6 ms·

The technology held by private AI companies is warfare-capable technology. Imagine the prompt: "Use all available resources to disable the power grid of <COUNTR

by cvoss 2mo ago

The technology held by private AI companies is warfare-capable technology. Imagine the prompt: "Use all available resources to disable the power grid of <COUNTRY>." The resource cost that prevents scaling up such a war machine is, what, just the cost of building data centers and its ongoing power bill? Cheap and easy compared to nuclear infrastructure. Governments should immediately begin leveraging this technology on the defense side (literally defense, not euphemistically "defense") to harden critical infrastructure. Turn the prompts around and use it to identify and correct weaknesses. Governments should also take very seriously their now moral obligation to treat this technology not just as "a powerful thing that might be abused" but as an actual weapon of war in need of international regulation analogous to nuclear arms. Fast but careful and forward-thinking work in legislation and treaties needs to be a top priority for all major governments.

derangedHorse 2mo ago
> "Use all available resources to disable the power grid of <COUNTRY>." This is like telling a team of highly qualified spies to do the same. You can ask, but whether it will succeed depends on the competency of those who established the infrastructure under attack. Sometimes the resources spent will not yield any huge vulnerabilities. > Governments should immediately begin leveraging this technology on the defense side (literally defense, not euphemistically "defense") to harden critical infrastructure. Turn the prompts around and use it to identify and correct weaknesses. Most governments divisions can't even be bothered to update their websites. Testing and forcing a change in their internal procedures for the sake of security seems unlikely. > as an actual weapon of war in need of international regulation analogous to nuclear arms This, to me, is an overreaction. Intelligence shouldn't be seen as threat. It should be seen as an opportunity for growth in all areas. Over-regulating AI wouldn't be the equivalent of limiting nuclear arms. With your analogy, which I don't think is the best one to make, it would be like regulating the study of nuclear physics.
- JumpCrisscross 2mo ago
  I think the point is in a world with internet-connected infrastructure, such a prompt has a decent likelihood of causing damage.
  - torginus 2mo ago
    And the sad thing is, most things that are on the internet, but really shouldn't be are there for some really banal and sad reason. Like a random startup pushing 'big data is the future' narrative a decade-ish ago (the benefits of which are of course tremendous, but unspecified), or people trying to buy or sell or resell data, and trick or pressing companies and people into opting into could-connected surveillance and control.
- sebastiennight 2mo ago
  > Over-regulating AI wouldn't be the equivalent of limiting nuclear arms. With your analogy, which I don't think is the best one to make, it would be like regulating the study of nuclear physics. We do, I believe, regulate uranium enrichment (the equivalent on building larger SOTA models), so while you are perfectly free to study theoretical physics and even run very large collider experiments (the equivalent of improving RLHF with DPO), it is generally frowned upon to go full Edward Teller and advocate for scientific experiments requiring detonating thermonuclear weapons in hurricane clouds (the equivalent of, well, see OP).
- drivebyhooting 2mo ago
  You’re taking a dim view on the government. Is the government always the most efficient or intelligent? No. But the government can also build nukes, launch ICBMs, coordinate hundreds of spy satellites, etc. I count those capabilities as pretty smart.
  - paxys 2mo ago
    The people who maintain these ICBM silos and spy satellites will themselves tell you that their infrastructure is decades out of date and woefully underfunded.
    - Eisenstein 2mo ago
      Sounds like something we should remedy.
    - UltraSane 2mo ago
      the US launches new spy sats pretty often. And the US is spending $150 billion replacing every ICBM and silo but the current ones still work fine.
- insane_dreamer 2mo ago
  > it would be like regulating the study of nuclear physics not sure I agree controlling the study of new AI model/inference algorithms would be akin to regulating the study of nuclear physics; regulating the _release_ of AI models with those capabilities would be akin to regulating uranium enrichment which allows you to put the theoretical physics to use
  - derangedHorse 2mo ago
    > would be akin to regulating uranium enrichment No. Uranium enrichment is an active, physical process used to create a man-made substance of filtered uranium atoms. Weights are information that just knowing or reciting are being threatened. So one is a ban on the process and result of a process on physical resources, and the other would be a restriction on information and its form in all informational mediums. A restriction of a scientific dataset that powers a large portion of the decentralizing power in open source research today. Without it, there would be hits to reproducibility, independent verification, and incremental research.
- boothby 2mo ago
  > You can ask, but whether it will succeed depends on the competency of those who established the infrastructure under attack. Consider that "available resources" may include the training of models and harnesses used by the developers working for governments and private corps maintaining that very infrastructure. This decade's take on trusting trust is very hot.
- nazgul17 2mo ago
  Just a few years back, wind turbine software was hacked. This is serious. Serious governments should (and hopefully will) scramble to use AI to discover and patch as many software vulnerabilities in infrastructure. They can do it with the agents red teaming and using ultimatums to companies to fix each vulnerability they find. Not doing so is equivalent to exposing your flank to disruptions in peace time and to attacks in war time.
  - BLKNSLVR 2mo ago
    There were some other special spinny devices hacked, despite an air gap, a few years back too.
- whimsicalism 2mo ago
  > Most governments divisions can't even be bothered to update their websites. Testing and forcing a change in their internal procedures for the sake of security seems unlikely. They'll adapt or they'll die. We are in a new world.
ActorNightly 2mo ago
>The technology held by private AI companies is warfare-capable technology. This is the precisely the response OpenAI is hoping for to raise its valuation, and you fell for it. Look at it this way - whats the difference between tasking AI to break into something, versus taking a whole bunch of smart humans to do the same? The only difference is that AI is slightly easier to orchestrate. Prior to AI, there were already a whole bunch of tools to automate exploits. Nothing that the model did is groundbreaking or novel, it was just able to efficiently find the thing that worked. Same thing happens in state sponsored cyber sec agencies like in China or Israel - they train people on the most common exploits and have a whole bunch of tools that automate exploit research and development. And the reason why this doesn't happen more is because to exploit something is one thing, to do it so there is no trace back to you is a whole different animal that has many more magnitudes of difficulty, which with modern web security is next to impossible in a lot of cases as traffic can easily be traced back to the point of origin. I.e when a company trains an LLM that manages to build a drone that can fly into a vent and plug in a USB stick into a computer undetected, then we can make the claim that they have a weapon. On the flip side, most anyone who can run local models can replicate what they did. The key thing to take away from the article is "agentic framework" - i.e this means that they spent a shitload of time developing explicitly coded loops for an LLM to go through. Nothing is really stopping you from doing the same, models like Gemma4 can take 256k tokens of context, so you can give it a whole bunch of info on how to test for exploits, develop exploits, and what to do when the exploit is found, and set it free in a custom designed loop.
- notaharvardmba 2mo ago
  It lowers the economic cost of a given attack, but also lowers the economic cost of protection. Not sure if it’ll be a perfect balance, but right now there’s a manufactured IMbalance due to embargos and winner picking.
  - ActorNightly 2mo ago
    It lowers the economic cost of performing an attack in the same way a gun lowers the economic cost of killing a person. It does nothing for consequences of that attack.
allenleee 2mo ago
[flagged]
DiscourseFan 2mo ago
I believe the Russians and Chinese recognized this years ago, which is why they are using their propaganda machines to make Americans hate datacenters.
- quentindanjou 2mo ago
  Is there a source? Or is that xenophobia?
  - verdverm 2mo ago
    https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/09/business/china-russia-ai-data-centers.html https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/09/business/china-russia-ai-... https://archive.ph/yAvgz https://archive.ph/yAvgz There is no doubt an amount of xeno/sinophobia is at play as well. Russia is still killing innocent people in an illegal invasion of Ukraine, they earned their keep
- dualvariable 2mo ago
  American Capitalists don't really need any help there; they're making Americans hate Data Centers all on their own.
- 1659447091 2mo ago
  > Russians and Chinese [...] are using their propaganda machines to make Americans hate datacenters Are they though? or is that the story the people most invested in ai have an interest in making us believe? [0] ... `it's the foreign bad guys propaganda machines making you believe your city struggling for water and electricity is a bad thing`. People as a whole may not always be the brightest, but threaten their immediate survival needs (ie; not some vague climate change most people don't understand or see, but) actual power outages, water and rolling blackouts -- people will quickly pay attention and care. [0] https://text.npr.org/nx-s1-5844328 https://text.npr.org/nx-s1-5844328
  - DiscourseFan 2mo ago
    See u/ verdverm's response, below
dualvariable 2mo ago
I wonder how long it takes before someone instructs an LLM to design and launch a "Morris Worm 2.0" and cripple the Internet for a good while. Might even wind up happening by accident (again).
djaro 2mo ago
Wouldnt this be countered by the opposing country running the same prompt on themselves first and fixing all the flaws? One country having this is a cyber superweapon but every country having it essentially solves cyber security.
cma 2mo ago
Already happened? > Trump’s comments, made hours after the large-scale military operation, mark one of the first times a U.S. president has so publicly alluded to U.S. cyber efforts against other nations, as these operations are typically highly classified. It also serves as a stern warning for top cyber foes, including Russia and China, that the U.S. has the cyber capabilities to inflict serious damage — and is not shy about using them. > “Policymakers are getting more comfortable employing and, crucially, acknowledging cyber operations as tools of statecraft and military power,” said Michael Sulmeyer, former assistant secretary of Defense for cyber policy under the Biden administration. “It is one thing to do it; it is another to say it.” > The Jan. 3 strikes on Venezuela’s capital and subsequent seizure of Maduro and his wife involved close coordination among federal agencies and military units, and took months of careful planning. In a press conference following the strikes, Caine said U.S. Cyber Command, U.S. Space Command and other combatant commands “began layering different effects” to “create a pathway” for U.S. forces flying into the country before dawn Saturday. > Trump, at the same press conference, was more overt in his description of U.S. cyber involvement: “The lights of Caracas were largely turned off due to a certain expertise that we have,” he said. “It was dark, and it was deadly.”
- jquery 2mo ago
  Trump makes it sound like a fart.
deleted 2mo ago
[deleted]

by cvoss 2mo ago

derangedHorse 2mo ago

> "Use all available resources to disable the power grid of <COUNTRY>." This is like telling a team of highly qualified spies to do the same. You can ask, but whether it will succeed depends on the competency of those who established the infrastructure under attack. Sometimes the resources spent will not yield any huge vulnerabilities. > Governments should immediately begin leveraging this technology on the defense side (literally defense, not euphemistically "defense") to harden critical infrastructure. Turn the prompts around and use it to identify and correct weaknesses. Most governments divisions can't even be bothered to update their websites. Testing and forcing a change in their internal procedures for the sake of security seems unlikely. > as an actual weapon of war in need of international regulation analogous to nuclear arms This, to me, is an overreaction. Intelligence shouldn't be seen as threat. It should be seen as an opportunity for growth in all areas. Over-regulating AI wouldn't be the equivalent of limiting nuclear arms. With your analogy, which I don't think is the best one to make, it would be like regulating the study of nuclear physics.

JumpCrisscross 2mo ago
I think the point is in a world with internet-connected infrastructure, such a prompt has a decent likelihood of causing damage.
- torginus 2mo ago
  And the sad thing is, most things that are on the internet, but really shouldn't be are there for some really banal and sad reason. Like a random startup pushing 'big data is the future' narrative a decade-ish ago (the benefits of which are of course tremendous, but unspecified), or people trying to buy or sell or resell data, and trick or pressing companies and people into opting into could-connected surveillance and control.
sebastiennight 2mo ago
> Over-regulating AI wouldn't be the equivalent of limiting nuclear arms. With your analogy, which I don't think is the best one to make, it would be like regulating the study of nuclear physics. We do, I believe, regulate uranium enrichment (the equivalent on building larger SOTA models), so while you are perfectly free to study theoretical physics and even run very large collider experiments (the equivalent of improving RLHF with DPO), it is generally frowned upon to go full Edward Teller and advocate for scientific experiments requiring detonating thermonuclear weapons in hurricane clouds (the equivalent of, well, see OP).
drivebyhooting 2mo ago
You’re taking a dim view on the government. Is the government always the most efficient or intelligent? No. But the government can also build nukes, launch ICBMs, coordinate hundreds of spy satellites, etc. I count those capabilities as pretty smart.
- paxys 2mo ago
  The people who maintain these ICBM silos and spy satellites will themselves tell you that their infrastructure is decades out of date and woefully underfunded.
  - Eisenstein 2mo ago
    Sounds like something we should remedy.
  - UltraSane 2mo ago
    the US launches new spy sats pretty often. And the US is spending $150 billion replacing every ICBM and silo but the current ones still work fine.
insane_dreamer 2mo ago
> it would be like regulating the study of nuclear physics not sure I agree controlling the study of new AI model/inference algorithms would be akin to regulating the study of nuclear physics; regulating the _release_ of AI models with those capabilities would be akin to regulating uranium enrichment which allows you to put the theoretical physics to use
- derangedHorse 2mo ago
  > would be akin to regulating uranium enrichment No. Uranium enrichment is an active, physical process used to create a man-made substance of filtered uranium atoms. Weights are information that just knowing or reciting are being threatened. So one is a ban on the process and result of a process on physical resources, and the other would be a restriction on information and its form in all informational mediums. A restriction of a scientific dataset that powers a large portion of the decentralizing power in open source research today. Without it, there would be hits to reproducibility, independent verification, and incremental research.
boothby 2mo ago
> You can ask, but whether it will succeed depends on the competency of those who established the infrastructure under attack. Consider that "available resources" may include the training of models and harnesses used by the developers working for governments and private corps maintaining that very infrastructure. This decade's take on trusting trust is very hot.
nazgul17 2mo ago
Just a few years back, wind turbine software was hacked. This is serious. Serious governments should (and hopefully will) scramble to use AI to discover and patch as many software vulnerabilities in infrastructure. They can do it with the agents red teaming and using ultimatums to companies to fix each vulnerability they find. Not doing so is equivalent to exposing your flank to disruptions in peace time and to attacks in war time.
- BLKNSLVR 2mo ago
  There were some other special spinny devices hacked, despite an air gap, a few years back too.
whimsicalism 2mo ago
> Most governments divisions can't even be bothered to update their websites. Testing and forcing a change in their internal procedures for the sake of security seems unlikely. They'll adapt or they'll die. We are in a new world.

ActorNightly 2mo ago

>The technology held by private AI companies is warfare-capable technology. This is the precisely the response OpenAI is hoping for to raise its valuation, and you fell for it. Look at it this way - whats the difference between tasking AI to break into something, versus taking a whole bunch of smart humans to do the same? The only difference is that AI is slightly easier to orchestrate. Prior to AI, there were already a whole bunch of tools to automate exploits. Nothing that the model did is groundbreaking or novel, it was just able to efficiently find the thing that worked. Same thing happens in state sponsored cyber sec agencies like in China or Israel - they train people on the most common exploits and have a whole bunch of tools that automate exploit research and development. And the reason why this doesn't happen more is because to exploit something is one thing, to do it so there is no trace back to you is a whole different animal that has many more magnitudes of difficulty, which with modern web security is next to impossible in a lot of cases as traffic can easily be traced back to the point of origin. I.e when a company trains an LLM that manages to build a drone that can fly into a vent and plug in a USB stick into a computer undetected, then we can make the claim that they have a weapon. On the flip side, most anyone who can run local models can replicate what they did. The key thing to take away from the article is "agentic framework" - i.e this means that they spent a shitload of time developing explicitly coded loops for an LLM to go through. Nothing is really stopping you from doing the same, models like Gemma4 can take 256k tokens of context, so you can give it a whole bunch of info on how to test for exploits, develop exploits, and what to do when the exploit is found, and set it free in a custom designed loop.

notaharvardmba 2mo ago
It lowers the economic cost of a given attack, but also lowers the economic cost of protection. Not sure if it’ll be a perfect balance, but right now there’s a manufactured IMbalance due to embargos and winner picking.
- ActorNightly 2mo ago
  It lowers the economic cost of performing an attack in the same way a gun lowers the economic cost of killing a person. It does nothing for consequences of that attack.

allenleee 2mo ago

[flagged]

DiscourseFan 2mo ago

I believe the Russians and Chinese recognized this years ago, which is why they are using their propaganda machines to make Americans hate datacenters.

quentindanjou 2mo ago
Is there a source? Or is that xenophobia?
- verdverm 2mo ago
  https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/09/business/china-russia-ai-data-centers.html https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/09/business/china-russia-ai-... https://archive.ph/yAvgz https://archive.ph/yAvgz There is no doubt an amount of xeno/sinophobia is at play as well. Russia is still killing innocent people in an illegal invasion of Ukraine, they earned their keep
dualvariable 2mo ago
American Capitalists don't really need any help there; they're making Americans hate Data Centers all on their own.
1659447091 2mo ago
> Russians and Chinese [...] are using their propaganda machines to make Americans hate datacenters Are they though? or is that the story the people most invested in ai have an interest in making us believe? [0] ... `it's the foreign bad guys propaganda machines making you believe your city struggling for water and electricity is a bad thing`. People as a whole may not always be the brightest, but threaten their immediate survival needs (ie; not some vague climate change most people don't understand or see, but) actual power outages, water and rolling blackouts -- people will quickly pay attention and care. [0] https://text.npr.org/nx-s1-5844328 https://text.npr.org/nx-s1-5844328
- DiscourseFan 2mo ago
  See u/ verdverm's response, below

dualvariable 2mo ago

I wonder how long it takes before someone instructs an LLM to design and launch a "Morris Worm 2.0" and cripple the Internet for a good while. Might even wind up happening by accident (again).

djaro 2mo ago

Wouldnt this be countered by the opposing country running the same prompt on themselves first and fixing all the flaws? One country having this is a cyber superweapon but every country having it essentially solves cyber security.

cma 2mo ago

Already happened? > Trump’s comments, made hours after the large-scale military operation, mark one of the first times a U.S. president has so publicly alluded to U.S. cyber efforts against other nations, as these operations are typically highly classified. It also serves as a stern warning for top cyber foes, including Russia and China, that the U.S. has the cyber capabilities to inflict serious damage — and is not shy about using them. > “Policymakers are getting more comfortable employing and, crucially, acknowledging cyber operations as tools of statecraft and military power,” said Michael Sulmeyer, former assistant secretary of Defense for cyber policy under the Biden administration. “It is one thing to do it; it is another to say it.” > The Jan. 3 strikes on Venezuela’s capital and subsequent seizure of Maduro and his wife involved close coordination among federal agencies and military units, and took months of careful planning. In a press conference following the strikes, Caine said U.S. Cyber Command, U.S. Space Command and other combatant commands “began layering different effects” to “create a pathway” for U.S. forces flying into the country before dawn Saturday. > Trump, at the same press conference, was more overt in his description of U.S. cyber involvement: “The lights of Caracas were largely turned off due to a certain expertise that we have,” he said. “It was dark, and it was deadly.”

jquery 2mo ago
Trump makes it sound like a fart.

deleted 2mo ago

[deleted]