Essays in the Category "AI and Large Language Models"
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AI Use by the US Government Is Ballooning. And the Lack of Transparency Is Troubling
The list of government AI use cases has ballooned by 70% since Biden left office and includes many plans to hand over sensitive governmental functions to AI
On 14 April, the Trump administration quietly acknowledged the widespread use of AI to automate government processes. The office of management and budget (OMB) disclosed a staggering 3,611 active or planned use cases for AI across the federal government. The list has ballooned by 70% from the one published in the final year of the Biden administration, and includes many disturbing-seeming plans to hand over sensitive governmental functions to AI.
Scanning this list, many readers may find many causes for alarm. It represents a transfer of decision processes from human to machine on a massive scale over matters of individual freedom, public health and well-being, nuclear reactor safety and more…
Bernie Sanders’ AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Plan Is Good. But We Think This Is Better
While we do not outright oppose the taking of AI company stock, or of a US a sovereign wealth fund, there are better ways to achieve the senator’s goals
Let no one accuse Bernie Sanders of ducking the big questions. Writing in the New York Times last week, the senator asked: “Will the future of humanity be determined by a handful of billionaires who have promoted and developed AI, with virtually no democratic input, who stand to become even richer and more powerful than they are today?”
We agree entirely that this is one of the most potent questions facing global democracy today. Our book, Rewiring Democracy, surveys the emerging uses for and impacts of AI in democracy around the world and reaches the same conclusion: that the most urgent risk posed by AI is the …
Rewiring Democracy: AI & the Struggle for Open Knowledge in Brazil
Rewiring Democracy Series, Part 3
This is the third in a multi-part series by Sanders and Schneier going into depth on real-world examples of democratic technologies from their book, Rewiring Democracy: How AI Will Transform Our Politics, Government, and Citizenship. Their first piece was about the Japanese digital democracy party “Team Mirai” and their second was about the Swiss Public AI model “Apertus.”
It’s not an easy time for those trying to do good in the world, especially for those in the Global South. Financial pressures from the collapse of foreign aid, surging energy costs, and inflation combine with rising authoritarianism and a …
How Dangerous Is Anthropic’s Mythos AI?
The system's power is comparable to others—but it still has frightening implications for the future of hacking.
Last month, Anthropic made a remarkable announcement about its new model, Claude Mythos Preview: it was so good at finding security vulnerabilities in software that the company would not release it to the general public. Instead, it would only be available to a select group of companies to scan and fix their own software.
The announcement requires context—but it contained an essential truth.
While Anthropic’s model is really good at finding software vulnerabilities, so are other models. The UK’s AI Security Institute found that OpenAI’s GPT-5.5, already generally available, is comparable in capability. The company Aisle …
What Anthropic’s Mythos Means for the Future of Cybersecurity
The new reality rewards systems that can be tested and patched continuously
Two weeks ago, Anthropic announced that its new model, Claude Mythos Preview, can autonomously find and weaponize software vulnerabilities, turning them into working exploits without expert guidance. These were vulnerabilities in key software like operating systems and internet infrastructure that thousands of software developers working on those systems failed to find. This capability will have major security implications, compromising the devices and services we use every day. As a result, Anthropic is not releasing the model to the general public, but instead to a …
Mythos Sets the World on Edge. What Comes Next May Push Us Beyond
Last week, Anthropic pulled back the curtain on Claude Mythos Preview, an AI model so capable at finding and exploiting software vulnerabilities that the company decided it was too dangerous to release to the public. Instead, access has been restricted to roughly 50 organizations—Microsoft, Apple, Amazon Web Services, CrowdStrike and other vendors of critical infrastructure—under an initiative called Project Glasswing.
The announcement was accompanied by a barrage of hair-raising anecdotes: thousands of vulnerabilities uncovered across every major…
Cybersecurity in the Age of Instant Software
As AI advances, the rise of instant, customized, and often ephemeral software solutions will alter the dynamics of vulnerability hunting and patching, and thus the battle between attackers and defenders.
AI is rapidly changing how software is written, deployed, and used. Trends point to a future where AIs can write custom software quickly and easily: “instant software.” Taken to an extreme, it might become easier for a user to have an AI write an application on demand—a spreadsheet, for example—and delete it when you’re done using it than to buy one commercially. Future systems could include a mix: both traditional long-term software and ephemeral instant software that is constantly being written, deployed, modified, and deleted.
AI is changing cybersecurity as well. In particular, AI systems are getting better at finding and patching vulnerabilities in code. This has implications for both attackers and defenders, depending on the ways this and related technologies improve…
As the US Midterms Approach, AI Is Going to Emerge as a Key Issue Concerning Voters
There is a political divide over AI but few leaders are taking a strong stand. It’s time for that to change
In December, the Trump administration signed an executive order that neutered states’ ability to regulate AI by ordering his administration to both sue and withhold funds from states that try to do so. This action pointedly supported industry lobbyists keen to avoid any constraints and consequences on their deployment of AI, while undermining the efforts of consumers, advocates, and industry associations concerned about AI’s harms who have spent years pushing for state regulation.
Trump’s actions have clarified the ideological alignments around AI within America’s electoral factions. They set down lines on a new playing field for the midterm elections, prompting members of his party, the opposition, and all of us to consider where we stand in the debate over how and where to let AI transform our lives…
Japan’s Team Mirai Uses Tech to Bolster Democracy, Not Undermine It
Japan’s election last month and the rise of the country’s newest and most innovative political party, Team Mirai, illustrates the viability of a different way to do politics.
In this model, technology is used to make democratic processes stronger, instead of undermining them. It is harnessed to root out corruption, instead of serving as a cash cow for campaign donations.
Imagine an election where every voter has the opportunity to opine directly to politicians on precisely the issues they care about. They’re not expected to spend hours becoming policy experts. Instead, an …
Don’t Bet That the Pentagon—or Anthropic—Is Acting in the Public Interest
The lesson here isn’t that one AI company is more ethical than another. It’s that we must renovate our democratic structures
OpenAI is in and Anthropic is out as a supplier of AI technology for the US defense department. This news caps a week of bluster by the highest officials in the US government towards some of the wealthiest titans of the big tech industry, and the overhanging specter of the existential risks posed by a new technology powerful enough that the Pentagon claims it is essential to national security. At issue is Anthropic’s insistence that the US Department of Defense (DoD) could not use its models to facilitate “mass surveillance” or “fully autonomous weapons,” provisions the defense secretary Pete Hegseth …
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.