Trust now one, including the spy guys and gals.
Signal agencies in Australia, the US, the UK, New Zealand and Canada sound alarm after Trump blocks foreign nationals from Anthropic’s Fable AI model
Powerful AI models capable of devastating new cyber attacks on governments and businesses are mere months away, intelligence agencies for the Five Eyes have warned in a rare joint statement, urging leaders to “act now”.
The surprising public intervention by signals agencies for Australia, the US, the UK, New Zealand and Canada comes after the Trump administration earlier this month decided to block “foreign nationals” from using a much-hyped AI model built by tech company Anthropic, called Fable.
The statement, issued late on Monday night, Sydney time, said while AI “would help us improve cyber defence over time, it also accelerates the speed, scale, and sophistication of cyber threats”.
“Frontier AI models are anticipated to exceed current industry expectations, fundamentally transforming both offensive and defensive cyber capabilities. The timeline is not years, it is months,” the warning by Five Eyes agencies said.
“In this environment, cyber resilience is integral to advancing business continuity, market confidence, and long-term value.”
The cybersecurity agencies said the leaps in AI models showed the technology would lower barriers for bad actors and increase the speed and complexity of attacks.
“A whole-of-organisation and whole-of-society response is required,” the statement continued. The Five Eyes is an intelligence alliance set up between the five countries after the second world war.
“Cyber risk can no longer be treated as a purely technical issue. This is a core business risk and leadership responsibility.”
Generative AI models are powerful new tools capable of looking for vulnerabilities in cyber security systems, and they can help exploit those vulnerabilities as well as repair them.
“What’s different about the latest [AI models] ones is they’re very good at generating exploits,” Olivia Shen, an expert in national security and AI at the University of Sydney’s United States Studies Centre, said.
While no AI models or companies are mentioned in the Five Eyes statement by name, many around the world have their eyes on Anthropic’s advanced tier of tools.
One of the major tech company’s latest inventions is called Fable 5, a supposedly more community-friendly version of Mythos – a powerful AI model released earlier this year capable of detecting vulnerabilities in cyber systems that is only available to vetted organisations and companies because of concerns it could be exploited....
....MUCH MORE
Here's hoping we won't have to use the old "The calls are coming from inside the house" movie trope.
Whenever I hear a spook talk, Brennan, Clapper, Dearlove, Steele, any of them, I am reminded of the John le Carré line:
“What do you think spies are: priests, saints, and martyrs? They’re a squalid procession of vain fools, traitors too, yes; pansies, sadists, and drunkards, people who play cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten lives. Do you think they sit like monks in London balancing the rights and wrongs?”They lie for a living. They're professional liars, the very nature of their business is lies and trafficking in lies.
— Alec Leamas, The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, 1963
[note: le Carré worked for both MI5 and MI6, he knew these people]
Possibly also of interest:
May 18 - "UN leads call to prepare ‘for when digital systems fail’"
And then I think "Nah, it's probably nothing."...
If interested see also "The WEF - Carnegie Endowment Cyber Threats Report" wherein the suggestion is made that the thing to do in anticipation of cyberattacks is merge the major banks, their regulators, and law enforcement into one entity.
And related:
