> "On June 11th Mark Warner, the vice-chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said that General Joshua Rudd, who leads the National Security Agency and the Pentagon’s Cyber Command, had told him that Mythos “broke into almost all of our classified systems, not in weeks, but in hours”"

Why:

1. It's a paraphrase of a 2nd hand conversation and (at least) the last two 'telephone game' recipients are a U.S. Senator and a general, not security domain or IT experts. 2. Motivated communication: The Senator claimed this to justify the necessity of unprecedented restrictions that he agrees with. 3. The original testimony to the Intelligence Committee was almost certainly detailed, nuanced and highly classified, making this an extreme paraphrase.

In saying this, I'm not claiming Mythos may not be a security issue or that something directionally like this wasn't reported. But given the indirect, circuitous path, it's quite easy to imagine the original testimony was more like "Mythos identified a potential vulnerability we rated "Severe" in a critical system and we believe it could find similar vulnerabilities in any of our systems."

State sponsored, non-public penetration fine tunes (of possibly public ones) likely can do it even faster.

Unsupervised penetration RL loop is ideal setup similar to optimization one – it's relatively easy to gain function on it.

[1] https://csrc.nist.rip/publications/history/index_1.html

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KeyKOS

From outside? Or did you have a shit ton of unpatched systems that only internal users could access?

Those "tapes" DOGE took away? Nothing on them can be considered private any more. That's how brute force risk happens. Mythos' risks are showing doorways to exfiltration surely? Why bother when you can walk out the door with a data dump?

The NSA is just a highly specific subclass of the problem. Their traditional publicly stated approach to security is "nothing electronic which enters our domain leaves" and yet somehow they have assessed these systems as capable of breaching their walls? That's super bad.

I suspect they ran an analogue/instance inside their protection rings. I doubt they ran a test outside in the global internet. If they have actually lost control of their boundary, that's a bigger story (which I doubt) and contextually he could have been referring to information systems in NSAs duty of care, not things inside Ft Meade.

In the end I got to help write up the issue but to my knowledge they never patched it as it would have caused major issues with maintenance by closing off access needed for some legacy software patches.

Not taking a dig at people, it was not a terrible choice earlier. Not like these models are inventing net new ways to exploit systems.

I think we owe tabloids a small apology…

Of course, America is now the only nation on the planet with advanced weaponised AI models that are so good they beat billions of dollars and decades of IT security experience with some of the brightest minds in their fields within hours.

If this were true, you’d see the president yapping and bragging about it on Truth before the NSA director even gets a chance to publicly talk about it. Probably doing a live stream about how he personally prompts his way into an unconditional Iranian surrender. You know it, I know it.

Nice try, William, but unless I see the Senate Intelligence Committee freaking out with you sweating black goo like Giuliani, I ain’t believing it.

This is the same kind of bullshit that was showing a gun on TV that could apparently give people heart attacks with some frozen, untraceable darts.

If the US really was in possession of a technology that could hack into the most secure environments on the planet autonomously within hours, you would see all their partners pulling their access from shared IT systems and blocking all traffic coming from the US immediately.

Especially considering they have been caught spying on allies before:

https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/cover-story-how...

You know what they say in intelligence circles.

Fool us once, shame on you. Fool us twice, it's open windows season.

None of the partners or adversaries seem to give a fuck about Mythos, so there is a good chance this is just another lying NSA director as usual.

Come on, people. You don’t run the NSA if you’re an honest man. It’s a spy agency.

“Donald Trump’s blocking of Anthropic is capricious and chaotic” - current title

I don’t understand the posted title quote and assume it’s missing a lot of context or was misinterpreted as it’s a secondary attribution. “Mythos broke into almost all of our classified systems in hours”.

When you put it on those networks already and gave it compute?

Maybe it's conspiratorial, but it seems like the direction this is going is for the US to nationalize these companies. Somewhere between "too big to fail" and "national security."

> NSA director: 'Mythos "broke into almost all of our classified systems in hours"

> Donald Trump’s blocking of Anthropic is capricious and chaotic

LLMs cannot create anything new, they can only repeat their training data. Ergo, the NSA director just admitted that their systems a) can be accessed from the Internet, b) have known, already exploitable (and probably already fixed) bugs, and enough of them to do the job in mere hours.

This is shameful.

Edit: From what I can tell, the NSA director didn't literally and verbatim say this, and it is second hand and (possibly) vastly misconstrued.

Somebody lied, I'm not sure who, but any claim Mythos can suddenly work, when every LLM before it couldn't, needs to be taken with a gigantic supermassive grain of salt.