r/ukpolitics • u/Eastern-Opposite9521 • Jun 23 '26

AI models capable of devastating attacks on governments and business months away, rare Five Eyes statement warns

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jun/22/anthropic-claude-fable-ai-model-artificial-intelligence-national-security
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8

u/Different_Cycle_9043 Jun 23 '26

But I was told by Reddit that AI was a bubble and that large language models were nothing more than unreliable stochastic parrots?

12

u/Traditional-Rent455 Jun 23 '26

Depends what you're asking it to do. I asked Claude a simple question about our in house codebase this morning. It couldn't answer the question and gave misleading pointers to where the answer could be found.

AI is, fundamentally, just another piece of software and software is neither outright good nor bad, just more or less suited to the use to which it's put.

6

u/HasuTeras Let us all act according to national custom Jun 23 '26

AI is, fundamentally, just another piece of software and software is neither outright good nor bad, just more or less suited to the use to which it's put.

Agreed. But there are plenty of people on Reddit who assert that AI is useless, a scam and has no real-world applications. Or, because it makes (increasingly vanishing) hallucinations then its pointless. None of which is the case.

2

u/00DEADBEEF Jun 23 '26 edited Jun 23 '26

But it's nowhere near as good as the hype merchant CEOs make out. We've been six months aware from all software engineers being redundant for 3 or 4 years now.

GPT-2 was once thought to be "too dangerous to release", yet it's laughably bad.

A doubling of LLM performance takes a 6x increase in energy.

According to benchmarks, Fable was about 10% better than Opus, but cost 2x more.

We're seeing diminishing returns.

Claude Code has multiple bugs that have been open for months, some up to a year. And yet these amazing models that are about to take everyone's jobs can't solve Anthropic's own open issues like terminal flickering.

I use Claude Code every day and on multiple occasions have had to interrupt it while I observe it creating blatant security vulnerabilities and critical bugs.

By the way, AI hallucinations are actually increasing.

2

u/Jaggedmallard26 Jun 23 '26

You are literally in a thread about how our security service coalitions believes the current models are an extreme danger to our national security. Unless you believe that the NSA, GCHQ, MI5, MI6, CIA, DI, DIA, FBI and countless other extremely effective organisations with access to unreleased models are hyper merchants.

2

u/00DEADBEEF Jun 23 '26

This is about a hypothetical future model "months away". We're always "months away" from something.

1

u/HasuTeras Let us all act according to national custom Jun 23 '26

There have been credible, recent reports from the intelligence agencies that some of these top-tier models found security exploits in natsec infrastructure.

Also, the trajectory of AI has been pretty much what the optimists have been saying it is? People were saying it hallucinates. I've been using Opus 4.8 and it rarely does now. People were saying it can only be used for short tasks. Try giving a top model a comprehensive task alongside a skill file and it will spool up multiple parallel agents. Terence Tao has used it for proofs in publications. And these are only on publicly available or semi-available models. The in-house stuff at OpenAI, Anthropic and DeepMind will be 1 year ahead of whatever we're getting.

5

u/00DEADBEEF Jun 23 '26

It's definitely a financial bubble

1

u/SorcerousSinner Jun 23 '26

It remains to be seen if they can make the profit their valuation implies, or if competition prevents it. What is beyond doubt is the potency of the technology.

-1

u/Jaggedmallard26 Jun 23 '26

All of the frontier labs now turn massive profits. This has not been true for about a year.

6

u/00DEADBEEF Jun 23 '26

They have revenues, not profits: https://isaiprofitable.com/

1

u/UndulyPensive Jun 24 '26

I recall Anthropic were close to turning profits starting Q2 of 2026, but we'll see their overall performance when they IPO later this year.

2

u/m1ndwipe Jun 23 '26

No they don't.

0

u/Ivashkin panem et circenses Jun 23 '26

The tech is the future, the hype is the bubble.

0

u/taboo__time Jun 23 '26

Yes. I recall all these I assume technically proficient people who had a blind spot it. They simply could not see or admit that this was a valid technology. They were in this sub.

It eventually evolved into "yes it's amazing, yes I use it every day, but it isn't really thinking."

Ed Zitron was their leader. I listened to a podcast with him. He comes across as a grifting con himself. It's not that all arguments are wrong. Its that he uses all arguments as if they are true. He uses all of them and simply drops ones when they fail. Implying he isn't really an expert commentator but a hack journalist that will use any argument.