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Comment by senda | Hacker News Reader

Is the Kremlin technologically useless? How are we not seeing insane attacks on Ukraine via Agents?

Or is this largely a fabrication, in regards to the "who", in an attempt to garner more acclaim in the hope of sustaining funding.

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I believe both sides of the war are now using AI on various levels of their offensive operations. Ukraine has great IT specialists too, and their military leadership is much younger.

How? Aren't all US frontier models ban the usage of AI for military purpose by parties other than US? I remember Anthropic even refusing allowing US government to use Claude for military purpose

Kimi / open models or jailbreaking frontier models. Your recollection of the Anthropic refusal isn't quite accurate, cyber hacking wasn't a sticking point, just domestic drag net surveillance and fully automated weaponry.

Claude said they don’t want their models used for mass surveillance or autonomous killing (?). USA frontier AI models have been used extensively in the Iran conflict and beyond

I think it was mostly a matter of "how much" and marketing rather than "my principles won't allow for this!"

These agent swarms are from inside OpenAI, with the safeguards built into the public API disabled.

Russia does not have access to this, and as with all western tech companies, AI providers do what they can to prevent Russian usage of their products at all.

As for open-source models, Russia's electricity grid is under severe strain with the Ukraine war, and only recently has it started building out serious sovereign compute capacity.

Couldn't they use frontier open-weight models from Chinese labs? The current Chinese government is friendly to them.

Russia is running out of refined oil to power their economy. They probably aren't capable of spinning up datacenters to run those.

They don’t need to run their own DCs, just pay for a proxy somewhere in the world that has better access to the infrastructure. We know North Korea has been doing that in the US since years now

The cost would be between 100k-250k, to run approx 88 agents leveraging the best open source models available.

I'm just saying, where this is actually applicable we are not seeing it being demonstrated. You would presume the entire energy infrastructure of Europe would be under constant AI hacking barrage, criminal enterprise would be breaking into poorly secured financial institutions and r/r4r posts would be littered Ai con-artists.

I'm just wondering, again, is this mostly bullshit?

Why do you think they're not, and why do you think Russia cares about Reddit?

It’s an example of potential use by bad actors.

Did you skip the last paragraph? Not a great time to be building data centers in Russia. Models are nothing without computers to run them

Russia can use fake accounts and VPNs to run their agents in data centers in neutral countries.

And which of these neutral countries have the capacity to serve them and the lack of awareness that hosting an offensive Russian agent swarm would bring hell back to their doorstep? Best they can do right now is rented botnets

Um... China?

No one is attacking China

I appreciate this line of questioning. It's really interesting to see how many excuses people need to reach for to avoid the conclusion that the "secret unheard of power" is B.S...

The Chinese models are benchmaxxed to hell. They aren't as good in practice as all the hype suggests.

There are several ways to get hold of tech and of any other thing. Russia did not have access to the H-bomb too, until it was handed to them. Ideals or money are very effective.

They very likely do, we only see in the news a very few events but you should assume it’s happening daily across the internet

I think this fails a lot of logical tests, it should be apparent in day to day life.

> In October 2024, the United States Justice Department and Microsoft seized more than a hundred internet domains some of which were associated with the FSB supported hacker Star Blizzard or "Callisto Group," which is also known as "Cold River" and "Dancing Salome" and are managed by the FSB Information Security Center […], and which were used as "criminal proxies" and used spear-phishing schemes to target Russians living in the United States, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), think tanks, and journalists according to Microsoft and United States State Department, Department of Energy, and Department of Defense officials, United States defense contractors, and former employees of the United States intelligence community according to the FBI. In some cases, the hackers were successful in obtaining information relating to nuclear energy-related research, United States foreign affairs and United States defense. According to Microsoft's Digital Crimes Unit from January 2023 to August 2024, Star Blizzard targeted more than 30 different groups and at least 82 Microsoft customers which is "a rate of approximately one attack per week."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberwarfare_by_Russia

That’s just one thing that has been found. Are you actually familiar with the state of cyberwarfare and are you following its evolution? Because if not you won’t be aware of most of what is identified. And only a small portion of the ongoing attacks are identified.

Yes.

I again am just shocked the sky is not falling, when thats the sales pitch.

Day to day life in what country? Do you live in Ukraine? Maybe things are wild there and we just don't know about it.

what do you mean? they're using AI to kill people directly in Ukraine

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/24/world/europe/russia-drone...

Here's a lower bound on what misuse is happening:

https://www.anthropic.com/threat-intelligence-report-septemb...

Cyber attacks between these countries were happening on large scale since the beginning of the war. There were several huge breaches, but otherwise most high-profile companies adapted and significantly strengthened their protections. Rest assured, you can be sure that both sides right now utilize available AI both for attack and defense.

Prigozhin falling out of a window was a not insignificant setback for their digital warfare capabilities.

He did not fall out of a window.

He fell out of the sky. After his plane exploded. Happens all the time. Is tragedy.

I was alluding to how people who fall out of favor with Putin have a tendency to have mysterious fatal accidents, more than 10 of them falling out of windows.

Sure, but it was unfortunate to pick the one dude who is well known, if for nothing else, for dying through means other than defenestration.

Only difference is the height he fell from.

So what I'm saying by saying that he fell out a window is that Putin and/or the FSB arranged his death. It's not a statement of the means of his death, but who arranged it.

Because they dont have the money for hardware or compute obviously.

Is the Kremlin technologically useless?

Clearly, look at what is going on with Ukraine.

They are great at propaganda, so is China, Iran and North Korea, it's why everyone runs around spouting such stupid nonsense...

> How are we not seeing insane attacks on Ukraine via Agents?

You live on the wrong side of the fence to be able to read that kind of news.

Did you really believe you had access to an unmanipulated news stream in a time of war?

LOL.

Please see other responses, I would expect to feel the effects not just read about.

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