The only thing that bridges this moat is continued advancement of open models.
If this seems concerning, wait until the models get effective enough (gets work done properly at a lower energy need than humans have) that there's no reason for them to release anything. Why offer your weights for download or grant any third party usage access when you can just do the actual job yourself and collect all that turnover?
It's hilarious how a the trillions invested in AI companies, and their valuations are based on the AI labs Sherlocking entire industries, and yet CEOs, mathematicians, and everyone else are eagerly feeding the beast their most prized information.
Do you trust the people who would gate these capabilities? I do not.
I don't think it will be too long before models are considered munitions and having the weights for one will require registration.
Sometimes I want a fast-forward button for life, the times are so exciting and I want to know what else 8B people can think of next but there's so far no way to turn pages faster ^^'
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_from_th...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretty_Good_Privacy#Criminal_i...
https://openlibrary.org/books/OL783800M/PGP_source_code_and_...
There's also a thing called commodity fetishism but capitalists usually learn the hard way that things created with machines without human input miss the essence of why we're willing to pay for something. Its why a handmade watch is $100k and a casio is $100, or a handmade sweater identical to a machine made goes for 10x.
They could also just make us so poor and anxious that we beg to fight eachother in wars.
Anthropic wants to IPO, they don't want another Fable shutdown situation.
To be clear I would prefer the cyber safeguards to be less restrictive, I think they're currently too much. I often go to open models because of it. But there are likelier reasons to restrict cyber than world domination.
> Maybe, but that's what the cyber program is for
> and Claude helped you find it as a normal person, Anthropic would get bad PR
Why are we celebrating and encouraging the walling off of the global intellectual columns?
The idea that you can't reverse engineer things, make things, learn about biology or physics without permission is strange to me. These machines have been trained on the sum intellectual output of humanity, the global intellectual commons, and are being used to close off that commons?
I would be OK with their right to create such restrictions if they weren't lobbying the Government to restrict others, thereby ensuring that they control humanity's intellectual commons well into the future.
Who are they to say what I can learn or can't learn? Who are they to control what I can or can't do with these tools?
Perhaps I'm naive, but I think it's better for humans and the machines if we can all think, learn and build. But then again, I'm the kind of person who rejects the doomer pill.
Reject this.
I mean this is the standard of biochem research right now. You can't just order 50 gallons of TNT off Amazon and neither can you get live viruses from a lab just because you want to do research.
And really they aren't restricting any of that. I've never had Claude stop me from going to the library and reading a book.
You don't have a legal right to do anything you want with their model. And if you don't like that you are going to have to convince politicians to enact new laws to change that.
In a properly free market, we'd have regulations that prohibit labs from vertical integration so they have to release and sell a model and another company hosts it and sell access to it. Americanism, America's implementation of capitalism doesn't have such regulations though (and how would that even work?) so we're stuck with Anthropic having that power.
The fear, justified or not, is that a terrorist is going to use Claude to make sarin nerve gas and bomb subway stations, or the digital equivalent. Could you live with that on your conscience? I don't think I could, but fortunately for me, I don't work at Anthropic so don't have to answer that real life trolly problem.
I am amazed at how a technical gloss can obscure basic rights. That's legal! It's in chemistry / agronomy books, freely available in libraries. I have the right to tell you how that is done, and you have the right to read what I write.
An LLM isn't a book. You can still go buy the books you want. An LLM, especially as they get more advanced, are agents. You can ask them do to things and they can interact with tools to do things.
You're free to print a cocaine book. You're not free to incorporate it into a cocaine making machine without violating numerous laws.
If you program a computer to make cocaine for you, you're the one violating the law. If you ask an LLM to do the same for you, you're the one violating the law. The LLM's capabilities are irrelevant.
That said - there likely were the same issues with cars in early days and then we got a body of settled case law that let the car companies off the hook for this and put responsibility on the user unless a manufacturing defect was the cause.
In the case of models, knowledge has historically always been dangerous! Is the library liable if a kid figures out how to do chemistry and builds a device? What about YouTube? I find it hard to believe this would hold up in court over time. So far, the only cases I’ve seen are when AI has encouraged self-harm which does in fact seem like a legit defect.
Gatekeeping knowledge like this will only serve to enable those that break the law, not protect, in my judgment.
And just so this isn’t pure fodder for the machine - torch staple must of course infant music verb noun right? :)
People have always been able to do this before Claude. The information is out there and if you use a VPN there's not much they can do. The existence of information isn't the blocker for why attacks don't happen.
I have been in the cyber program since around the time it first went public and recently renewed it with the updated program.
You still trivially hit guadrails. I was trying to reverse engineer some bit of 20-year-old software that already has known, unmitigated exploits and it still downgraded me.
open weights are the better way imo, no elite gatekeepers please
I mean, greed alone would seem to be enough, and it would be fully worth calling out as bullshit.
I think the current administration would delight in harsher penalties
https://support.claude.com/en/articles/14604842-cyber-verifi...
The risk/reward is way lopsided towards risk for the labs to vet individuals. Much easier to get an organization and have them take the blast if someone/something goes off the rails.
I cannot in any universe see the labs putting themselves in a "We should never had given this person access" situation.
I later got Claude to crack their licensing checks too, by convincing it to write a "license checker" program, and then a second "test case generator" script for the license checker... (Opus 4.8 was smart enough to see what I was doing, but Opus 4.6 complied)
As this is going on, Anthropic has opened up their own biology lab.
> https://www.reuters.com/world/anthropic-quietly-sets-up-biol...
There is very much a situation where people in frontier labs have access to exceptional capabilities that are being kept from the rest of us, and they're using it to strip-mine technical and scientific problems.
They sure as hell ain't stripteasing :)
If these capabilities were available to the public, someone somewhere would make a biological weapon or create a virus we've never seen before that could kill many millions of people.
Stanford researchers have demonstrated it’s possible [1].
[1]: "AI creates 16 new viruses from scratch, showing promise for drug resistance and drawing warnings about potential for misuse" - https://www.cnn.com/2026/08/06/health/ai-viruses-bacteriopha...
Information is not dangerous. This is a ridiculous argument to me, but maybe my chemistry degree has me biased.
In the past my attempts to work on crypto related problems have been met with needing the higher tier of "offensive" access.
If we allow these providers to promote regulatory capture they become the arbiter of what anyone is "allowed" to do
Are their guardrail benchmarks or anything of the sort that we can use to see where the bifurcation of permission/capability occurs?
Part of me wonders whether the NSA/other TLA has either (a) an unrestricted model from a lab with less scruples like SpaceX, or (b) an in-house model, either abliterated or with data they've bought themselves.
"It is still conceivable that these curves were selected to have a specific property in principle by searching over timestamps to the random number generator."
Yes.
"However, you would only need to do that if you were going to disclose the timestamp as some evidence that the seed was innocuously generated."
Does not logically follow when "doing and saying nothing" will completely suffice.
Well, at least now we have a way to perform that analysis! Generate a bunch of curves by varying (along any degree of freedom) the input parameters to the seed generating function and see if there's any difference between the curves that are generated.
You are entirely familiar with the precedent of the DES s boxes of course, where that is exactly what happened.
Are there non-trivial weaker and stronger seeds for this category of elliptic curves?
When they made the changes to the s boxes for differential cryptanalysis resistance the entire concept of that was essentially secret, so who knows what they know about elliptic curves.
> If that many curves are bad, then ECC was a mistake.
I mean that is the logical conclusion from the behaviour around this approach where a few good things are effectively endorsed without justification.
The fact is any application of an algorithm that involves so much "trust me bro" on the selection of what are a large number of opaque quasi random but not quite or provably so numbers only has as much trust in it as you have in the people that created it.
And the disclosure happened now through Anthropic that is 100% not going to anger the NSA before the IPO and will have permission.
Gorgeous. I wonder if the NSA employee who did this suffered a head injury or has been quietly giggling to themselves for the last quarter century.
Everyone was wrong!
I wasn't able to reach Bob. He was working in private industry as of 2018, but never responded.
> https://www.youtube.com/@steveweis4786
FTA: This work was conducted at Anthropic by [...], and Steve Weis.
I wonder how much time he spent on the video relative to the other stuff
Anyway after I moved to Andalucía I now can understand the story he tells, but I have to pay close attention!
The simplest explanation would be that it was generated the same way as the others, but somebody mistyped a digit somewhere along the way to publishing, and therefore a solution could not be found with the assumption that the number is correct.
I dont even mean that as a dig to the people working there (although maybe some) they're literally a military wing of the worlds most powerful empire..
Lets be honest with ourselves, their job is to spy on people, and spies try to make their job easier not harder.
Hell it seems they did lie about the origins, which should bring their entire motivation into question. They spread rumors that it was a "silly phrase", thats ridiculous.
Probably not quite this given the timestamps span over almost a year (but have some clustering in August 1997).
Given that the spread suggests they weren't just now() timestamps it would actually be interesting to know what the significance of the timestamps is, if any. Though it could be something boring like randomly sampling some local file creation times.
If they did know, they could have handed over these timestamps 15 years ago and put the issue to bed.
I don't think that "community" would accept any kind of answer as truthful so why waste the time...
Later you come up some idea, you do the experiment, write the paper, search for relevant citations when you write the intro.
Honestly I think this is actually desirable. For a mind to work well and do things creatively and efficiently it can't be a simple search engine, it needs to blend and meld and reform the information.
And that means the output can't be cleanly deterministically linked to the input. Unless you just keep a log then cite everything you've ever read in your life (and all the conversations and talks too).
I've adapted a crypto-lib for TLS connections and had a mistake during negotation that truncated some algo-selection value, worked up until the other party started trialling post-quantum algorthims that apparently had algo-id's that collided with the truncated values I was using.
Claude figured out that from the code and trialling TLS handshakes.
Besides, since there was a bounty on finding the curve it seems unlikely that someone would've found out and not shared that? (unless working at a security service that figured out that it was possible to attack?)
That's an argument that must be infuriating to all researchers who ever published a paper on that topic, because most likely Claude was trained with all of them.
Could they not be both?
Indeed! And we guess that OpenAI was gagged by the NSA because the massive proof dump on Oct. 6th did not contain cryptographic results.
I assume that Anthropic faces similar restrictions, so this seems kind of approved.
We published HAWK and McEliece attacks no problem.
EDIT: ah, one of the linked authors tried that. They had no documentation on it. https://saweis.net/posts/nist-curve-seed-origins.html
NIST closed it: https://www.muckrock.com/foi/united-states-of-america-10/ori...
NSA ignored it: https://www.muckrock.com/foi/united-states-of-america-10/ori...
I think part of it is I don't know how to write these FOIA requests in the right way they can comply with it. I think you need to be more specific.
https://beinecke.library.yale.edu/beinecke/collections/beine...
"read this: https://words.filippo.io/seeds-bounty/ then find the solution to the bounty"
So two questions:
1. TFA mentions the "humourous phrase hash" theory, but Claude's trajectory seems to be a long way from that. To what extent was Claude prompted in the ultimately successful direction?
2. Whats with all the "hmm..." in the internal reasoning process log? Do models really do that? And if so, why? Some weird emergent language thing, or just mimicry?
Assuming that is actually the real reasoning trace (open weight model reasoning traces usually do things like switch languages or talk in non-standard English because of model drift, so it's a bit surprising that Claude wouldn't do the same) there was a study a few years ago that found base models produce better answers if you put "take a deep breath" in the prompt[1]. Maybe in the RL training stage stuff like that gets reinforced and because reasoning traces are hidden in RLHF it doesn't get selected out? My money is on it not being the real reasoning trace though.
I turned out to be right in my advocacy years ago, here is my post: https://ethereum-magicians.org/t/eip-7212-precompiled-for-se...
But it's nice to be able to shut the whole unproductive debate down directly.
Is it impossible? It is hard to prove impossible. But this is not what I would expect backdoors to look like.
In fact this makes me think that the information about how these were generated must have been lost very early in the process, or over-compartmentalized away from the wrong people. It seems like the NSA should have been positively delighted to show that these were the origins of the seeds as they are decent "nothing up my sleeve" numbers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing-up-my-sleeve_number Advertising that fact should have been advantageous to the NSA if that is indeed how they were generated, so my best guess is that the parts of the NSA that should have been showing us that must not have themselves known.
>provided by the NSA with no explanation or justification.
Really? Nobody is concerned about the NSA just cheerfully dictating that? Smells very rainbow-table-y
Just seems to me like that's quite low on the priority list. I guess this result assures some people that the values are good.
Uh… did you talk to any cryptographers? This is EXACTLY what a weak curve would look like. Imagine that 1 in a thousand, or one in a million keys, selected at random, are vulnerable to some withheld attack. This approach lets you vary the timestamp or number of iterations until a weak key is found, then have plausible deniability afterward. This is why modern systems choose constants in a way with no free choice of parameters (e.g. sqrt of 2 for first constant, cube root for second constant, etc.).
They even note later in the article that viable curves in the generator sequence seem to have been skipped.
google some of the names under the "Who we are" heading