This is bizarre. I used to work in offensive security, doing a lot of vulnerability research and exploit development. Given the nature of the work and the fact that our products were subject to export controls, we used to work in an actual, airgapped environment - emphasis on the word _actual_. We had mirrors of package registries that would be synced once a day, and if a dep you wanted wasn’t mirrored, you needed to ask IT to have it mirrored.

We considered this just good discipline. I am sure that IT would have loved to allow just the mirror to have internet access, but it was an active decision not to let it, because it had potential to exfiltrate data out of the development network.

Reading this telling of the story, I can’t help but walk away with the conclusion that these frontier labs lack rigour when it comes to securing their models, especially given how much they hype up their models’ capabilities.

Utterly bizarre.