Classified estimates show the NSA is paying billions to test AI models

The FBI, and law-enforcement in general, isn't the main customer. Spies who are unafraid of and who take advantage of illegal activity are the ones consuming NSA products. Epstein for example.

My opinion is that those crimes are not relevant to their mission. Are they serious financial crimes? Yes absolutely. But no one actually gets hurt, it’s just money.

Which humans were arrested or held accountable for the Minab school attack?

State capacity has always been the bottleneck for authoritarian regimes. China can't keep track of who is even a citizen or not in many cases simply because having a national database doesn't get rid of the birthday problem + the limited number of common surnames + the administrative state's limited capacity to process data that until recent decades came in handwritten + a unsurprising amount of petty corruption that adds up. If you start with bad data there's no magic bullet. And the data is always bad to start with. The spectre of "birth tourism" only works on the Chinese side because through quotidian corruption someone without Chinese citizenship can be made into one by a civil servant of sufficient rank, which is also why it's not a real problem - not enough people actually have that level of connection within the bureaucracy. The US by definition cannot have an accurate database of even who's a citizen - thanks to repeated changes in citizenship laws from the 60s through the 90s that was then frozen around 9/11 as well as the lack of a coherent system that is accurate, immutable, and can act as an oracle. Home births were not just a western thing (although it certainly happens more often on a per capita basis out here, I'm in Nevada). SSNs are not indicators of citizenship, nor are driver's licenses. I spent most of my 20s in NYC where none of my friends who grew up in the city had a driver's license and the state DL/ID wasn't REAL ID compliant until after I left. We only have vaguely reliable data from Texas but ICE, the presumptive arbiter of documentation validity (not part of their mandate), has an error rate of 1% that they admit to, but that's after immigration court and appeals and administrative actions ameliorated their error rate down to 1%. At this point we are removing US citizens and rendering them stateless almost casually, almost as policy.

AI is trained on these flaws. These aren't flaws that can easily be fixed. The ramifications can be significant. Garbage in, garbage out. Records, however official, are wrong all the time. I have an entry in my "criminal record" from a clerical error that is attached to no charges but 4 days in LA County Men's where I had a seizure, which can be interpreted as the record being correct but incomplete or a giant screwup. What sort of process would it take to fix this if the AI decided on the latter? It doesn't affect me, but someone less privileged? Absolutely it will have consequences. Worst of both worlds indeed. People routinely forget that LLMs ARE NOT PEOPLE. Mistakes get compounded. Biases if not caught in time get baked in. There are multiple AI safety dialogues that should be happening but you wouldn't know it from the media, and it's the wrong one that is front and center. You can rotate keys, you can roll out patches, you can't open up the corpus and use a scalpel and cut out the errors and omissions and biases, and the latter aren't logged.

We don't have enough people who possess professional expertise in widely varied fields that nevertheless intersect in the conversation. This might be because there aren't many people that fit the descriptor, but these are the blindspots. Anyone talk to Orin Kerr lately?

Plus the inherent unreliability of AI combined with the blind willingness of people to trust the results from AI. What a mess we're in.

Claude loves snitching though.

The people abusing Flock are police officers.

>The NSA mission is primarily inward focused.

This is simply false. Only domestic law enforcement agencies like the FBI can conduct domestic investigations. Law enforcement or counter-intelligence agents might be given access to intelligence the NSA collects if they have a warrant, but it is not in the remit of the agency to intentionally collect information on US persons, it’s only allowed incidentally when conducting foreign intelligence collection

China has proved there is a massive grey market for gpus.

I don't expect there are very many intelligence agencies politely asking and fervently hoping they are given access. To much of anything, let alone what may be the most important technology in human history.

This is really naive. 'Anthropic won't give them out'. It's amazing how creative AI doomers can get about the upcoming apocalypse, and can't seem to fathom that men with guns always override the opinions of nerds in SF.

https://xkcd.com/538/

The supply chain thing was just an embarassing attempt at politicking by a laughably useless Hegseth.

My understanding is that Anthropic doesn't really have a lot of say in the matter of keeping their models out of government hands. The government can do pretty much anything they want with a domestic company in the name of national security. They might first choose to be polite about it with an open request and payment, then they might choose to infiltrate and extract by any means necessary (the NSA has a literal army of hackers on hand to point at the task) and Anthropic may not even know about it leaking, either way they do what they want and serve a national security letter to silence the event.

Ultimately they can just offer something Dario can't refuse. Every one of these "oops, our models are just so powerful our agents hacked something by mistake" PR fluff pieces is admission to federal crimes and they are leverage they're giving the government to exert control over them. Refusal means prison.

I see. I misunderstood your comment.

> So you have to be evil to think of what evil can do by the statement you made.

You don't, and my statement did not assert that. You are stretching wayyy too much here to try to get the world to fit your narrative.

They do, in droves. It's clear you don't know anything about the entire industry.