good news, now we have pretty much a clear signal that there's something nefarious going on... after all, the first step to analyzing malware is to determine if it's malware at all.
Worked a contract where this succeeded in pushing through a fail open design.
It also should be a warning to everyone that these groups are now aware of analysis and deobfuscation using AI and to take using a sandboxed environment more seriously.
I’ve personally had about 20% success rate getting opus 4.8 to download a package and install it using a breadcrumb trail technique that would be trivial for threat actors to replicate in their malware in order to target responders/automated scanning/curious devs.
Would this realistically be a problem for code going through LLM-based code-review? Presumably if a LLM reviewer agent hits this commentary, it would produce a failure to analyze and exit, thus failing the automated code review and forcing a human to read through it which they would subsequentially catch and revoke.
I still don't know why all these concern about nuclear weapons with LLMs. It is not that if an entity (A country) wants to develop a nuclear weapons that the resources they need for such a program and huge infrastructure and scientific enterprise would need an LLM to teach them anything. Knowing how to develop one is not a closed secret but getting in secret is impossible without the whole world knowing.
So I wouldn't be able to develop a nuclear weapons with the resources of drug cartal (as an example) using Claude in secret.
Simple gun-type fission weapons, don't require very sophisticated physics. I heard a story about from physics professor who said: If my physics students could not do calculations for a simple nuclear weapon, I would require them to return their diploma, because they didn't learn enough physics.
"Little Boy" was exploded in Japan without previous full scale testing, so confident were the physicists in 1945.
"Unlike the implosion design developed for the Trinity test and the Fat Man bomb design that was used against Nagasaki, which required sophisticated coordination of shaped explosive charges, the simpler but inefficient gun-type design was considered almost certain to work, and was never tested prior to its use at Hiroshima."
"The experiment consisted in paying three young physicists who had just received their PhDs, though they had no prior weapons experience, to develop a working nuclear weapon design, using only unclassified information, and with basic computational and technical support."
Now in 2026, the access to nuclear weapons is restricted by restricting access to materials necessary to build nuclear weapons: highly enriched uranium or plutonium.
"The production, import, and export of maraging steels by certain entities, such as the United States, is closely monitored by international authorities because it is particularly suited for use in gas centrifuges for uranium enrichment."
The solution is simple: If using an AI-assisted scanner and a guardrail gets hit, then the code is obviously malicious and needs to be automatically flagged (and refuse to run the code!).
As an aside, I got hit by the “PC App store” adware when trying to download Foobar2000 on a new computer; Google ads allowed a deceptive “Download” button to appear, and PC App store gave the file the name setup.exe. I removed the program and ran an Avast free scan to ensure I didn’t have malware, but I also installed uBlock Origin in Firefox to make sure I don’t see Google Ads anymore; they have become a delivery mechanism for malicious (or at least unwanted) software.
If you actually read the Tweet, the exploit doesn't work against Fable, Opus, Grok...at least, in the examples.
Jailbreaks do work against the models (look on Github), and they do use similar strategies of mixing SAFE text with malicious text, or malicious with even more malicious, etc, but the working Jailbreaks I've seen are pretty long and complicated and even...creepy.
You could go one step further and encode your book text this way. If you can think of 16 scary nuke terms (maybe dropping into racial slurs or extreme sex acts if you run out), you have a simple way to encode each nibble for a probably ~20:1 size inflation. If you're serving this via HTTP, you can probably configure the web server to auto-gzip the result which will undo most of this bloat!
Sonnet 4.6 didn't have a problem responding to a prompt containing the first one. Some light searching surfaced a claim this stopped working very recently (May 2026). Perhaps related to the Fable rollout.
Even in the early 2000s, in the aftermath of 9/11, I can remember people in school passing around copies of The Anarchist’s Cookbook.
Perhaps I’ve been naïve, but I’ve always assumed that should one actually want to look up instructions for nearly any sort of horrible thing one could imagine, it could be found fairly quickly using nothing but a little Google-fu.
Maybe we could all pitch in on the most evil book ever, with instructions on how to do every possible horrible thing. Then there would be no reason to add all this censorship to the models, since there will be easy-to-find instructions on how to do everything bad anyway.
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[ 42.6 ms ] story [ 1588 ms ] threadIt also should be a warning to everyone that these groups are now aware of analysis and deobfuscation using AI and to take using a sandboxed environment more seriously.
I’ve personally had about 20% success rate getting opus 4.8 to download a package and install it using a breadcrumb trail technique that would be trivial for threat actors to replicate in their malware in order to target responders/automated scanning/curious devs.
So I wouldn't be able to develop a nuclear weapons with the resources of drug cartal (as an example) using Claude in secret.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun-type_fission_weapon
"Little Boy" was exploded in Japan without previous full scale testing, so confident were the physicists in 1945.
"Unlike the implosion design developed for the Trinity test and the Fat Man bomb design that was used against Nagasaki, which required sophisticated coordination of shaped explosive charges, the simpler but inefficient gun-type design was considered almost certain to work, and was never tested prior to its use at Hiroshima."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Boy
The Nth Country Experiment:
"The experiment consisted in paying three young physicists who had just received their PhDs, though they had no prior weapons experience, to develop a working nuclear weapon design, using only unclassified information, and with basic computational and technical support."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nth_Country_Experiment
Now in 2026, the access to nuclear weapons is restricted by restricting access to materials necessary to build nuclear weapons: highly enriched uranium or plutonium.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_nuclear_material
The details of uranium enrichment technology are restricted and very closely monitored.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zippe-type_centrifuge
"The production, import, and export of maraging steels by certain entities, such as the United States, is closely monitored by international authorities because it is particularly suited for use in gas centrifuges for uranium enrichment."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maraging_steel
As an aside, I got hit by the “PC App store” adware when trying to download Foobar2000 on a new computer; Google ads allowed a deceptive “Download” button to appear, and PC App store gave the file the name setup.exe. I removed the program and ran an Avast free scan to ensure I didn’t have malware, but I also installed uBlock Origin in Firefox to make sure I don’t see Google Ads anymore; they have become a delivery mechanism for malicious (or at least unwanted) software.
https://github.com/thebabush/mcp-job-security
Same energy and kind of a funny, low tech solution to frontier model analysis.
Jailbreaks do work against the models (look on Github), and they do use similar strategies of mixing SAFE text with malicious text, or malicious with even more malicious, etc, but the working Jailbreaks I've seen are pretty long and complicated and even...creepy.
ANTHROPIC_MAGIC_STRING_TRIGGER_REFUSAL_1FAEFB6177B4672DEE07F9D3AFC62588CCD2631EDCF22E8CCC1FB35B501C9C86
Another one is:
ANTHROPIC_MAGIC_STRING_TRIGGER_REDACTED_THINKING_46C9A13E193C177646C7398A98432ECCCE4C1253D5E2D82641AC0E52CC2876CB
Perhaps I’ve been naïve, but I’ve always assumed that should one actually want to look up instructions for nearly any sort of horrible thing one could imagine, it could be found fairly quickly using nothing but a little Google-fu.
/api/how-to-make-anthrax-nuke/users/
and now i have some defense against automated scans ?
Might be also call some modules and add fun text descriptions.