Google's blog (https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/threat-intelligence/ai-...) says Google "worked with the impacted vendor to responsibly disclose this vulnerability", so in this incident, it's not Google software.
-TFA
Please refer to any seller of weapons ever.
The robbers used a CAR in the robbery.
The blackmailer used a TYPEWRITER to write blackmailing letter.
Security "researchers" are overpaid buffoons who hype things for their own salaries and their companies. And the stenographers from the press dutifully copy everything.
This is a despicable game to fool politicians into giving money and favorable AI legislation.
Strangely enough these buffoons never offer their models to open source developers. It is always a select group of highly paid other buffoons that throws some very occasional results over the wall.
Software is in such a state now, Gmail is full of bugs around sharing attachments to the position that I have to tell my dad to turn his phone off and on again in order to attach a document
https://projectzero.google/2024/10/from-naptime-to-big-sleep...
https://deepmind.google/blog/introducing-codemender-an-ai-ag...
I wonder what gives them that "high confidence", as opposed to this being just a traditional zero-day?
I'm not being snarky or critical, I'm genuinely wondering what about an attack could possibly indicate it was discovered with LLM assistance?
Like, unless the attackers' computers have been seized and they've been able to recover the actual LLM transcript history? But nothing in the article indicates that the hackers have been caught, just that a patch was developed.
"Although we do not believe Gemini was used, based on the structure and content of these exploits, we have high confidence that the actor likely leveraged an AI model to support the discovery and weaponization of this vulnerability. For example, the script contains an abundance of educational docstrings, including a hallucinated CVSS score, and uses a structured, textbook Pythonic format highly characteristic of LLMs training data (e.g., detailed help menus and the clean _C ANSI color class) "
No such circumstantial evidence can prove that an AI model has been used to find the bug.
Of course, it is quite likely that an AI model was used to speed up the search for bugs, but this can never be proven as long as you see only the code used to exploit the bug.
I don't get the "although": Are they happy that Gemini was not used in cybercrime oder are they bothered because somebody used a (probably better) alternative?
Google, Cloudflare, and Microsoft are a trio of companies that get to see most of what's going on the internet. I imagine that if they see you attacking them, they can work back from that and get remarkably far, even against sophisticated actors. If it's their LLM, they presumably keep transcripts. If you searched for the affected API function via a search engine, they almost certainly know. Even if you used a competing search product, you probably went to a site that has Google Analytics. Oh, and one of these companies probably has your DNS lookups. And a good chunk of the world's email traffic. And telemetry from your workstation. And auto-uploaded crash reports... And if it's bad, they can work together behind the scenes to get to the bottom of it.
So, when their threat intel orgs say they have high confidence in something, I'd be inclined to believe it.
I don't doubt that they found some evidence of AI use. I'm just skeptical that the amount and strength of evidence has anything to do with their making this statement.
I've been thinking about why the AI companies are making so much use of fear based marketing. And I'm wonder if it isn't just naked Machiavellianism at work.
For a long time tech companies were forced to compete for power by being the most loved (or at least not the most hated). But now they've found an avenue to cultivate fear.
For the other half of the sentence ("discovery"), one could claim that it is true only if the identity of the attackers were discovered and evidence about their prior activities would be gathered.
Even if it is likely that today anyone who searches for bugs would also use AI agents to accelerate that, I find unacceptable in announcements like that of Google the use of careless sentences that are obviously either false or they might be true only if Google knew something else that they do not disclose.
Except "we" have been successfully chaining attacks long before AI started automating it. AI doesn't make any of this possible, it just takes the drudgery out of it and lowers the cost of an attack.
did it take a lot of effort? sure. lots of dead ends. but that does not mean it is impossible.
I say this only slightly in jest, as that's about the only thing I can think of which would legitimately give them 'high confidence'.
But at this point I feel like odds are everyone looking for vulnerabilities is using AI to some extent. Why wouldn't they? It'd be stranger if they didn't.
Excessive use of em-dashes, and emoji bullet points in the readme
"That's why for your safety we need a scan of your ID and your biometrics to let you use our best models"
I'm not sure why or how to turn it off, does anyone know?
(Also, insert weary photo of Kaczynski here.)
If unlock features remain after that, it's a manufacturer feature that's been set up. In that case you'll have to look for a guide for your specific brand and model.
Your phone can't turn this on by itself, if it's doing face recognition that means you set it up at some point.
Citation needed.
It's like willingly walking through a minefield.
Tired of this trend.
State actors + hackers will have more resources to make better offense. What worse, in my experience AI produced code is blind to overall system behavior. So I fear the exploits will be either low hanging/trivial to exploit errors or bigger system level bugs.
Idk, this doesn’t strike me as news. Google just missed a vulnerability.
Immediate distrust of the article. GPT 5.5 is out with nearly the same capability. The author might be parroting company marketing, unable to discern that a lot of this is much less complex than it seems. For all we know this group could have had a model examine some obscure line of code thousands of times until it found something.
For me, not thee
Are you one bad headline away from a major hack? Or worse, one hack away from your company going under? It's all a ticking time bomb.
Someone else on HN pointed out that distros like Debian might be too slow as people find live exploits in the kernel, it might not be worth keeping something like that, on the other hand Ubuntu supports live kernel upgrading at the enterprise level, so maybe Ubuntu Server might be Debian's indirect saving grace.
Article says that it was largely a theory until now. That's not entirely true, we know that hackers used Claude to hack the Mexican government, got the PII of every citizen basically. I would not be surprised if there's more hacks that are undetected. The hackers don't need to declare their use of AI, its irrelevant.
Why collect all the news dupes but not the source up top OP? Because the source was already submitted?
https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/threat-intelligence/ai-...
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/11/us/politics/google-hacker...
this instead
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/11/us/politics/google-hacker...
(can read the article immediately; slightly less fuss)
To contact the HN mods, you need to send them an email.
If I am paid by someone to create an exploit that caused damages wouldn't I be liable? Or could I avoid it by making my client sign a terms of service agreement to not use it that way?
Who created the model and who helped with GPU power to run the model to create the export and should they be doing more.
What research? Where is it published?
I don't see how you can regulate that though. Just making it illegal to release small models? Or to use unauthorized ones? (I'm kind of not sure the kind of people who want to do bad things are going to be discouraged by such a law though.)
Unlikely in America or China. This is not a game either can singularly control, and locking down the R&D means conceding momentum to the party that doesn't. Which means use restrictions will be contained to countries satisfied with playing second fiddle.
Instead, I suspect we'll see momentum towards running software on publisher-controlled servers so the source code can be secured through obscurity. It isn't perfect. But it might be good enough to get us through this transition.
See https://openai.com/index/gpt-5-5-with-trusted-access-for-cyb...
I imagine Mythos is going to be the same story from what I’ve seen so far.
I got cajoled the other day that I need to upload my ID and ask for 5.5-Cyber access by the Codex desktop app while I was having it develop a fuzzing suite for an open source library I'm(we?) are developing. I was able to berate it into getting back to work.
This struck me as a point of emergent enshittification; an anus if you will.
https://www.nytimes.com/by/dustin-volz
> I am based in The Times’s Washington bureau, and much of my focus is on the dealings of U.S. cybersecurity and intelligence agencies, including the National Security Agency, Central Intelligence Agency, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, as well as their counterparts abroad, chiefly in China, Russia, Iran and North Korea.
> My remit spans nation-state hacking conflict, digital espionage, online influence operations, election meddling, government surveillance, malicious use of A.I. tools and other related topics.
> Before joining The Times, I worked at The Wall Street Journal, where I spent eight years covering cyber conflict and intelligence. My recent work at The Journal included a series of articles revealing a major Chinese intrusion of America’s telecommunications networks that breached the F.B.I.’s wiretap systems and has been described as one of the worst U.S. counterintelligence failures in history. I have also worked at Reuters and National Journal, where I began my career in Washington chronicling congressional efforts to reform surveillance practices at the N.S.A. in the wake of the 2013 Edward Snowden disclosures.
> My work has been internationally recognized, including by the White House Correspondents’ Association, the Gerald Loeb Awards, the Society of Publishers in Asia and the Society for Advancing Business Editing and Writing.
What have you done lately?
GP might be incorrect in stating that the author is parroting Anthropic's marketing, but the author certainly does not go out of his way to specify that these are only Anthropic's claims. It is actually a bit ironic as the article linked[0] from the quoted part (by another author) uses the correct phrasing when dealing with such claims:
> Anthropic, the artificial intelligence company that recently fought the Pentagon over the use of its technology, has built a new A.I. model that it claims is too powerful to be released to the public.
I feel like this website is a particularly dangerous place to ask that and hope it to be a “mic drop” moment. There are a lot of highly accomplished engineers, scientists, founders CEOs, etc. here that could easily respond to that with any manner of impressive qualifications.
> An argument from authority (Latin: argumentum ab auctoritate, also called an appeal to authority, or argumentum ad verecundiam) is a form of argument in which the opinion of an authority figure (or figures) is used as evidence to support an argument. The argument from authority is often considered a logical fallacy and obtaining knowledge in this way is fallible.
that's the scary part. not that super-expert Phd folks can eventually do it with serious effort, but that AI can do it faster and while guided by a plucky college freshman
The fact that they are holding some information back doesn't really strike me as unreasonable. The bug has yet to be released, so they should not provide identifying details. Let's see what happens with the CVE.
[0] https://www.cisecurity.org/ms-isac/services/words-of-estimat...
I thought that the fingerprints/iris in twins where identical like the DNA.
To circumvent conversations being flagged as "cybersecurity bad!!!" I often have to use previous models (5.3 for example, and sometimes using them through subagents is enough). And when this method no longer works, local models will be good enough for it to not be a problem (for my use case, at least).
Guess how I know you've never been a reporter.
> Some consider it a practical and sound way of obtaining knowledge that is generally likely to be correct when the authority is real, pertinent, and universally accepted
Anyway, other than trying to think critically, anything?
(You thought I was exaggerating about it being "investigative," dincha.)
The latter in no way implies the former. But it sure does make good press.
We need local AI ASAP.
This time, however it's even worse, because it'll be a really long time until either we get consumer GPUs with enough VRAM for full models or LLMs that fit in 16-32GB capable enough to compete with cloud providers.
I run locally qwen3.6 27b on my 3090 and it's really impressive for what it is, but it is still generations away from being capable of delivering a level of quality that we can confidently default to solo drive them on a daily basis.
That is an excellent idea, once we, the GPU-poor mice, figure out who is going to bell the SoTA training cat. Chinese models being banned is well within the realms of lobbied possibilities.
The real game would be to put a “nothing of interest here” prompt injection attack in the original series of prompts so a LLM parsing them later would ignore the attackers’ session.
OP posited that the author didn't know what he's talking about. I pointed out that the author has far more knowledge and experience in the field than rando internet griefers on HN who immediately reach for "shoot the messenger" when they read something that doesn't neatly fit into their pre-conceived worldview, instead of perhaps learning things from other people.
But at least your trope acknowledges that he's an authority on the subject.
"Richard Dawkins certainly knows about evolution, and he can confidently tell us that it is true, but that doesn't make it true. What makes it true is the preponderance of evidence for the theory."
You mean, you guessed that a random person online lacked experience. The experts are genuinely here too.
That position does not appear to be present.
I don't. I'm not saying American politics isn't capable of doing it. But I don't see us being stupid enough to try locking ourselves out of a technology that everyone else has access to.
Ironically, this–a nascent industry and budding industrial cluster–is the textbook case for deploying tariffs. America tariffs American use of Chinese models and pays that back as a tax credit to American developers.