Andrew D. Noble

Websites are files on a computer. When you view a website, you are asking the computer to send you the files, then your browser shows them to you. 70% of the websites you see use PHP to make them interactive. So you can send things to the website too and it can respond. E.g. filling in a comment box and hitting 'post' adds the comment as a row to a spreadsheet. PHP has a flaw in its code that allows anyone to gain control of the computer that has the website on it. The organisation that provides PHP announced the vulnerability before a patch was available, meaning we're in a window where everyone knows about it (including baddies) but the good guys don't have an official solution. Some are just turning off their websites and waiting for the solution. Others are trying to fix it themselves. General chaos and lots of stressed techies across literally the entire planet because this affects the entire internet.

As I Return.

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We discovered a sophisticated recording device that was hidden inside one of our offices. We used our models to understand the device and where it had come from, identifying that a specific employee had planted it a few days earlier. We referred the matter to the FBI, and we’re grateful to the agents and prosecutors who moved quickly to make an arrest. The FBI’s investigation is ongoing and we will continue to support their work. At this time, we have no indications of this individual inappropriately accessing or exfiltrating model weights, source code, or customer data. The employee was terminated. We take protecting our technology, data, and people seriously, and as a matter of national importance. Our security program is designed to protect against a wide range of threat actors, from insider risks to cybercriminals to nation states, and this case is an example of how AI can help address these sophisticated security threats.

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Anthropic's leaders need to stop commenting on the emergence of RSI like a local news anchor reporting on traffic on the 101, and acknowledge that they are the traffic, and they're not going to build something that they don't want to exist. They should move beyond "pacing" language, commit to specific policies and red lines, explain why those lines are red, and then use that costly signal to build an international consensus around norms. It's not that I trust the CCP, or that I think global lab monitoring and verification is imminent. But the status quo is absurd. You've got US lab leaders writing (or favorably quote-tweeting) essays about slowing down while simultaneously saying "things are moving faster and faster" and "btw, our internal models finished mathematics on Tuesday, next up: physics." The effect is the equivalent of Usain Bolt winning race after race while using his press conferences to bemoan the dangerous speed of modern sprinting on one's legs so would everybody please try a little less hard next race, and then ... breaking his 100m record again the following month. Honestly ask yourself: If you were China, why would you take this pausing/pacing stuff seriously?