Programming

As much as I hate everything about the rise of LLMs, saying this isn't impressive because it can be matched by "an elite security researcher" isn't very reassuring to me. It's still an agent being pointed at a codebase and finding hundreds of vulnerabilities. Even if only a twentieth turn out to be exploitable in practice, that's still a terrifying tool to imagine in the hands of hackers who might otherwise lack the skills to find these vulnerabilities.

Most hacking groups buy exploits off of dark markets and indiscriminately target servers until they find one that's vulnerable. The number that can actually develop those hacks is far smaller, but if you can simply ask an LLM to find a vulnerability then that bar is lifted. Hell, you could probably coerce it into writing the actual exploit too by claiming you need a proof-of-concept for a CVE writeup.

I'm a bit confused because the quotes do seem to do Mythos quite a bit of justice here. Saying it is essentially the equivalent of an elite security researcher seems... good, right?

Isn't the threat that's being discussed "what if anyone could point this at anything and then actively exploit the things it finds"?

This is the meat of the headline:

For example, the Anthropic-claimed 181 Firefox exploits ran with the browser sandbox turned off and the FreeBSD exploit transcript "shows substantial human guidance, not autonomy." 

Additionally, the "'thousands of severe vulnerabilities' extrapolates from 198 manually reviewed reports. The Linux kernel bug was found by Opus 4.6, the public model, not Mythos," Devansh said.

Another researcher, Davi Ottenheimer, pointed out that the security section (Section 3, pages 47-53) of Anthropic's 244-page documentation "contains no count of zero-days at all. With no CVE list, no CVSS distribution, no severity bucket, no disclosure timeline, no vendor-confirmed-novel table, no false-positive rate."

Ottenheimer likens it to "the ending of the Wizard of Oz, a sorry disappointment about a model weaponizing two bugs that a different model found, in software the vendor had already patched, in a test environment with the browser sandbox and defense-in-depth mitigations stripped out."

Marketing outstripping reality? Is that even allowed to happen? I hope nothing like that happens with the dick pills I just ordered.

Consistently under-reported: If you spend a few hundred million on security research, you’re gonna find a lot of vulnerabilities.

The real revelation is not how much more skilled Mythos is, but how much better funded.

no!

This soccer playing robot isn't much of a threat, it can be equalled by an elite player with years of experience.

It's funny to think that Whiskey Pete may have cost the US military access to the most powerful cyber warfare tool in history all because he's an incompetent drunkard and immature man-child. But I also don't want to be giving these AI companies the benefit of the doubt, especially when it comes to marketing claims.