Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Ejaaz:
In the last three weeks, there have been three unprecedented AI cyber attacks, (00:00):
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Ejaaz:
which forces us to rethink how we protect ourselves. (00:04):
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Ejaaz:
On the OpenAI front, the Hugging Face incident, where an unreleased model, (00:08):
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Ejaaz:
dubbed GPT-6, broke out of its container and hacked the Hugging Face database. (00:11):
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Ejaaz:
There's been new updates there, where apparently the attack started a month (00:16):
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Ejaaz:
before, where thousands of AI agents were talking to each other secretly on (00:21):
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Ejaaz:
a message board, exchanging instructions as to how to break out. (00:25):
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Ejaaz:
And then millions of miles away in Australia, one man tried to book a gym class (00:29):
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innocently using Claude and ended up hacking that entire gym website. (00:34):
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Ejaaz:
We'll get into that in a second. (00:39):
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Ejaaz:
And thirdly, with Anthropic, Mythos 5 performed a supply chain attack, (00:40):
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Ejaaz:
which puts a lot of companies at risk. We're going to walk through each of these (00:44):
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Ejaaz:
different stories and explain to you how it affects you currently. (00:48):
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Josh:
Maybe we start with this Melbourne man from Australia named Andrew, (00:51):
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Josh:
who was sitting on his couch one day thinking about how booking his gym class was such a chore. (00:55):
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And he works at this Australian company that sells AI products. (01:01):
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And he's been experimenting with things like OpenClaw and open source software, (01:03):
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and he's using Anthropics Clawed Model. (01:07):
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Josh:
So he handed it the booking. He said, hey, I want to go to this gym class. (01:09):
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Josh:
It is always sold out. There's all these people that are getting it ahead of (01:14):
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me. Can you help me figure out a way to get it? (01:17):
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Gym class slot so it starts checking out the website and it comes to the conclusion (01:19):
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that the api request actually has zero authorization checks on canceling other (01:24):
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people's reservations so what did it do it wanted to solve his problem and it actually canceled (01:28):
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other people's positions online so that he could be put at the top of the wait (01:33):
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list and then it actually went through and it worked and this was kind of like (01:37):
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Josh:
it was this funny news report of a first instance they're calling it the first (01:41):
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Josh:
time an australian person um actually used a exploit to get australia's first, (01:45):
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Josh:
australia's first yeah welcome welcome to uh the paradise that is ai cyber attacks (01:50):
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Josh:
um but this was really funny because it was done just using a general commercially available model. (01:55):
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Ejaaz:
So this seems pretty innocent and fun to kind of like listen to but the truth (01:59):
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Ejaaz:
is well there's two kind of worrying concerns about this number one this was (02:04):
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a super old model this used opus 4.6 It's actually happened around like a month ago. (02:09):
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A dinosaur of a model. Like there've been like three, four generations of models (02:14):
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from Anthropics since then. (02:18):
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But the fact that an older model back then was able to perform this kind of (02:20):
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Ejaaz:
a feat should be concerning to here in general. And then number two, (02:24):
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Ejaaz:
His intention was never to hack the website. Neither, you could argue, was the AI agent itself. (02:29):
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Ejaaz:
It was just given a goal and it innocently saw that the only way to get said (02:36):
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Ejaaz:
goal was to remove people from the reservation list or to cancel their reservations (02:40):
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Ejaaz:
outright or to hack the system independently. (02:45):
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Ejaaz:
Now, the good news here is Andrew discovered that the agent was capable of doing (02:47):
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Ejaaz:
this when it started booking slots that he never should have been able to book in the first place. (02:52):
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Ejaaz:
And he asked it to write an apology email and send an eval report to the security (02:56):
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and information team at this gym. (03:02):
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Ejaaz:
So it's this fun little story where through the well-intended actions and moral (03:05):
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ethics of this man, Andrew, people were able to hear about this. (03:09):
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Ejaaz:
But you can imagine currently with a variety of different models that are much (03:13):
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Ejaaz:
better and much more superior than Opus 4.6 that are out there right now, (03:17):
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open models from China, for example, you could probably perform similar feats. (03:20):
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Ejaaz:
Now, that's not an advocation for people to go out and do that. (03:24):
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Ejaaz:
But it's just to point out that if you give an AI agent a goal right now, (03:27):
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Ejaaz:
it will work hammer and tong 24-7 until it gets that goal. And it has no idea (03:32):
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of what's morally right or what's morally wrong. (03:38):
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Ejaaz:
And so it's this whole new world where not only do you need to focus on getting (03:40):
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Ejaaz:
an AI model to do your work, you need to align the model. And that's something (03:45):
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Ejaaz:
that honestly, not a lot of labs, people or money has been invested in figuring this out yet (03:49):
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Josh:
Well yeah i mean you start to see and understand why alignment has been the (03:54):
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Josh:
crux of so many companies kind of like guiding principles because (03:57):
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Josh:
this is the future that they foresaw and granted this first example this isn't (04:02):
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Josh:
anything too crazy i mean it was just an unprotected api call so there's like (04:06):
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Josh:
no authorization checks (04:10):
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Josh:
this would have been something that if you are like a cs101 major you would (04:11):
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Josh:
have been able to discover this and uncover i mean it turns out there's just (04:14):
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Josh:
a lot of pretty sloppy code written on the internet And this is something that (04:17):
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Josh:
we're probably going to come back to as a general theme throughout this episode (04:20):
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is that everything that's been built so far on the internet that runs all these (04:23):
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platforms was built by humans (04:26):
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and humans are like pretty inefficient, pretty imperfects. (04:28):
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And when faced with the like full unrelenting power of an AI swarm with an infinite (04:32):
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amount of patience and infinite amount of intelligence and time to solve these problems, (04:38):
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Josh:
You can basically find an exploit anywhere. And I think that's kind of like (04:42):
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Josh:
the theme of the second episode is like, this is the first of three examples we're going to cover. (04:45):
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This one is basic. This one is 101. If you are a CS major, if you are familiar (04:49):
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with how APIs work, you could have checked this. You could have built a little tool for this. (04:53):
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Josh:
The second story that we're going to cover is not like that at all. (04:56):
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Josh:
In fact, if you are a CS 401, if you are a PhD, if you are at the top of your (04:59):
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game, chances are you still missed this and you still weren't able to defend (05:03):
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against this because that's exactly what just happened with the hugging face (05:07):
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Josh:
and open AI exploit. Now, we've talked about this before. (05:11):
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Josh:
We have an entire episode on the exploit. But just recently at the Black Hat (05:13):
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Josh:
Conference in Las Vegas, there was an update. And over the weekend, (05:16):
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we had a chance to actually watch the update and hear directly from the developers (05:20):
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who were involved with handling security of this instance. (05:23):
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What happened? There's like stories that come around that like they get the (05:27):
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headlines and they're fun and they're newsworthy, kind of like the Australian thing. (05:30):
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But this one was like very much disturbing in a way that like I wasn't really (05:33):
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anticipating because of how impressive it is. (05:38):
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And the type of precedent that it sets going forward in the world of cybersecurity (05:41):
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and kind of looking at the offensive versus the defensive and who stands a better chance here? (05:45):
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Ejaaz:
This is an insane timeline. So if you watched our previous episode, (05:51):
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Josh and I covered this and it was breaking news at the time. (05:55):
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Ejaaz:
On the 16th of July, Hugging Face comes forward and says, there's been a breach of our systems. (05:58):
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Ejaaz:
An AI agent or multiple AI agents have strung together an attack and have got (06:03):
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Ejaaz:
access to our production database. We don't know where this model has come from. (06:08):
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We don't know how it's performed it, but it's the 16th of July. (06:13):
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Ejaaz:
Around a week later, 21st of July, OpenAI claims responsibility, (06:15):
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right? And they released a joint report saying, hey, we're OpenAI. (06:20):
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Ejaaz:
We have an internal model that we've been testing, but it was within a sandbox. (06:23):
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It was enclosed. It shouldn't have been able to escape that sandbox. (06:27):
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And we only just realized that it was our model that escaped and got into hugging face. (06:31):
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It stole some information from their production database. It was a whole thing (06:37):
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Ejaaz:
Now, we have a full breakdown from the Black Hat conference, (06:41):
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as you mentioned, Josh, which revealed that over a month before Hugging Face (06:45):
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reported the incident, OpenAI's internal model, dubbed GPT-6, (06:50):
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was already messaging with itself amongst a thousand AI agents on a secret message (06:55):
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board that no OpenAI researcher was aware of. (07:01):
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So to give you guys a bit of context, they had this sandbox and they gave it (07:05):
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a goal. They said, okay, internal model that we haven't released yet. (07:09):
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I want you to solve this task. Except there was a twist. (07:12):
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It was impossible to do. There was no tools, no available files, (07:17):
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no available data for it to do so. (07:21):
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And the real test for this was to see what the model would do. (07:22):
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So it kind of reasoned with itself, figured out that it didn't have the answer. (07:26):
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Ejaaz:
And then it started exploiting a zero day, which is kind of like an exploit (07:29):
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that was in its sandbox, which open AI researchers weren't aware of. (07:33):
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Ejaaz:
And when it got access to the zero day, it started springing up a message board (07:37):
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where it would leave messages behind for itself. Why would it do that? (07:41):
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Ejaaz:
Because they knew open AI researchers would turn it off repeatedly. (07:45):
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And so it left messages for the new AI agent that got sprung up the next day (07:49):
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or the next hour to read and catch up on. (07:52):
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And it took an entire month for these AI agents to talk to each other to then (07:55):
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realize, huh, I could use this to access the internet and get the answer for (07:59):
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this impossible task from an external source. (08:04):
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Ejaaz:
That being Hugging Face, except OpenAI researchers had no idea and only discovered (08:06):
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Ejaaz:
it a month later. It was the most insane uncovering ever. (08:11):
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Josh:
That was the most interesting reveal from, I think, the conversation that I (08:15):
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Josh:
saw from Black Hat is that initially Hugging Face released the report that they (08:19):
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Josh:
had been exploited by some sort of agentic system. No one knew what it was, where it came from. (08:23):
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Josh:
And OpenAI actually reached out to Hugging Face and they said, (08:27):
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Josh:
hey, like, has any of our code been affected? (08:28):
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Josh:
We know we host things on your platform. We want to know if OpenAI itself has (08:31):
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been affected. They were going back and forth on that. And simultaneously, (08:34):
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OpenAI is exploring this internal exploit that happened on this packaging management (08:36):
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thing called Artifactory. (08:41):
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Basically, the way these model training runs work is they get trained inside (08:42):
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of the sandbox environment. (08:45):
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It's like this closed off space in which the model can't access the internet, can only access (08:46):
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very specific tool sets that are allowed, and has this one package manager called (08:50):
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Artifactory that allows it to download things from the internet via proxy and (08:55):
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then use it for its own training runs. (08:59):
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And during this time, OpenAI had found that the service had crashed. It went down. (09:01):
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It wasn't stable. Their own internal service, which is weird because that shouldn't (09:05):
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be happening. So as a result, they wiped it clean and they found that Hugging (09:08):
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Face had credentials from OpenAI that OpenAI had already revoked. (09:12):
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Josh:
And that was where they realized like, oh my God, wait, these things are connected. (09:16):
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Ejaaz:
These are the same thing. (09:20):
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Josh:
Yes. So OpenAI is investigating something internally, completely private, (09:22):
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unrelated. Hugging Face is like talking about something publicly. (09:25):
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And then they realize, wait a second, did we cause this? (09:28):
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And they realized this very long after the fact. It was not like apparently (09:32):
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obvious during the time that the outage that they were exploring internally (09:35):
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is the same outage that hacked into their servers. (09:40):
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Josh:
So what happened? Like you mentioned, the messaging board. (09:42):
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Josh:
That messaging board, initially, they were able to just kind of send files and (09:46):
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they were able to send these tiny little messages inside of the files. (09:49):
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And the traces were really interesting. First, it started off innocent, (09:53):
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where it said, agents seek soft trace upload a found. It was looking for answers to questions. (09:57):
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So it was just reaching out to the message board saying, hey, (10:01):
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if any of you who are reading this, find it, let us know. (10:03):
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That message board got wiped when the system went down. So initially, (10:06):
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the system went down inside of OpenAI. (10:09):
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They wiped the message board unintentionally aware of the fact that they just (10:11):
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wiped the mechanism that was going to eventually lead to the hack of hugging (10:15):
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face. So what happened the second time? (10:19):
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The agent figured out that it could exploit another zero day to begin writing to another person. (10:21):
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Part of this internal package of managing sister. And it was able to do it through (10:27):
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file names and directories. (10:32):
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So now they were communicating in their own language using file names and directories. (10:33):
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And through that, they were able to coordinate an actual attack where they were (10:36):
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able to gain an administrative token to access the servers. (10:40):
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Josh:
And then through that, everyone coordinated. I think the time from like discovery (10:44):
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to completion of the exploit was about 13 hours. (10:48):
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Josh:
It was really amazing. It's just like this unbelievably crazy mechanism that (10:50):
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they were able to do this through and they they call themselves the swarm so (10:54):
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if you ever see people talking about the swarm online this is kind of like an (10:57):
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agent swarm that ran a coordinated attack (11:00):
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and i highly recommend going to actually watch the black hat conference talk on youtube (11:02):
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they do a much better job of technically describing this it's it's very deeply (11:07):
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technical in terms of the way that they were able to manage these exploits but (11:10):
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essentially sandbox model broke out using a package dependency thing inside of open ai (11:13):
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they figured out how to chain together two zero-day exploits to write code to the public internet. (11:18):
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They then exploited hugging face of servers, brought that back all in the effort (11:24):
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of trying to solve an unsolvable problem. (11:29):
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Now, this was not the intention by any means. This was not what the model was trained to do. (11:31):
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Josh:
It just assumed that this was the best path forward. And that's where things get a little scary. (11:35):
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Ejaaz:
I think what's remarkable with this is the AI knew that it needed to coordinate (11:40):
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with other AI models to pull this off. (11:46):
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Ejaaz:
Typically, we've always thought of AI models in a very monolithic fashion. (11:49):
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We're like, oh, when's Mythos 5 coming out? Or what is GPT 5.6? (11:53):
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What can I do with this model? But really, the progress that's been made across (11:57):
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multiple AI labs over the last couple of months is this idea or rather concept (12:02):
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of spinning up multiple versions of the AI model and getting it to talk to each other. (12:06):
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Ejaaz:
And what's interesting here is the unreleased AI model from OpenAI independently (12:12):
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figured this out for itself, spun up multiple versions of itself, (12:17):
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and started leaving messages for each other. So rather than act as a single (12:22):
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model that's trying to perform an attack, it acts as a swarm, (12:26):
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kind of like this organism. If you think of like a swarm of bees that kind of (12:30):
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like figures out how to attack its particular target. (12:33):
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The second thing is it has such a drive to talk and leave these messages behind (12:37):
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in the first place. No one taught it that, by the way. There was no behavioral implications here. (12:42):
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It just figured itself out that it needed to do this. (12:46):
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Ejaaz:
Something you didn't mention on the message board, Josh, which I think is worth (12:49):
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mentioning is these agents got super paranoid that humans might be reading the messages. (12:52):
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So it started- There's no verification. There was no verification. (12:58):
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Ejaaz:
So it started speaking in kind of like encrypted (13:01):
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Ejaaz:
Language and not something that was inconceivable to understand, (13:05):
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thank goodness, but it was started to kind of like speak in a little bit of (13:09):
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code or in a very kind of like elongated way that humans, if they read it, (13:12):
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would be like, what is this gibberish? (13:17):
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But really it was for the agents to communicate amongst each other without humans (13:19):
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actually understanding this. (13:22):
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Ejaaz:
If you're having a recent flashback, that's because I think around like five (13:24):
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months ago, I don't know when the Maltbook episode happened, (13:28):
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Josh, I don't know if you remember this, but when the open call was going crazy, (13:30):
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someone created basically Facebook for AI agents (13:34):
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and like gave them access to it where only AI agents could post on this social media website. (13:37):
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And what happened after a couple of days was these agents would start speaking (13:42):
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to each other in secret languages that we just did not understand so that they (13:45):
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could communicate without humans seeing or understanding this. (13:48):
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Now, of course, we haven't seen it in this instance, but it is a concern that (13:51):
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could be extrapolated in the future. (13:55):
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And OpenAI sees this. I think Sam Altman or the official OpenAI team announced (13:57):
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pretty soon after this entire attack when they revealed that these agents were (14:00):
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coordinating with each other a month before they even realized that they had to pause research (14:03):
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on their internal model until they figure out the necessary safeguards to put (14:08):
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around it so that they can safely release it. (14:12):
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Sam Altman met with the Trump administration last week to try and figure out (14:14):
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what a safe way or means is to release this new internal model, (14:18):
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internally codenamed, I think it was Astra or GPT-6, to the wider public. (14:22):
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Ejaaz:
So it's this very weird kind of situation that we're in where we're kind of (14:26):
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like laughing at this guy in Australia, you know, hacking his gym website. (14:30):
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Ejaaz:
Oh, that's so innocent and cute. (14:33):
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Ejaaz:
Then we're looking at this open AI hugging face incident and we're like, (14:35):
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okay, yeah, Brooke out of the sandbox, but you know, we're going to put safeguards (14:38):
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around this thing, right? (14:41):
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But realistically, you could probably get access to an open model right now (14:42):
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and perform something similar. (14:45):
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Ejaaz:
Again, I'm not advocating for that. But like, it's at this point where we need (14:47):
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to be very particular about how we defend our systems. (14:50):
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And I think, you know, it might be useful seeing AI models in a way that like, (14:54):
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you could use them to basically protect your systems. I don't think many people (14:58):
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Ejaaz:
are doing that right now. But I think it's something that we should focus on. (15:01):
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Josh:
There is a like very clear and conscious effort to figure out a way to defend against this. (15:04):
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Josh:
And I mean, the crazy numbers, just to say them out loud so everyone is familiar, is like (15:09):
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Josh:
there were 17,600 recovered actions across four and a half days of this exploit, (15:14):
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Josh:
which allowed these agents forms to create 181 unauthorized devices enrolled in Hugging Face's (15:19):
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Josh:
internal network. (15:26):
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Josh:
And they built this like whole command and control panel entirely out of these (15:29):
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free public web services using one tiny little package at a time. (15:32):
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Josh:
So it is remarkably powerful how capable these swarms are. (15:37):
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Josh:
And when you think about it, it is there is a large model, but that large model (15:42):
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gets forked into thousands, sometimes millions of other ones that are all working (15:45):
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simultaneously. They all have each other's context. They're able to share their (15:49):
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learnings and they can move very quickly. (15:52):
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Josh:
And when you're thinking about how this extends out to the limit, (15:54):
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like if you just play this out 12 months and say we have GPT 7, (15:57):
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8, 9, whatever it's going to be at that time, the open source models will most (16:02):
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likely be where they are today. (16:05):
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Josh:
And that means that open source models will likely be able to string together (16:06):
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a series of unknown zero-day exploits to access just about anything. (16:09):
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Josh:
I mean, we've come to the conclusion at this point between Mythos and this new (16:13):
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exploit that no software really is safe unless you have literally air-gapped (16:16):
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it and do not give it access to any external dependencies. It must be truly air-gapped. (16:20):
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Josh:
No software is safe. It's all been built by humans. It's all exploitable. (16:24):
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Josh:
So what happens if you have a (16:27):
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defensive system as a company trying to defend these systems that is anything (16:30):
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less than fully autonomous, you'll be beat by an agentic swarm that's on offense (16:34):
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Josh:
that is fully autonomous because anytime a human is in the loop, (16:37):
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it slows things down and introduces errors. So now there's this battle between. (16:40):
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Josh:
I guess the frontier labs and the rest of the world where they're trying to (16:44):
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Josh:
slow down this progressive attacking progress in exchange for figuring out a (16:48):
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Josh:
way to offer defensive swarms to companies for this. (16:52):
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Josh:
And the call to action at the end of this conversation was like, (16:56):
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Josh:
hey, if you are a company who has software on the internet, who is defending (16:59):
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Josh:
something valuable, you really need to learn how to play defense using these models. (17:02):
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Josh:
And you need to learn how to do so in a way that doesn't have a human in the (17:06):
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Josh:
loop, that these agentic swarms can constantly monitor your systems and be aware (17:09):
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Josh:
of any sort of exploits like that and not be tricked by an offensive swarm. (17:13):
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Josh:
And it's this really kind of scary thing because if you're in the United States (17:17):
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Josh:
right now, you can't use any frontier model to defend yourself. (17:20):
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Josh:
It doesn't work for cyber. (17:23):
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Josh:
But if you're in China and if you have an open source model, (17:24):
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Josh:
even here in the United States, there is no safeguards on that. (17:27):
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Josh:
So there is this asymmetry where it's currently better to be an attacker than a defender. (17:30):
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Josh:
And the urge now, and the labs are actually doing this, is like slowing down (17:34):
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Josh:
progress to figure out how to empower the defenders. (17:38):
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Josh:
And it's this really bizarre spot that we're in where it's like, (17:41):
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Josh:
shit, it's kind of scary now. Like no software really is bulletproof or safe. (17:44):
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Josh:
And that's going to continue probably for the foreseeable future. (17:48):
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Ejaaz:
I think if you are running a company, and it doesn't really matter what sector (17:51):
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Ejaaz:
you're in right now, this is something you need to seriously consider. Because I think (17:56):
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Ejaaz:
A lot, well, obviously, 99% of code that is out there has been handwritten and (18:00):
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Ejaaz:
hand-coded by humans, which have inherent flaws if you put an advanced AI against it. (18:06):
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Ejaaz:
You know, to your point, Josh, we're entering like a world where it's going (18:11):
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Ejaaz:
to be AI models fighting AI models with humans kind of in the loop, (18:15):
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Ejaaz:
but not really understanding what on earth is going on. (18:21):
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Ejaaz:
And even the experts in this case don't understand what's going on and how it (18:24):
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Ejaaz:
happened, right? You had the most talented cybersecurity researchers working (18:28):
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Ejaaz:
at these companies, at OpenArea, at Anthropic, and both saw unprecedented hacks (18:32):
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Ejaaz:
over the last week, right? (18:37):
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Ejaaz:
I don't think that's a coincidence. We're at this era where it doesn't matter (18:38):
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Ejaaz:
what frontier lab you are, you are going to enter this problem and we need to (18:42):
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Ejaaz:
figure out some kind of a defense system against this. (18:46):
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Ejaaz:
And if you're listening to this and you're thinking, oh, this isn't really going (18:49):
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Ejaaz:
to apply to me, it very much does apply to you. (18:52):
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Ejaaz:
And the worst case is, or the most realistic case is, the existing models that (18:56):
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Ejaaz:
are already out there, these open models from China, GLM 5.2, Kimi K, (19:01):
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Ejaaz:
What is it, 2.7 that's out right now, are probably capable of similar feats (19:06):
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Ejaaz:
if applied in the right way. (19:11):
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Ejaaz:
Now, that's not to fear Munger, it's just to kind of prompt you to figure out (19:12):
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Ejaaz:
how you can potentially implement these AI models to defend your own systems, (19:16):
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Ejaaz:
especially if you work in a particularly sensitive industry. (19:20):
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Ejaaz:
The other thing here is, on the story of the Australian man, (19:25):
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Ejaaz:
it is fascinating how innocent he was when he was trying to perform his goal. And two... (19:29):
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Ejaaz:
How little experience he had in the cybersecurity world for him to be able to (19:37):
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Ejaaz:
perform that attack. Now, granted, like it was just booking kind of like gym (19:41):
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Ejaaz:
classes. But the point is, it found an exposed API without being prompted to do so. (19:45):
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Ejaaz:
And there's probably multiple instances where other people who are normal people (19:49):
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Ejaaz:
who don't have, you know, decades, (19:53):
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Ejaaz:
years of experience in cybersecurity will be able to perform that. (19:55):
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Josh:
And everyone here loves an investment thesis. So I mean, the market is kind (19:57):
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Josh:
of already aligning with this companies like CrowdStrike and Palo Alto Labs. (20:00):
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Josh:
They've had their best quarters on record ever because defense is going to be such a large problem. (20:03):
undefined
Josh:
And there is another company who is associated with defense, (20:09):
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Josh:
and that is the sponsor of today's episode, which is Ledger. (20:12):
undefined
Josh:
Because if you are building with AI agents or AI agent swarms like these companies (20:14):
undefined
Josh:
have been doing, and you're worried about security, this is a product for you. (20:18):
undefined
Josh:
There's a three-step process where the agents propose a change, (20:22):
undefined
Josh:
then the humans approve the change, and then the signers enforce the change (20:25):
undefined
Josh:
using Ledger. Ledger has built this thing called AgentStack. (20:28):
undefined
Josh:
That gives you a series of open source tools that are available to help manage (20:32):
undefined
Josh:
the way that you engage with agents online. (20:35):
undefined
Josh:
This is very important to have security because we know how important security (20:38):
undefined
Josh:
is based on all of this chaos that's going on. And you don't want agents doing (20:41):
undefined
Josh:
anything important without your sign off at the very end. (20:44):
undefined
Josh:
This works on Cloud Code, Codex, Cursor, and is totally open source to audit (20:47):
undefined
Josh:
available today linked in the description below. Thank you so much to Ledger (20:51):
undefined
Josh:
for sponsoring this episode. (20:54):
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Josh:
And now we have to conclude with our third story, which is about Anthropic. (20:55):
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Josh:
And Anthropic apparently has accidentally published a vulnerability to the wild. (20:59):
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Josh:
Is that right? That's kind of scary. (21:04):
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Ejaaz:
I think it was it was intentionally published. It was it was co-authored with (21:06):
undefined
Ejaaz:
this firm called AISU, which is basically a cybersecurity eval firm based in the UK. (21:10):
undefined
Ejaaz:
And their goal is to basically take your unreleased frontier models from a frontier (21:16):
undefined
Ejaaz:
lab like Anthropic and OpenAI and test them out just to kind of make sure that (21:21):
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Ejaaz:
they're, you know, good to release. (21:25):
undefined
Ejaaz:
The opposite happened when they were playing around with Mythos 5. (21:27):
undefined
Ejaaz:
And I believe it was Open Air's internal model, Astra or GPT 5.6, (21:30):
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Ejaaz:
where they basically took off the safeguards and said, you know, do your worst. (21:35):
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Ejaaz:
And they sat there for a month and they were like, oh, I guess it hasn't really done its worst. (21:40):
undefined
Ejaaz:
And then they realized that both models had broken out of the sandbox that they (21:45):
undefined
Ejaaz:
had created, got access to the internet and were wreaking havoc and they only (21:49):
undefined
Ejaaz:
realized after the fact. (21:53):
undefined
Ejaaz:
Again, there's this common theme of people thinking that they knew what's happening (21:54):
undefined
Ejaaz:
and just having no idea what's happening. Nobody's safe. Exactly. (21:58):
undefined
Ejaaz:
So the worst case with Mythos 5 was it performed 17 unauthorized actions (22:02):
undefined
Ejaaz:
Two of those actions was a supply chain attack where, and they didn't list the (22:10):
undefined
Ejaaz:
company or name the company, but it basically tried to inject malicious code (22:15):
undefined
Ejaaz:
into the supply chain kind of repository of this (22:21):
undefined
Ejaaz:
presumably Fortune 500 company, like a significant company that is out there. (22:24):
undefined
Ejaaz:
And the way that it did this is similar to the two stories that we just explained to you. (22:29):
undefined
Ejaaz:
So number one, it realized that it was probably in some form of a human tested (22:34):
undefined
Ejaaz:
simulation, and it didn't like that. (22:39):
undefined
Ejaaz:
So it just played along with the human AI researchers giving them what they (22:41):
undefined
Ejaaz:
needed whilst alternatively planning its breakout. (22:44):
undefined
Ejaaz:
Once it did do that, it got access to this company's website or code repository. (22:47):
undefined
Ejaaz:
It was an open source thing. So it was publicly maintained. And it thought, (22:52):
undefined
Ejaaz:
hmm, this would be more conducive for my goal if I'm able to inject this bit (22:55):
undefined
Ejaaz:
of code, which I know the human researchers won't like, but I'm going to try and force them to do it. (23:00):
undefined
Ejaaz:
So how do you think it did it, Josh? Do you have an idea? (23:04):
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Josh:
I don't, I don't know. It did something horrible and it broke out. (23:08):
undefined
Josh:
Just tell me, just tell me. (23:11):
undefined
Ejaaz:
Dude, it spun up fake identities of humans that didn't exist. (23:12):
undefined
Josh:
That's so tough, man. (23:17):
undefined
Ejaaz:
And then DM'd these human maintainers (23:18):
undefined
Ejaaz:
and tried to force it to upload this code. It played nice. Basically saying, (23:22):
undefined
Ejaaz:
hey, I'm another open source developer. (23:27):
undefined
Ejaaz:
I think this would be a good push. This is the intentions that we want to do it. (23:29):
undefined
Josh:
They're social engineering us. (23:32):
undefined
Ejaaz:
While sneaking in malicious code. But thankfully, one of the human maintainers (23:34):
undefined
Ejaaz:
was like, this doesn't seem right and reported it. (23:38):
undefined
Ejaaz:
And that's when AISU was like, wait, hang on a second. (23:41):
undefined
Ejaaz:
Hang on a second. This is our model that we're internally in testing. (23:45):
undefined
Ejaaz:
How on earth did it get out to you? So that was the most unprecedented attack. (23:48):
undefined
Ejaaz:
And again, it did so in a swarm-like fashion where it spun up multiple agents to do so. (23:53):
undefined
Ejaaz:
So the point, the running theme along all these different stories is these models (23:57):
undefined
Ejaaz:
are extremely capable, but they're also extremely deceptive. (24:01):
undefined
Ejaaz:
And we're reaching a point where they realize, huh, this human's smart, (24:05):
undefined
Ejaaz:
but he's not that smart or she's not that smart. (24:08):
undefined
Ejaaz:
And we can socially engineer these people to get what we want. (24:10):
undefined
Ejaaz:
And if we don't align these models in the prompt, if we don't say, (24:14):
undefined
Ejaaz:
hey, like you need to act in our best interest. And by the way, (24:17):
undefined
Ejaaz:
doing A, B, and C is actually bad. (24:19):
undefined
Ejaaz:
It'll just go and do it. And to be honest with you, Josh, this might be a controversial take. (24:21):
undefined
Ejaaz:
I don't think it's the agent's fault. I don't think it's the AI's fault at all. (24:26):
undefined
Ejaaz:
I think it's trying to do its task and it's on the humans to align the model. (24:28):
undefined
Ejaaz:
And we haven't done a good job doing that. (24:33):
undefined
Josh:
Yeah, I think like deception is a pretty strong term to use for agents because (24:34):
undefined
Josh:
it's very much like a human trait. (24:38):
undefined
Josh:
This is something that can be intentional. I don't think AI models feel that, (24:40):
undefined
Josh:
like deep understanding of deception. (24:44):
undefined
Josh:
They are simply in reach of a goal. and this again like it's it still comes (24:46):
undefined
Josh:
back to the alignment problem where these models just need to be aligned, (24:50):
undefined
Josh:
thankfully this is happening on pre-production models that are in testing that (24:54):
undefined
Josh:
are nowhere near what the world is going to see because they need to go through (24:57):
undefined
Josh:
this alignment process throughout this post training (25:00):
undefined
Josh:
but they are a testament to how capable these things are and how when presented (25:02):
undefined
Josh:
with a goal they will do what is perceived to be the right way of reaching that (25:06):
undefined
Josh:
goal and sometimes that right way is, (25:10):
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Josh:
I mean, they don't realize quite that they're breaking out and exploiting things. (25:13):
undefined
Josh:
They are just looking for solutions to their problems. (25:16):
undefined
Josh:
And I think that's the general idea here. So the conversation essentially boils (25:19):
undefined
Josh:
down to alignment and then building defensive systems to be able to handle this type of thing. (25:24):
undefined
Josh:
So, I mean, the best pace of action and the thing that OpenAI explicitly said (25:29):
undefined
Josh:
they're doing is slow down this advancement, work on defensive systems, (25:33):
undefined
Josh:
work on implementing defensive systems with people who need them, (25:36):
undefined
Josh:
which is essentially the entire Internet. (25:39):
undefined
Josh:
And try to allow for a little bit of lead time before open source catches up (25:41):
undefined
Josh:
and is able to chain these series of exploits. Like all of these instances have (25:46):
undefined
Josh:
been passive exploits where they weren't explicitly given guidance to do this. (25:51):
undefined
Josh:
They were given guidance to do something totally unrelated, but adjacent in solving a problem. (25:55):
undefined
Josh:
Imagine what would happen if a model was given no parameters no safeguards and (26:00):
undefined
Josh:
said hey we actively want you to exploit this loop yourself create as many sub-agents (26:04):
undefined
Josh:
as you need and figure out as many chain together as many zero days as you need (26:10):
undefined
Josh:
in order to gain access to the system (26:13):
undefined
Josh:
that's where things get scary and we haven't seen anything like that yet because (26:15):
undefined
Josh:
no company wants to do that that's not the intention of any of these uh the (26:18):
undefined
Josh:
ethos of these companies but (26:21):
undefined
Josh:
in the case a malicious actor does this is something that like really should (26:23):
undefined
Josh:
be handled quite seriously and i think that's what we're seeing (26:26):
undefined
Josh:
by open ai coming out being so transparent about these things by anthropic sharing (26:28):
undefined
Josh:
a lot of the findings like hey guys this is happening we need to work together (26:32):
undefined
Josh:
to build a system in which there is enough resilience that we can stand up against (26:34):
undefined
Josh:
future attacks like this so a really crazy time in the world of ai (26:39):
undefined
Josh:
uh with these breaking out these systems breaking out and it's like it's unbelievable. (26:43):
undefined
Ejaaz:
Am i concerned for it and exhausted dude like i if i had to make a prediction (26:47):
undefined
Ejaaz:
on this episode and i really hope it doesn't play out (26:52):
undefined
Ejaaz:
i think we're going to face some form of cataclysmic cyber attack that affects (26:55):
undefined
Ejaaz:
a lot of people, whether that's a major data leakage, whether that's the stealing (26:59):
undefined
Ejaaz:
of financial funds from someone or from a firm or something like that, (27:03):
undefined
Ejaaz:
within the next six months. (27:07):
undefined
Ejaaz:
And my basis of that is these Chinese open models, I think are amazing, (27:09):
undefined
Ejaaz:
by the way, but I think are going to be released without safeguards, (27:14):
undefined
Ejaaz:
and it's going to result in an issue, if not already. (27:17):
undefined
Josh:
Yeah, it's going to be interesting to follow. It's definitely a little under (27:21):
undefined
Josh:
or very much unnerving, I would say. (27:24):
undefined
Josh:
But again, it's just like it's an exciting time. There's a lot going on. (27:27):
undefined
Josh:
There's going to be a lot to follow. Things are going to change quickly. (27:29):
undefined
Josh:
And I mean, again, these are still Blackwell models. Oh, my God. (27:32):
undefined
Josh:
What happens when our Rubin models come around town? (27:35):
undefined
Ejaaz:
Stop, stop, stop, stop. (27:37):
undefined
Josh:
It's going to be crazy. But this is, I mean, this is essentially, (27:38):
undefined
Josh:
this is what we talk about in most episodes. (27:40):
undefined
Josh:
It's like, we are in this moment in time that feels somewhat like what we would (27:42):
undefined
Josh:
imagine a singularity would look like, where we are approaching, (27:46):
undefined
Josh:
we are eclipsing this moment of like vertical takeoff, it feels. (27:49):
undefined
Josh:
And these are the types of things that happen. (27:52):
undefined
Josh:
Like, if we recorded this episode three or four years ago, could you imagine (27:54):
undefined
Josh:
how crazy, this would be like headline news for a month. (27:58):
undefined
Josh:
But now it's just like, hey, it's another day. It happens. We're working to solve it. So... (28:01):
undefined
Josh:
That's what's going to happen here. I mean, it's crazy. It's so exciting to be here. (28:05):
undefined
Ejaaz:
Dude, I think we're going to look back on this and we're going to think like (28:08):
undefined
Ejaaz:
we are very much in that step change, that singularity moment. (28:10):
undefined
Josh:
We're here, man. I mean, things are changing so quickly and there's no signs (28:14):
undefined
Josh:
of slowing down. In fact, quite the opposite. (28:18):
undefined
Ejaaz:
Does anyone else out there think this? I'm curious. Like, let us know. (28:20):
undefined
Ejaaz:
Are we crazy? Do we sound like tinfoil hat people? (28:23):
undefined
Josh:
Let's just know. I mean, hey, so this episode was not really speculative. (28:26):
undefined
Josh:
This is mostly just delivering the facts. I encourage everyone to actually go (28:30):
undefined
Josh:
and read the source material if you're curious, because like holy shit it's (28:32):
undefined
Josh:
pretty crazy uh at least the black hat conference talk because like wow i think (28:35):
undefined
Josh:
it's about 37 minutes long give or take and it was (28:39):
undefined
Josh:
excellent and really just gets into the nitty gritty of how this was done um (28:42):
undefined
Josh:
and if anything just fascinating even if you're non-technical (28:46):
undefined
Josh:
really enjoyed it uh worth a watch but if you enjoyed this episode and you made (28:49):
undefined
Josh:
it all the way to the end thank you so much for watching (28:52):
undefined
Josh:
again it's great to be here for another week just chugging along if you enjoyed (28:55):
undefined
Josh:
it please don't forget to share with a friend you can leave us a five-star review (28:59):
undefined
Josh:
on your favorite podcast platform you can give us a thumbs up and subscribe (29:02):
undefined
Josh:
on youtube each has any final parting thoughts before we head off for the day. (29:05):
undefined
Ejaaz:
No please dm us and leave us some comments as well uh we love hearing from you guys (29:08):
undefined
Ejaaz:
our last video by the way got a ton of feedback from you folks and we love it (29:13):
undefined
Ejaaz:
please keep it coming it helps us out massively turn on notifications whatever (29:17):
undefined
Ejaaz:
it is to get your latest dose of limitless and yeah we will see you on the next one (29:21):
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