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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   15344 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 7, 2026

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Anthropic released a long blog post on various examples of people caught misusing their AI. A few thoughts:

  1. One major sort of concern that people have about AI is misuse by rogue actors. It's interesting here that they managed to catch a large variety of people doing that. While we only see who they caught, and not who they didn't catch, the ability to do detection at this scale does make me wonder whether in the long run, AI will more have the effect of democratizing the ability to do harm (as I was previously leaning more towards), or whether the ability of sophisticated actors to detect and smother that will be more important.

  2. This gives a bit more of a feel to me of what it is like to run a surveillance state. I'm sure we will have an increase in AI-powered surveillance in the future.

  3. At the same time, surveillance was one of the categories of things that they were listing here, seeing as Anthropic is not permitted to be used for surveillance. I am curious how the ecosystem of surveillance contractors will develop.

  4. Finding all of this was only happened because people want to use Anthropic, because their AI is capable. When there are viable alternatives who are more permissive, people engaging in prohibited activity try to shift to use those when possible, at least, in cases where they cannot do what they want with Claude. This is pertinent for discussions about open source vs. proprietary models, as well as differences in precautions between different companies.

In the 1990s, a lot of smart people were 100% convinced that there would be a rogue nuclear dirty bomb attack in the next decade. The reasoning was something like:

  1. Huge amounts of enriched nuclear material and even many entire nuclear warheads including those on easily-relocated mobile launchers have just gone missing since the fall of the USSR. Nobody knows where many of them are, they vanished, state authority in a lot of remote [former] parts of the Soviet empire is limited or entirely absent.

  2. Terrorists, primarily although not exclusively Islamist, are often quite well funded. Meanwhile, a lot of people who are in practice in charge of these nuclear stocks at the end of the Cold War are poor, unpaid (often for months/years due to the state and economic collapse) and don’t really care who they sell them to.

  3. Making a dirty bomb and transferring it to a city center is relatively easy once you have the material. Certainly it would not be beyond known terrorist skill sets for many Islamist orgs, Al Qaeda, the IRA, Basque separatists and various others who were capable of delivering powerful bombs to urban centers.

Interestingly it hasn’t happened yet, although you never know. There is some discussion about why (it’s actually something we’ve discussed here before), but the consensus is usually some handwaving around the US / CIA making a big effort to find and decommission Soviet silos and other nuclear sites in the aftermath of the Cold War. This is true, but it’s very unlikely they got all of them (and indeed I don’t think the consensus is that they did).

It would be fairly easy to steal some old medical or industrial radioisotopes for a dirty bomb; it's certainly happened accidentally plenty of times.

If you wanted to make an actual nuke, there was a window post USSR where a motivated group could have theoretically filched some poorly guarded fissile material from their nuclear cities.

https://archive.ph/pH1j9

When post-Soviet Russia came into being, in 1991, it inherited a sprawling state industry that had provided a full range of nuclear services, including medical science, power generation, and ship propulsion—as well as the world’s largest nuclear-weapons arsenal and, almost coincidentally, the world’s largest inventory of surplus plutonium and HEU, maybe 600 metric tons. The physical plant consisted of several dozen research, production, and storage facilities, and especially of ten fenced and guarded nuclear cities, which housed nearly a million people, yet were nominally so secret that they did not appear on maps. But within a few years the industry was obsolete, unable to adapt to the new Russian economy, and in steep decline. The buildings were in disrepair, and morale was low because people were not being paid enough or on time. Worse, the nuclear stockpiles were apparently being neglected. There were stories of guards abandoning their posts to forage for food, and of sheds containing world-ending supplies of HEU protected by padlock only. The question now, some fifteen years later, is why terrorists or criminals apparently did not then take advantage. One explanation is that they were ignorant, incompetent, and distracted. Another is that the defenses were not as weak as they appeared.

My understanding is the material in a warhead isn't that dangerous and it's mostly the fission products that cause fallout.

More likely materials would probably be the isotopes used for radiotherapy or irradiaton like cobalt 60 and cesium 137

The core physical idea is:

59Co + neutron flux + energy = vaporized 60Co

Cobalt 59 and energy are dirt cheap compared to neutron flux. Cobalt 60 can be manufactured beforehand by placing 59Co in a nuclear reactor for a few months, or it can be generated on-site by surrounding a nuclear warhead with cobalt 59.

The other argument for "why dirty bombs have never been made/deployed" is because they're useless, and a pain. The assembly (and shielding during it) is tricky, and while terrorists may not care about receiving a large radiation dose prior to detonation, they'll probably care that "it is well-documented by all our official agencies that the radioactivity in dirty bombs is unlikely to seriously hurt anyone."

Interestingly it hasn’t happened yet, although you never know.

What is your take on the (conspiracy) theory that Aum Shinrikyo tested a nuke in the Australian outback?

Thanks for this pointer; I hadn't heard of it. To anyone interested: https://www.colorado.edu/today/1997/05/27/mystery-event-australian-outback-nuclear-blast-earthquake-or-meteorite

Before I reached the end I had already guessed meteorite. Surely several orders of magnitude a more convincing explanation than a nuclear weapon.

I feel like because of what AI is it does make it easier to detect since people interface directly with a company while typing what they want.

The risk is that bad actors just deploy increasingly competent local LLMs where the prompts aren’t sent to HQ for threat detection.

You call it a risk, I call it a blessing. Anyway with a lot of stuff - the hard is part is surviving making the dangerous thing. The reason bioweapons never picked up is not because USA and USSR didn't want them to work.

In on-premises environments, the actor used AI to monitor the stealth and persistence of their implants. When their implants were flagged by security products, the actor used Claude to systematically identify, modify and redeploy the detected artifacts.

I think this will read like an admission of guilt/wrongdoing to the US govt. Being radically honest and open doesn't read so well to politicians and decisionmakers.

GTG-16002: Moonshot serves Claude instead of Kimi and collects exchanges for model training

I remember thinking that some of the new Kimis sounded very Claudey. Earlier Kimis sounded genuinely distinctive but then they Clauded up.

In using Kimi, the user revealed internal code and live credentials from multiple major PRC companies, including high-profile technology companies.

Yeah, AGI let alone ASI is gonna cut through any human organization like a knife through butter. People cannot be trusted, they are lazy and make mistakes. They plug their laptops into some agent that does god knows what (it's more convenient and we 'just trust' the machine).

Alternately maybe they're lying since Kimi is the biggest Chinese threat to Anthropic and they want to pull the eye of Sauron (Party security-state) down on them as a suppression tactic? And admitting how their models were used for all this bad stuff is a galaxy-brained ploy to get more regulation, guard the lie with a bodyguard of truth? Who can say.

Now this is what begging for regulatory capture looks like. Two things stick out in that regard.

  1. The heavy emphasis on US geopolitical adversaries.

  2. The contrast between Anthropic-provided AI services (good) and AI services provided by other companies (bad).

Incredible, borderline unforgivable, that they didn't turn the Iranian accounts over to U.S. intelligence so they could be run as assets. AI future led by neurodivergents is genuinely concerning.

Such accounts not making it to american intelligence would be opposite of concerning. Why stop there, anyway, why not turn over valuable info from companies using the service? Why not literally everything people type in (or let be read), you are bound to find something useful in there.

It’s hard not to read the report in light of the “supply-chain risk” nonsense that Anthropic got into earlier this year. It’s pretty clever for them to be like, “I guess we’ll just have to pour all of this valuable intelligence onto the ground…”

Pretty much. And the stunt earlier this week with the former activist who became an OpenAI employee and then “quit” and somehow got 100 million views on X was interesting as well. I am really concerned about what will happen when the IPO gives these people hundreds of billions of dollars. They are obviously extremely political and partisan.

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