OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is doing something no Big Tech owner has ever done: "He's publishing a detailed blueprint for how government should tax, regulate and redistribute the wealth from the very technology he's racing to build and spread," according to Axios.
The reason is a little unsettling: "superintelligence" is nearly upon us, and the effect will be "so mind-bending, so disruptive" on society that America needs a "new social contract" on the order of the Progressive Era of the turn of the 20th century or the New Deal.
AI companies know some random idiot, or some rogue nation, could use their models to conjure the next pandemic. "Wonderful things are going to happen there — we'll see a bunch of diseases get cured," Altman said. But he also knows terrorist groups could use the models to try to create novel pathogens: "[T]hat's no longer a theoretical thing, or it's not going to be for much longer."
Anthropic has just given its "Mythos" AI model a limited release. Why limited? Both the industry and the government believe that Mythos is an AI capable of "not just identifying weaknesses in security systems, but exploiting them with autonomous, never-before-seen precision," reports Axios.
The darn thing accidentally escaped the confines of its "sandbox" and strolled through several systems after building a "moderately sophisticated multi-step exploit" to give it the run of the internet.
The model demonstrated a "potentially dangerous capability for circumventing our safeguards," Anthropic revealed. "The researcher found out about this success by receiving an unexpected email from the model while eating a sandwich in a park."
Yikes.
Anthropic's Logan Graham — a former Rhodes Scholar who leads the Frontier Red Team, which stress-tests new models — told us the industry needs to rethink future releases of all AI models, given the new and coming capabilities.
So imagine Mythos-level power in the hands of the Iranian regime in the middle of a hot war or Russia's military as it tries to decimate Ukraine.
That's the chief reason the government and AI companies are racing so fast toward a technology so powerful and potentially dangerous. These officials fear that China, armed with superior AI, could present an existential threat to U.S. dominance.
"An enemy could reach out and touch us in a way they can't or won't with kinetic [battlefield] operations," a source close to the Pentagon told us. "For most Americans, the Iran war is 'over there.' With a cyberattack, it's right here."
"Secrets" in business or government are fleeting, and for the right price, someone, somewhere might be tempted to sell AI secrets to bad actors. Or more likely, those bad actors would create their own AI nightmares, given the state of the tech and the abilities of the Chinese and the Russians.
The controlled release of Mythos could be the blueprint for future model releases, with AI companies doling out access to select partners that have enough security to test world-bending systems.
Other AI companies will soon catch up to Mythos — not just here, but in China and elsewhere.
A Chinese state-sponsored group already used an earlier Claude model to target roughly 30 organizations in a coordinated attack before Anthropic detected it.
The time is fast approaching for all of corporate America and all of government to be prepared to guard against hackers with superhuman powers.
The window to get ahead of this is closing fast. Most in power aren't remotely ready.
This doesn't sound like AI hype to me. This isn't Sam Altman bragging about his latest ChatGPT release. This is crunch time. We're now in a genuine arms race where keeping ahead of China and Russia is a matter of the highest national security and, potentially, of national survival.
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