wouldn't discount some of #3

(If you see an American AI company requiring security clearance that gives a good indication of some level of state involvement. But it might also be just selling their software to a peaceful internal department...)