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’s always been this way, it’s just always been marginal people who have peered inside. Closed source couldn’t exist if law enforcement wasn’t able to keep up with those people, which it loosely appears to have succeeded in up until now. Now, reality can’t be ignored, even if people use terms like “hackers, AI, stealing” to make it sound like there’s still some barrier.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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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.
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.
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)
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
It’s always been this way, it’s just always been marginal people who have peered inside. Closed source couldn’t exist if law enforcement wasn’t able to keep up with those people, which it loosely appears to have succeeded in up until now. Now, reality can’t be ignored, even if people use terms like “hackers, AI, stealing” to make it sound like there’s still some barrier.
>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.
Progress isn't always welcome by the incumbent who have built their moats on hoarding knowledge over being adaptable
'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.
> 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.
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They will never be able to read all the words in my head that spell out exactly what I want to have happen at that org.
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.
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.
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Are you proposing that this government is above being slave owners?
the success of mythos isn't from model weights, it's from the harness and toolset it has access to
Is it really?
Harness is important for model performance, but weights are surely mode important, without that you would have haiku doing the work.
I agree but that's even easier to exfiltrate, surely.
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Was Fable / Mythos in pi or opencode that much worse?
If they use the defence production act, would Dario be even able to resign in protest?
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.
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John Cook resigned, so Dario might resign also. But he would make it public, so they won't do it
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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.
All the CEOs very quickly changed their messaging after Altman's house got molotoved.
Seems to me that they were mostly right, and the message was received by the right people. No need to ensure it gets distributed to the wrong people.
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".
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.
[1]. https://thehill.com/policy/technology/5936339-ai-cybersecuri...
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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.
I said absolutely nothing about LLMs, which is a fantastic tool I'm using every day. I'm talking about marketing.
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> I was able to identify, diagnose, fix, ...
a link to the PR or Changelog would strengthen this comment that it actually happened?
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.
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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".
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.
The perpetrators all have their golden parachutes. The taxpayers will foot the bill.
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Why on earth would you expect any of them to take profit so early in the game?
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there is a well known politician that uses this same trick
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
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.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/tim-haugh-firing-trump-60-minut...
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Here is one sector of the US government I'm happy to see burned down. If the alternative is the status quo, I'm OK with any roll of the dice.
It can always get worse.
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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.
> dozens upon dozens fired for no reason
When you say without reason do you mean without cause?
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.
Everyone lost access. What even is mainstream news these days.
> Everyone lost access.
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.
Doesn't make any sense. They could just force them to provide Mythos to the federal government.
> They could just force them to provide Mythos to the federal government
The DPA only gives that power to the President [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_Production_Act_of_1950
Maybe GP was treating Trump to the royal "they"
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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?
> What powers does the US government have to force them to provide access?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_Production_Act_of_1950
This would not be a particularly big stretch here, either.
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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.
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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)
The constitution limits a lot of things that this administration has done regardless.
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> 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.
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.
> NSA literally has MITM proxies/interception of any traffic they want inside every major US tech company
No, they don't.
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Please provide sources for such bold claims
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the NSA isn't a bunch of super soldiers, they're cops with too much access, it doesn't take a genius to outsmart a cop
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> Propaganda
IPO incoming.
Misdirection
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?
They're great at building datacenters and running massive archival operations.
Ghidra comes to mind
Ghidra is good, but would they release it if it was not for the leaks?
https://github.com/nationalsecurityagency/ghidra
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.