There's one very important thing I would like everyone to try to remember this week, and it is that AI companies are full of shit

Only rarely do their claims actually bear scrutiny, and those are only the mildest of claims they make.

So, anthropic is claiming that their new, secret, unreleased model is hyper competent at finding computer security vulnerabilities and they're *too scared* to release it into the wild.

Except all the AI companies have been making the same hypercompetence claims about literally every avenue of knowledge work for 3+ years, and it's literally never true. So please keep in mind the highly likely possibility that this is mostly or entirely bullshit marketing meant to distract you from the absolute garbage fire that is the code base of the poster child application for "agentically" developed software

You may now resume doom scrolling. Thank you

A couple people seem very invested in me being wrong about this assessment. All I can say is that this would be the first time I have misclassified an AI claim as bullshit

So here's the other thing that bothers me about all this. Regardless of the eventual results, this thing they're doing is *incredibly* resource intensive. They routinely spend billions of dollars on training these models, and billions more on operating them. It's not simple to parse out what fraction of that is directly attributable to the massive scale vuln finder/fabricator. But for the sake of argument lets just pick a plausible number, and call it 50-100 million dollars.

What could we have gotten for 50-100 million dollars of sponsorship for security audits? Prior to this, the largest single investment into FOSS security I'm aware of was the 2015 audit of openssl, after the heartbleed incident. It's hard to find precise costs for that, but I found a few sources estimating 1.2 million dollars, and that is arguably the most security critical piece of software in the world.

But suddenly there's 100x more resources available to do this work, now that producing the artifact can be done with stolen labor? Now that they can externalize the cost of false positives onto the already mostly unpaid maintainers of these projects? Even if their claims are true, which we have no reason to believe and very good reason not to, it's still a travesty

@jenniferplusplus They want to get rid of us. The price doesn't matter.