20 comments

  • QuantumNoodle 0 minutes ago
    Okay, when fuzzing techniques came out there was a big surge in discovered and exploited bugs. AI is more general and I expect there be a similar surge. However fuzzing is cheap but compute and techniques can be "owned." The economics of AI is unless you pay for it, it is difficult to self host (expensive hardware, open source models are catching up).

    State actors + hackers will have more resources to make better offense. What worse, in my experience AI produced code is blind to overall system behavior. So I fear the exploits will be either low hanging/trivial to exploit errors or bigger system level bugs.

  • s3p 1 hour ago
    >But new A.I. models like Anthropic’s Mythos, which was announced last month, appear to be so good at finding such holes that Anthropic shared it only with a limited number of firms and government agencies in the United States and Britain.

    Immediate distrust of the article. GPT 5.5 is out with nearly the same capability. The author might be parroting company marketing, unable to discern that a lot of this is much less complex than it seems. For all we know this group could have had a model examine some obscure line of code thousands of times until it found something.

    • bluGill 6 minutes ago
      That is very clearly the claim of mythos though. The experience of projects that do have access to mythos though suggests that if you use the other models it's not going to find much of anything. Which is to say generally we believe it is marketing as you say however the claim that the reporter said is very clearly stated even if it's not right.
    • cobolcomesback 22 minutes ago
      GPT 5.5 does not have the same capabilities as Mythos. There is a separate 5.5-Cyber model which is the Mythos “equivalent”, but it is similarly restricted access like Mythos. Per OpenAI, the major difference is the built-in safeguards that 5.5 (and other models have), where 5.5-Cyber does not have these safeguards and is more “permissive” for security work.

      See https://openai.com/index/gpt-5-5-with-trusted-access-for-cyb...

      • ofjcihen 10 minutes ago
        I have access to the Cyber version. It’s great at cybersecurity work but only marginally better than its predecessor with the right jailbreaking.

        I imagine Mythos is going to be the same story from what I’ve seen so far.

    • reaperducer 1 hour ago
      Immediate distrust of the article… The author might be parroting company marketing, unable to discern that a lot of this is much less complex than it seems.

      https://www.nytimes.com/by/dustin-volz

      > I am based in The Times’s Washington bureau, and much of my focus is on the dealings of U.S. cybersecurity and intelligence agencies, including the National Security Agency, Central Intelligence Agency, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, as well as their counterparts abroad, chiefly in China, Russia, Iran and North Korea.

      > My remit spans nation-state hacking conflict, digital espionage, online influence operations, election meddling, government surveillance, malicious use of A.I. tools and other related topics.

      > Before joining The Times, I worked at The Wall Street Journal, where I spent eight years covering cyber conflict and intelligence. My recent work at The Journal included a series of articles revealing a major Chinese intrusion of America’s telecommunications networks that breached the F.B.I.’s wiretap systems and has been described as one of the worst U.S. counterintelligence failures in history. I have also worked at Reuters and National Journal, where I began my career in Washington chronicling congressional efforts to reform surveillance practices at the N.S.A. in the wake of the 2013 Edward Snowden disclosures.

      > My work has been internationally recognized, including by the White House Correspondents’ Association, the Gerald Loeb Awards, the Society of Publishers in Asia and the Society for Advancing Business Editing and Writing.

      What have you done lately?

      • kubik369 10 minutes ago
        Your comment was surely well meant, but you could have plainly stated that the article author is a seasoned reporter instead of the snarky reply.

        GP might be incorrect in stating that the author is parroting Anthropic's marketing, but the author certainly does not go out of his way to specify that these are only Anthropic's claims. It is actually a bit ironic as the article linked[0] from the quoted part (by another author) uses the correct phrasing when dealing with such claims:

        > Anthropic, the artificial intelligence company that recently fought the Pentagon over the use of its technology, has built a new A.I. model that it claims is too powerful to be released to the public.

        [0] https://archive.ph/GC6WP#selection-4713.0-4713.200

      • ofjcihen 7 minutes ago
        Okay, well I’ve done more than that and I say he’s right. Now what?
      • LudwigNagasena 50 minutes ago
        Reporting on such stuff requires networking skills, not technical knowledge.
        • reaperducer 46 minutes ago
          Reporting on such stuff requires networking skills, not technical knowledge.

          Guess how I know you've never been a reporter.

      • himata4113 36 minutes ago
        nytimes reporters have recently been very disappoiting and starting to feel like they're people who managed to become relevant long time ago, but haven't kept up with recent changes and are just parroting things others have said instead of unique thoughts.
      • flextheruler 54 minutes ago
        • reaperducer 50 minutes ago
          Not at all.

          OP posited that the author didn't know what he's talking about. I pointed out that the author has far more knowledge and experience in the field than rando internet griefers on HN who immediately reach for "shoot the messenger" when they read something that doesn't neatly fit into their pre-conceived worldview, instead of perhaps learning things from other people.

          But at least your trope acknowledges that he's an authority on the subject.

          • ssl-3 9 minutes ago
            > OP posited that the author didn't know what he's talking about.

            That position does not appear to be present.

            • JumpCrisscross 4 minutes ago
              Eh, "unable to discern" seems like a polite way of saying someone is talking out of their ass.
      • megous 39 minutes ago
        How many zeroday vulns had the article author discovered using AI assisted methods?
  • sowbug 1 hour ago
    Security will be a wedge to restrict the sophistication of open-weight and local LLMs, just as it's been used to demonize and restrict cypherpunk technologies.
    • JumpCrisscross 7 minutes ago
      > Security will be a wedge to restrict the sophistication of open-weight and local LLMs, just as it's been used to demonize and restrict cypherpunk technologies

      Unlikely in America or China. This is not a game either can singularly control, and locking down the R&D means conceding momentum to the party that doesn't. Which means use restrictions will be contained to countries satisfied with playing second fiddle.

      Instead, I suspect we'll see momentum towards running software on publisher-controlled servers so the source code can be secured through obscurity. It isn't perfect. But it might be good enough to get us through this transition.

    • kshacker 1 hour ago
      As long as it is within the country, restriction works. How do you restrict the capability from a foreign entity, especially a hostile one?
      • jazzyjackson 42 minutes ago
        netsplit, I guess. decide that the risk of an open network is too great and simply block all routing out of the country through the ISPs and consider the political power that goes along with a global satellite constellation under rule of a single, government-aligned corporation.
        • notsound 5 minutes ago
          "simply block all routing out of the country" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. For government networks, sure. For civilian networks? It's a bit like stopping pirates from ripping video; how do you deal with an attacker that ultimately can gain some form of access? Even in North Korea external media can be smuggled in.
        • bluGill 8 minutes ago
          That works for very oppressive countries. However, more freedom-minded countries are not going to law for that.
    • somewhatgoated 9 minutes ago
      Didnt work out so well with the cypherpunk technology so there is hope
    • 2ndorderthought 23 minutes ago
      If they tried to lock down local models more people would use them. They would also have to take down a few us companies in the process who would go down fighting for certain.
  • gman2093 1 hour ago
    Black hat hacking seems to be a well-fit use case for these LLMs. Attackers only need to be right once, so the sometimes-wrongness of the attacks might be trivial. This probably devalues stashes of zero-day exploits for those that have been witholding them.
  • bouncycastle 39 minutes ago
    Meanwhile, I cannot ask ChatGTP how to pick my own lock. Even though this information is available in a book in the library.
    • dryarzeg 11 minutes ago
      Then go ask some ChineseGPT about this, I guess, as these models seem to be much less restricted on such topics (you could even get some explosives recipes, though not all of them are real and safe) /j
  • skeledrew 15 minutes ago
    Wild that they think restricting access to models will help much. Access to Chinese models will definitely not be restricted and have enough capability to find exploits as well.
  • xnx 21 minutes ago
    • skeledrew 18 minutes ago
      This is 3 hours earlier than what you're sharing.
  • atrocities 1 hour ago
    Can we link to the actual google article, instead of these editorialized articles about the article?

    https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/threat-intelligence/ai-...

  • CrzyLngPwd 1 hour ago
    People used LLMs to find flaws in Google software.
    • amelius 1 hour ago
      But did they use Gemini?
      • freedomben 42 minutes ago
        I don't know, but given how often Gemini refuses benign requests IME, I would suspect it's a complete non-starter for finding security holes.
      • Andrex 34 minutes ago
        > the company added that it did not believe it was its own Gemini chatbot.

        -TFA

  • skywhopper 33 minutes ago
    Drives me nuts that the NYT just uncritically cites Anthropic’s unverified claims of “thousands of zero-days” without a hint of skepticism.
  • SecretDreams 1 hour ago
    If "bad guy AI" can find flaws, can "good guy AI" patch them faster when backed by trillion dollar companies?
    • boothby 1 hour ago
      Do your AI patches introduce fewer flaws than they repair?
    • cyanydeez 1 hour ago
      If I sell weapons to both sides of a conflict, can I become rich?
      • mindcrime 31 minutes ago
        No. To become really rich you have to draw a 3rd player into the conflict, and then sell weapons to them as well.
      • SecretDreams 1 hour ago
        Ask anyone selling AI hardware recently!
    • j2kun 1 hour ago
      The bottleneck is probably validating and deploying the fix, which requires coordination.
  • 0xWTF 58 minutes ago
    Wait until the bio version of this shows up.
  • 4128-1228 1 hour ago
    The Google Threat Intelligence Group wants to increase its relevance and casually point out the it was not Mythos which found the exploit!

    Security "researchers" are overpaid buffoons who hype things for their own salaries and their companies. And the stenographers from the press dutifully copy everything.

    This is a despicable game to fool politicians into giving money and favorable AI legislation.

    Strangely enough these buffoons never offer their models to open source developers. It is always a select group of highly paid other buffoons that throws some very occasional results over the wall.

  • ppqqrr 1 hour ago
    ...says yet another company hell bent on integrating it into every facet of our lives. This reads like a celebration, if you ask me.
  • huflungdung 11 minutes ago
    [dead]
  • Predaxia 9 hours ago
    [flagged]
  • simmerup 1 hour ago
    Can google please use AI to find bugs then?

    Software is in such a state now, Gmail is full of bugs around sharing attachments to the position that I have to tell my dad to turn his phone off and on again in order to attach a document

  • wnc3141 56 minutes ago
    But in exchange we get to also waste vast energy and carbon while depleting job prospects for just about any college grad.
    • andrepd 52 minutes ago
      It's not all bad though. We also managed to turn the Information Superhighway of the 1990s into the Slop Wasteland of the 2020s.