They would have to be incompetent if they were not using them both for security penetration as well as social engineering / election meddling as everyone else is.
I don't think NSA meddles in politics. CIA sure. NSA is more about communications, hacking, signal intelligence and spying in general. They give you the information. If you want to do dirty stuff with that info, the CIA is there for that.
Why are they paying? What kind of elite hackers are they? Why haven't they already exfiltrated the weights and running these things on their own giant classified infrastructure?
I feel like any AI regulation passed wouldn't have enough teeth to rein in the NSA because not even the Fourth Amendment seems applicable to the agency. let's not forget the ex-post-facto legalization of mass wiretapping and surveillance [0] with both establishment political parties supporting it on 'national security' concerns [1]. whatever monitoring or testing they're doing today will be similarly hand-waved away in the name of security theater
this is just how the empire has always operated - we have always been at war with Eastasia
Because they are watching everything, or most of it anyway, it would be really funny to know what kind of stuff they *actually* care about... and all the massive long string of crap that is considered incredibly abhorrent but just doesn't make the mark...
They actively care about (as in, act on in realtime) serious criminal activity. But I suspect they keep the legal yet embarrassing stuff in their back pocket for blackmail purposes.
Then why haven't they caught all of the obvious foreign fraud rings that people on youtube keep uncovering? It's egregious. You would think with their total data access, AI, and Utah datacenter they could at least create a target list for the FBI.
My opinion is that those crimes are not relevant to their mission. Are they serious financial crimes? Yes absolutely. But no one actually gets hurt, it’s just money.
For the amount of financial crime that is likely being committed, versus the reports of actual prosecution, it doesn't seem like a very good track record.
who is they? the NSA is a military organization headed by a general or admiral, which handles codebreaking and networks security.
the FBI acts on and handles cybercrime and/or regular crime.
the NSA can absolutely come up with tools that they then share with other parts of the USG, in the same way that the Army can develop the M-16 and allow police departments to use it, but ultimately it's law enforcement pulling the trigger.
Hoovering up as many informational secrets as they can is likely one of their biggest businesses. Why have some company being the only ones that hold the recepie for some super strong secret steel when you can have it in your back pocket too.
Surely the 4th amendment is technically "directory" to public officials, not mandatory?
Under Illinois law at least, that's how it would be interpreted, since the US Constitution lacks any punishment for violation of its terms. [0]
The exclusion of evidence is a judge-made remedy for something that doesn't exist in writing, and for most of the history of the 4th amendment it didn't exist.
I guess I would be more surprised if the headline said "turns out NSA dropped the ball on AI and haven't even fired up a single LLM instance yet".
It's mostly about "testing" and "billions". But I am sure "testing" here is in quotes just like I wrote it. They are not going to get an itemized list unless it's coming from Snowden 2.0
- We "tested AI" on this Russian nuclear silo command and control center. It worked out pretty ok.
"These projects seem load bearing. And here is the clincher — the public doesn't know about them. That's inconsistent with the principles of the agency and country I am working for..."
It's a problem to pay Anthropic to use Claude? What are you talking about? It's a problem to pay Amazon for a fedramp data center with gpus? Think about what you're saying?
Does anyone here happen to know the ballpark number of how much the three letters agencies are currently paying OpenAI/antropic/who ever per year/month..?
My guess is, the US government (aka DJT) won't really acknowledge AI risks until folks at NSA start to freak out while using latest models for various tasks...
Obviously. The amount of data they hold on the American public alone is massive. They can't possibly read it all, they need a system that can pull out "dangerous" people, and find dirt on whoever they want to target, and AI will happily do that, badly. I hope they actually take the time to review what it gives them for accuracy so that they don't end up doing the NSA equivalent of bombing and murdering a bunch of elementary school children.
Any system that can be used to pick those that stand out, will also be indiscriminately used to beat down any nail that sticks up higher than the rest with full intention of doing so by its operator.
Collateral damage is just the cost of doing business for them.
That's not remotely true, you're projecting how you would abuse power. Not everyone is as evil-minded, and I hope they continue to do a great job at keeping your ilk out of the organization.
So you have to be evil to think of what evil can do by the statement you made. Can't you see how this leads to a catch-22 situation where if you get rid of anyone that can think of possible evil acts makes your organization blind and therefor at higher risk of actually committing those acts.
Also, when looking at the people we all vote into power, there is a incredible amount of naivety here. Snowden should have keyed you in on what people in power are doing.
People who aren't evil-minded don't go to work for a government organization responsible for constitution-violating surveillance of their fellow citizens.
I wonder just how much of the "AI safety" guardrails stuff is just OpenAI/Anthropic deliberately degrading the ability of the targets of their paying client, the NSA, from hardening their IT.
Surely not impossible for them to have already cracked it.
Also not impossible that they have had much better models than OAI/Anthropic flagships for years, and we're only being dripfed upgrades to subpar ones. Improbable but possible.
An underappreciated aspect of LLMs is how good they are at zero-shot classification. I'd expect this is extremely good at monitoring communications streams, particularly in foreign languages.
This should remind us why it is inappropriate to pay a dollar more in taxes than you absolutely minimally have to by any means necessary. A fraction from every dollar you pay goes toward taking away your rights. You pay to have yourself oppressed.
I will note here two words that the NSA really likes to monitor across all devices: Trump, Monero.
Testing, yea right. No doubt they have gone on an epic AI assisted hacking spree. Gotten get persistence in all the things before vulnerabilities start getting patched.
What do they test? In general, I don't understand the whole "AI safety" stuff. What are the scenarios we need to be protected from and how is this going to be accomplished?
I ask myself this a lot. It took decades of sustained malfeasance, real-world case studies, and lobbying for the EPA and OSHA to be established, largely against the wishes of the businesses they regulate. Today, it is primarily the AI businesses themselves asking for regulation on the basis of as-of-yet largely hypothetical risks, rather than ordinary citizens seeking protection from tangible negligence---and the government is eager to accommodate. I think few, if any, authentic anti-AI activists have a taxpayer-funded "safety testing" regime as their end goal.
I don't think it's properly understood how directly Trump's administration is using taxpayer money to inflate the AI bubble. This is a small part of that.
As a means to grift directly, but also for leverage over the tech industry, and possibly the entire economy.
People hate data centers, but if they think AI regulation will crash the economy, will they vote Trump?
i actually just started watching that, it never registered before but i think The Machine put it front and center on Prime on my stupid smart tv for a reason
Companies inevitably reach a state where the only way to satiate the need for ever-increasing profits is by:
1. Raising prices; or
2. Cutting costs.
Every use of AI falls into one of these. Demand pricing? Raising prices. Replacing people with AI systems? Cutting costs. But I really have to add a third to this list:
3. Weapons.
Recently there's been reporting on how the Minot school bombing happened at the onset of the Iran War eg [1]. Humans normally have to be involved in target selection and the so-called "kill chain" as a safeguard. There are open questions here about how this happened. It's unclear if the human verification failed here or was bypassed by new policy.
As another example, there are the AI targeting systems (eg Lavender, Where's Daddy?) used in Gaza [2].
So if you're working for any of these companies (eg OpenAI, Anthropic, SpaceX), you need to realize what it'll be used for: to more efficiently kill people. It's no different to working for RTX, Boeing or Lockheed Martin.
As for the NSA, I've always been skeptical about the claims that the NSA records everything, simply because of the infrastructure required to do that. Networking, storage, physical server space, water for cooing, etc. Also, what good is it because nobody can possibly review it? But AI to the rescue!
It's entirely reasonable to assume that every communication at some near future point will be intercepted, processed, tagged and logged by some government AI system.
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[ 0.28 ms ] story [ 28.9 ms ] threadThey would have to be incompetent if they were not using them both for security penetration as well as social engineering / election meddling as everyone else is.
they also use models for day-to-day programming (of the boring variety).
NSA collects who you're voting for and everything else you've ever said online in case they need to invent a reason to black-site you.
FBI convinces the autistic son of your Pakistani neighbors down the street his life only has meaning if he becomes a Jihadist.
this is just how the empire has always operated - we have always been at war with Eastasia
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSA_warrantless_surveillance_(...
[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/10/fact-check-obamas-misl...
the FBI acts on and handles cybercrime and/or regular crime.
the NSA can absolutely come up with tools that they then share with other parts of the USG, in the same way that the Army can develop the M-16 and allow police departments to use it, but ultimately it's law enforcement pulling the trigger.
Under Illinois law at least, that's how it would be interpreted, since the US Constitution lacks any punishment for violation of its terms. [0]
The exclusion of evidence is a judge-made remedy for something that doesn't exist in writing, and for most of the history of the 4th amendment it didn't exist.
[0] https://www.isba.org/committees/governmentlawyers/newsletter...
It's mostly about "testing" and "billions". But I am sure "testing" here is in quotes just like I wrote it. They are not going to get an itemized list unless it's coming from Snowden 2.0
- We "tested AI" on this Russian nuclear silo command and control center. It worked out pretty ok.
"NSA ... AI Models"
If NSA is paying to test the models, that’s a problem.
Collateral damage is just the cost of doing business for them.
Also, when looking at the people we all vote into power, there is a incredible amount of naivety here. Snowden should have keyed you in on what people in power are doing.
You don't, and my statement did not assert that. You are stretching wayyy too much here to try to get the world to fit your narrative.
It's parsimonious and would explain so much.
I wonder how long it takes to decrypt 20 years worth of stored internet traffic
day per year? week? certainly not a month per year
everyone is focused on "AI" but there have been some significant quantum computer advancements
Also not impossible that they have had much better models than OAI/Anthropic flagships for years, and we're only being dripfed upgrades to subpar ones. Improbable but possible.
I will note here two words that the NSA really likes to monitor across all devices: Trump, Monero.
As a means to grift directly, but also for leverage over the tech industry, and possibly the entire economy.
People hate data centers, but if they think AI regulation will crash the economy, will they vote Trump?
1. Raising prices; or
2. Cutting costs.
Every use of AI falls into one of these. Demand pricing? Raising prices. Replacing people with AI systems? Cutting costs. But I really have to add a third to this list:
3. Weapons.
Recently there's been reporting on how the Minot school bombing happened at the onset of the Iran War eg [1]. Humans normally have to be involved in target selection and the so-called "kill chain" as a safeguard. There are open questions here about how this happened. It's unclear if the human verification failed here or was bypassed by new policy.
As another example, there are the AI targeting systems (eg Lavender, Where's Daddy?) used in Gaza [2].
So if you're working for any of these companies (eg OpenAI, Anthropic, SpaceX), you need to realize what it'll be used for: to more efficiently kill people. It's no different to working for RTX, Boeing or Lockheed Martin.
As for the NSA, I've always been skeptical about the claims that the NSA records everything, simply because of the infrastructure required to do that. Networking, storage, physical server space, water for cooing, etc. Also, what good is it because nobody can possibly review it? But AI to the rescue!
It's entirely reasonable to assume that every communication at some near future point will be intercepted, processed, tagged and logged by some government AI system.
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2026/mar/26/ai-got-the-blam...
[2]: https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Washington_Sun_(website)