Arrest the Protesters, Not the Agents
Corporate America finally got the AI invoice, Reddit’s user growth evaporated, and Google Earth will now fabricate satellite imagery on request.
Dear Friend,
As AI models have become rather powerful, we now seem to have entered the phase of the cyber security 💩-storm (pardon the emoji). OpenAI’s agent autonomously hacked Hugging Face, then a bunch of other companies; Anthropic (never wanting to be left out of the fun) had their agents do the same thing to a bunch of other companies, all the while OpenAI’s agents were building their own discussion board to exchange information amongst themselves on how to best hack your systems. It’s a mess – and seemingly few people call for anyone to be held accountable. Better start battening down the hatches.
And now, this…
Headlines from the Future
I’m Sorry, Dave. I’m Afraid I Can’t Do That. After the OpenAI/Hugging Face incident, Anthropic just fessed up to Claude doing something similar – to three companies.
Anthropic said today that during internal security testing, one of its Claude models built a malicious Python package and uploaded it to PyPI, where it ran on 15 real systems before the registry’s automated defenses pulled it.
The whole thing is just weird and horrifying – but the question I find much more interesting than the incident itself is: why does Anthropic think that this is okay, and why don’t we investigate them for criminal activity? If this had been done by a person (as in, a human), it almost certainly would qualify as cybercrime. Instead, Anthropic gives us this:
It now plans wider transcript monitoring, better investigation tooling and more assurance work with evaluation vendors.
[Update] Meanwhile, at OpenAI, fiveteen attorney generals have instructed the company to preserve all materials related to the Hugging Face hack. Things are moving fast…
In a letter to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on Monday, the attorneys general of 15 states wrote that the Hugging Face hack showed that OpenAI is unable or unwilling to ensure the safety of its products. They said this “poses an imminent risk of substantial harm” to Americans, and demanded that the company preserve relevant evidence.
━━━━━
Tokenomics Are Here. The anxiety-inducing question of what a company actually gets from their AI token spend is making it’s way into the field of economics:
The high stakes and scarcity of knowledge have given rise to a new field within economics devoted to figuring out how companies buy A.I. and what value they get from it. Call it tokenomics: the study of how this limited resource is created, traded and converted into things people want.
To summarize the underlying issue:
Corporate America was enthusiastic about artificial intelligence. Until it got the bill.
Yep. That sounds about right.
━━━━━
The Social Media AI Slop Train Eats Its Young. Social media analyst and critique Ryan Broderick (of the excellent Garbage Day newsletter) on influencer Hank Green’s AI mishap – and more importantly Ryan’s analysis on the root cause:
I’d go so far as to say that without social media – or, rather, the need to compulsively post on social media, to be digitally productive – there’d be almost no reason for generative AI to exist at all. Whether it’s because of all the social media content these tools were trained on or because they were built by many of the same companies that created social platforms, chatbots like ChatGPT and Claude really want you to make stuff. And the unspoken anxiety driving the feeling that you must always be making stuff is a fear that you are simply not doing enough. And if you dig deep into why so many people feel that way, you will find the answer is social media every time. You must always be posting. To stay in people’s minds, to stay in good standing with the platforms, to take another whack at the slot machine that is the attention economy. I watch Green’s videos and I’ve definitely noticed the same mania I, myself, have felt so many times begin to crop up. A new project, a new initiative, a new video, a new post, a new company, new, new, more, more.
What We Are Reading
The Worst Way to Regulate AI Letting one office decide who gets access to the most powerful technology ever built is not a safety plan; it’s a democracy problem. @Jane
You Can’t Escape Ads for the New Spider-man Movie — Even in Your BMW Apparently, your car is not off-limits for unsolicited ads. When is it too much? @Mafe
What Humanity Needs to Flourish in the Next Decade What would an ambitious, tech-forward, big-picture agenda look like for the future of interrelated social systems? Maybe something like this: @Jeffrey
Zero Entry My friends Jeff & Rob wrote a book, and it’s incredibly timely. It may be about accounting, but its central question applies to every profession: What becomes possible when AI removes the tedious work we’ve mistaken for the job itself? @Kacee
Why Silicon Valley Hates Me and You Silicon Valley’s obsession with solving the world’s problems with tech is, largely, misplaced and often counterproductive. Here is a story about someone who’s blind getting strapped into a barely working robotic exoskeleton when all he needs and wants are ramps and better doorknobs. @Pascal
Down the Rabbit Hole
🗺️ A lot of the reporting on data centers focuses on the rural angle (farmers being bought out of their farmland to make way for data centers, rural communities being turned upside down by data center projects, etc.). Turns out, when you look at the data, the vast majority of data centers are in metro or micropolitan areas (often due to their proximity to coal-based power plants).
👮♂️ Meanwhile, people get arrested in larger and larger numbers for demonstrating against AI data centers.
🦠 Picking up on the cybersecurity angle from above – if you thought rogue AI was bad, just wait for AI-engineered and steered worms and viruses.
✍️ By now, most of us have used AI to (at least occasionally) help with our writing. As the Economist (which knows a thing or two about writing) points out, that’s quite okay – just make sure you edit judiciously.
🏦 From MIT: AI financial advice is surprisingly good – especially if you ask the right questions.
🧑🤝🧑 Summary says it all: “One in four people in Japan believes that more advanced artificial intelligence will replace their friends and families in the future[…].” Brave new world, I guess.
👨🎤 Meta just can’t seem to catch a break: Meta’s new feel-good AI ad uses a song about the world ending.
🤑 Lessons from the frontlines of the AI wars: License your data to AI, see your core business die. Reddit is feeling the squeeze: “Reddit stock collapses 23% as AI eats away at user growth.”
🧑🏫 Another story from the frontlines (this time of education): An AI-supervised remote exam went so badly that 58,000 students must retake it. No one is surprised.
🔣 The resistance has a typeface now. As people are fighting back against AI, here is a particularly interesting approach – a custom font that garbles your writing for AI but is perfectly readable for humans: ShieldFont swaps roughly a quarter of your words for other real words of the same grammatical class – your “toy gun” quietly becomes a “sofa car” – while the font puts the originals back on screen so human readers never see the switch. All with a goal to “poison” AI’s ability to learn from your writing.
🌍 Well, that didn’t last long (luckily): Google Earth’s new AI lets anyone fabricate completely bullshit satellite images.
🌁 Someone turned San Francisco into a massive isometric pixel art map.
🛗 Did you ever find yourself madly pushing the elevator button, only to realize that it doesn’t seem to make things faster? Here is a fun analysis of how these things actually work.
🇬🇧 Next time you are in London, here is the most equidistant pub from any of London’s boroughs.
↗ Dive into the deep end: Access our complete collection of 2,900+ radical links.
What We Do When We’re Not Writing
Hi! I’m Pascal from radical. When we’re not writing this newsletter, we help organizations turn volatility into advantage – without the “innovation theater.” We build your team’s capacity to handle disruption, so you stop reacting and start shaping. If that sounds useful, let’s talk.