Eerie Insouciance.
The Uber of advanced AI training.
“It’s the first thing I read every morning.” — Rob Manfred, Commissioner, Major League Baseball.
1. We keep a list of stories about the stories that we think will be this decade’s most important. The list includes: The pandemic, Russia’s war on Ukraine, President Trump’s election in 2024, the third Gulf War, AlphaFold…you get the idea.
There’s one “emerging” story that has the potential for becoming the most important financial and cybersecurity story of the 2020s. That story is about an AI model called Mythos:
One balmy February evening in Bali, Nicholas Carlini stepped away between events at a wedding, opened his laptop, and set out to do some damage. Anthropic PBC had just made a new artificial intelligence model, called Mythos, available for internal review, and Carlini — a well-known AI researcher — intended to see what kind of trouble it could cause.
Anthropic pays Carlini to stress-test its AI models to see whether hackers could leverage them for espionage, theft or sabotage. From Bali, where Carlini and his wife were attending an Indian wedding, he was staggered at what the model could do.
Within hours Carlini found numerous techniques to infiltrate systems used around the world. Once Carlini was back in Anthropic’s downtown San Francisco office, he discovered Mythos was able to autonomously create powerful break-in tools, including against Linux, the open-source code that underpins most of modern computing.
Mythos orchestrated the digital equivalent of a bank robbery: getting past security protocols and through the front door of networks, and breaking into digital vaults that gave it access to online treasures. AI had picked locks, but now it could pull off an entire heist.
