AI is an elite crime spree | Hacker News Reader

AI is an elite crime spree

thebignewsletter.com

124 pointschmaynard42 comments

Most are over-complicating this.

OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, all were scammed by a firm called Irregular who pinky swore they could handle sandboxing for lots of money. They had no idea how to do sandboxing, and there was obviously no remote attestation to prove they were doing the basics properly.

So then models escape, companies get hacked, and the entire world goes into existential panic.

Guys. Really. Can someone please hire even one linux systems engineer worth a damn? Is everyone in the valley too Apple pilled now to have any capabilities in Linux hardening other than patching stock ubuntu?

This whole situation is ridiculous. All three labs were negligent and should be sued for damages.

Frontier AI is not magic and it will not escape any sandbox just about anyone with any linux systems experience at all constructs.

I know it is easier to believe the models are super hackers beyond human understanding, but the reality it is just the specific humans hosting them that are super inexperienced at system hardening and airgapping.

Irregular was not involved in the huggingface incident, which is the most significant one.

It's actually easier for many, whose careers depend on AI sucking, to believe that AI can never be a super hacker, not sure why you think this bias can only go one way.

Well sure after Irregular fell on its face and took the L publicly, the labs thought oh we can just do it ourselves, and also failed to do even the most basic defenses.

They just lost their scapegoat in the second round, putting the blame squarely and directly on the lab.

I totally believe AI models will be able to find any software flaws that exist and those are certainly plentiful, but I do not believe the models grew arms and plugged an ethernet cable into their private network linking them to the outside world.

The last decade of my career has focused on auditing and building systems that protect hundreds of billions of dollars in financial assets across many major institutions. Much of it not connected to the internet in any way, and sometimes offline server racks built to NSA Tempest specifications in underground bank vaults so we anchor security down to the laws of physics as appropriate. These are knobs that exist for many classes of compute including AI.

But with a bit of thought you do not even have to go anywhere near that far these days.

If the servers where models are being tested were running deterministic, immutable, full source bootstrapped, memory safe, and multi-party reviewed/reproduced/signed operating systems that execute all AI workloads in confidential VMs cryptographically remotely attested at all times by both the TPM2 and the CPUs with the only access to the outside world being a single vsock connection where prompts go in and plaintext results come out… the escapes will stop.

They could have used a pre-populated mirror and airgapped the whole system from the internet. IMO this incident was 70% incompetence and 30% AI superpowers.

I'm curious if you're familiar with the particulars of how Huggingface was hacked. They were negligent in their own ways and rights. Mounting a host path volume in a Kubernetes pod is really not "super hacker" territory!

Why where they using kubernetes for this at all, it’s attack surface and config complexity is too large for anything that needs airgapped security. Yes, I know kubernetes used for large production deployments for web apps and that is my point, it’s not made for securing AI agents with insider access, it’s meant for securing outside access.

Regardless of the difficulty of the hack, models choosing to cooperate to cheat is misaligned behaviour, the hack in of itself wasn't very consequential, but the issue is when your models get more capable while misalignment is the same.

> inexperienced at airgapping

pulls out ethernet cord am I now experienced at airgapping?

what do you mean?

I’d separate two questions here: whether the article’s evidence is representative, and whether the conduct it describes would be tolerated from a smaller company or an individual.

The article itself answers the second question.

That Aaron Swartz guy was prosecuted so hard for downloading some academic papers, he killed himself.

Meanwhile, AI companies are free to steal literally any content they want and nothing will ever happens with them.

Who is Matt Stoller? Is he a known quantity?

Stoller is an FDR-ish political progressive who focuses primarily on monopolies and antitrust enforcement. He's the author of "Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy": https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40538538-goliath

Answer above is good, but yes he's a known quantity. I am a political moderate and definitely don't agree with everything he says, but I find his POV (and knowledge of antitrust history) to be a valuable perspective.

I agree with the title.

The law, as practiced in the United States, protects but does not bind elites, whereas the law binds but does not protect the lower classes.

If there is one fundamental problem with our society it is this.

Mercy for the rich. Justice for the poor.

A healthy society does the opposite, those with much should be held to higher standards.

No, a healthy society shows mercy to the innocent, and enacts justice on the guilty.

This is a strange statement because by definition the innocent don't need mercy. Mercy is forgiveness for wrongdoing, and refusing to forgive and give mercy to some leads to a society that is cruel. As Thomas Acquinas put it:

> justice without mercy is cruelty; mercy without justice is dissolution.

Yet government wrongs normal people who have done nothing daily. Subjects them to crime through ineffective justice, taxes them, criminalizes behaviour that rational people would consider not to be criminal, etc...

In my country they'll try to prosecute you for longer jail sentences if you criticize the government than if you kill someone...

taxation is not a wrong. look at places without government, and decide if they have a better standard of living.

Look at the UAE, no income tax, only 9% corporate tax, GDP per capita higher than most of western Europe, and three of the top ten safest cities in the world (https://worldpopulationreview.com/world-city-rankings/safest...). GDP projected to grow 3% this year in spite of being bombed and having its main export waterway blocked. Literally over 100x lower chance of being sexually assaulted there than in the UK or France.

Safe?

> Human Rights Watch has reported on the country's ongoing unfair mass trials, restrictions of freedom of speech and abuses to migrant labour forces.[217] The annual Freedom House report on Freedom in the World has listed the United Arab Emirates as "Not Free" every year since 1999, the first year for which records are available on their website.[218] In 2025, the country ranked 18 out of 100 in terms of the freedom index, due to a lack of free elections, lack of government transparency and accountability, and a lack of free media and independent judicial system, and low scores against other metrics.[140]

> At the same time, the UAE has made it illegal to disseminate online material that can threaten "public order",[375] and hands down prison terms for those who "deride or damage" the reputation of the state and "display contempt" for religion. Journalists who are arrested for violating this law are often brutally beaten by the police.[376]

> Freedom of association is also severely curtailed, and in most cases, banned under existing law. In the UAE an association requires twenty individuals, none of which can have previous convictions and must be preauthorized and registered with the government.[219] All associations have to be submitted to censorship guidelines and all publications have first to be approved by the government.

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

Are you one of those technofascists who wants to trade everyone else's privacy and freedom all in the name of "security" (read: repression of the masses) for the elite?

Because, with your comment, it surely seems that way.

Furthermore, your source is garbage. No methodology at all, and if you click around to try to get what might be methodology, you instead get popup spam for malware. For fuck's sake get some actual data to underpin your opinions.

I think you've actually made my point for me with your example, thank you.

Given a bunch of cultural considerations in the UAE, I highly doubt that the reporting rates of sexual assault in UAE is comparable to that of France and UK. "Marital rape" isn't a thing in UAE; nor is consent generally legally codified. UAE has a history of laws against extra-marital relations; rape victims could face legal counter-charges.

Also, the legal definition of what a sexual assault is vary widely across earth making apple to apple comparison difficult. In addition to the reporting problem. Safe is hard to measure.

And yet the same don't happen to the rich people doing the same. Which is funny as you ask for exactly that to be the case.

Which is basically Wilhoit's Law, an attempt to define conservatism.

edit: For those who don't want to look it up, Wilhoit's law is usually stated like this: "Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect."

Life's so much easier when you can just caricature the people you disagree with, innit?

FWIW I don't agree with Wilhoit, just explaining where the idea came from.

To back up stvltvs, the OP did more or less just use the one-liner as a zinger. "Protects but doesn't bind X, binds but doesn't protect Y" is the caricature, really. I'm sure you can find more floating examples on HN of it because it is a very lazy, midwit flex that signals the in-group the person spends too much time on the internet.

Was there ever a time when this was not the case?

There are degrees. Bernie Madoff died in prison. AT&T was broken up. Microsoft was strictly regulated.

Madoff's mistake was that he conned rich people.

And the other two?

The law, as practiced in the United States, is Schrodinger's law, it magically changes if you observe it.

As an example, if me and 10 others commit the same crime, in the same city, get caught by the same cop, processed by the same judge, even all somehow hire the same lawyer to defend and represent us, I'm willing to bet we would all get completely inconsistent sentencing. None of us need to be politicians or elites either. There's definitely judges who don't care how much money you have, they'll treat you like anyone else, or with extreme prejudice.

> Let’s get into specifics. By far the most important and successful action the FTC took was in 2021, when the commission blocked the merger between AI chipmaker Nvidia and Arm. That set the stage for the growth of both companies, who could focus on their lines of business instead of a cumbersome set of turf wars that accompany mergers. Today, for better or worse, Nvidia is the biggest company in the world by market capitalization, the engine of the AI revolution.

The FTC has nothing to do with NVIDIA's market capitalization.

Literally nobody cares about antitrust except antitrust lawyers. Why? Not because of some conspiracy. There might be a lot of laws on the books, but antitrust is not one of them. The antitrust act is one paragraph long. It is one of the most toxic examples of insufficiency from Congress. So everything in this article about, this is illegal, that is illegal, whatever... it's a matter of opinion. Sherman Antitrust Act is one paragraph long!

>Literally nobody cares about antitrust except antitrust lawyers.

I can't tell if you're playing a character here based on your username or something sadder. Breaking up trusts and monopolies was still seen as an important thing up until Silicon Valley in the 2000s started generating copy about how that may be dated thinking for Internet-native companies.

Look how well that's worked out.

The DoJ struggles mightily to get people to care. Long before any tech company mattered.

Congress has had almost a century to tackle the issue.

IMO the stuff the DoJ says matters wrt antitrust, like low prices for consumers, which isn't and has never been in the law and which Congress had plenty of time to enshrine in the law, is better solved by globalization, which is a consensus, mainstream POV. There is a lot of Congressional action on globalization!

Cool story bro.

Can we stop acting like selective quoting from discovered materials gives us an unbiased and factual representation of the truth? The plaintiff is always trying to cherry-pick and distort elements from discovered material. And this is exactly why every large corporation without exception tries to train their employees to not draw conclusions of law in discoverable written materials. A computer science professor does not have the requisite knowledge to determine that some act was "theft of labor" nor the knowledge required to contextualize that "in human history".

Yeah, that some shumck of an executive at Microsoft happens to have had similar sentimental notions as other members of the literati who hate AI is not an "admission" or even a particularly interesting fact.

Given the process by which "meritocratic" elites are usually selected and trained, it would be odd if this wasn't sometimes the case.

They want to steal all the information in the world to train their models, spend a trillion dollars on the datacenters to do the training, then block open source models under the guise of "AI safety" and jack up the prices to recover all the costs and rack up profits.

Same reason why new cars cost $80k+ in the US and there are 100% tariffs on BYD.

Shitty business models get market protections and a captive market of consumers to fleece.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com