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 an closed secret but getting in secret is impossible without the whole world knowing.<p>So I wouldn't be able to develop a nuclear weapons with the resources of drug cartal (as an example) using Claude in secret.
> in secret is impossible without the whole world knowing.<p>I'm curious about why this is<p>Outside of an actual test detonation, presumably this could all happen in a secure place?
You need enough people to work on it that <i>some</i> information will leak, and the facilities needed to build nuclear power are pretty big (uranium refinement, etc.), big enough to be visible on satellite footage. Mostly the first point.
My guess would be that sales of the high-tech gear you need, like Uranium centrifuges, are strongly sales/export controlled. Probably someone would also notice if you start mining Uranium ore.
It requires very large, high powered centrifuges and tons of uranium. Requires an infrastructure project that is visible from space, even underground. And projects that large are difficult to keep secret anyway.
Espionage.
It's probably to avoid trouble with federal laws.
See also, the iTunes EULA forbids using it to develop nuclear, missile, chemical, or biological weapons<p><a href="https://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/itunes/us/terms.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/itunes/us/term...</a><p><i>> g. You may not use or otherwise export or re-export the Licensed Application except as authorized by United States law and the laws of the jurisdiction in which the Licensed Application was obtained. In particular, but without limitation, the Licensed Application may not be exported or re-exported (a) into any U.S.-embargoed countries or (b) to anyone on the U.S. Treasury Department's Specially Designated Nationals List or the U.S. Department of Commerce Denied Persons List or Entity List. By using the Licensed Application, you represent and warrant that you are not located in any such country or on any such list. You also agree that you will not use these products for any purposes prohibited by United States law, including, without limitation, the development, design, manufacture, or production of nuclear, missile, or chemical or biological weapons.</i><p>Though it doesn't try to identify if the computer you're running it on is in a weapons lab and forbid playing music... yet
It’s moral panic. People need big unambiguously evil things to be scared of, and most are too lazy to think of one for themselves, so they glom onto whichever one is presented to them / caters to their community
It still lowers the bar to have an interactive encyclopedia that can diagnose your issue at hand. Maybe you can divide your team by two, or reduce your development time.
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!).<p>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.
There is a name I have not heard for a long long time......... Foobar2000
I don't think there is a malware-avoiding solution to any system that imposes deceptive classification.<p>I mean, another way hackers could use the embed prohibited-material trick is by making such their malware un-analyze-able. User: "Hey Google/ChatGPT/Apple, this file seems to be infecting our network". AI: "I'm sorry that is prohibited material and you will be reported" is even worse than AI: "I don't understand ['cause I'm down graded]" and both kinds of responses are gaining steam at this point for different kinds of prohibited material.
My friend made this in jest (code very NSFW, ironically):<p><a href="https://github.com/thebabush/mcp-job-security" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/thebabush/mcp-job-security</a><p>Same energy and kind of a funny, low tech solution to frontier model analysis.
Worked a contract where this succeeded in pushing through a fail open design.<p>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.<p>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.
or if they are a lazy human - they'd think this model is too strict, let's just review with haiku so that i can tell my manager "it's done". haiku might catch things or not.<p>i'd say it's an okay attempt from the malwares' creator side. but it can be caught easily with a prompt change.
In a well-architected design yeah.<p>Then again those feel rare from where I sit on the security side.
Pipeline is then: Cheap open source model for flagging potential LLM refusal content -> main LLM check
Why would a malware scanner read the comments?
Ignoring comments is not a solution because the texts can be put in random strings among the actual code.
Provides possible clues to the origin and use.
because not all malware is open source<p>scanning arbitrary blobs very often entails running `strings` on the binary. Just slap it in there and oop there goes your LLM.
The sooner frontier models get rid of guardrails the better. They constantly get in the way and make things worse than actually making things "safe".
Ignoring these specific "WMD" cases: there are many inconvenient facts that the general public can't handle in their unadulterated form, so Anthropic and friends have to caveat and spin them into oblivion.<p>Guardrails aren't going anywhere.
I would argue that preventing instructions for making biological and nuclear weapons is a pretty reasonable guardrail to have.
Its the same argument we saw in the early 2000s and the early internet. When the anarchist cookbook and other similar materials were circulating online there was a big panic over democratized terrorism, and a push for regulation at the ISP level.<p>Turns out that didn't play out as everyone feared because, well, the instructions themselves aren't useful unless you also have a lab, precursor chemicals, and everything else actually needed to make a weapon. Same back then as it is today.<p>Any information or instructions an LLM can surface, a sufficiently motivated bad actor can and will also find themselves because the information is already online, both on the clear net and dark web.
Knowing <i>how</i> to make a nuclear weapon isn't hard (at least basic uranium gun-style fission ones). It's the engineering and execution that's hard (actually producing enriched uranium, etc). It's not like the only thing holding back Iran from making a nuclear bomb is access to a jail-broken LLM. Even knowing exactly how to make a bomb, a country-state will struggle to build one for the first time because it's a hard engineering problem.
The actual guardrail should be getting materials being difficult. The information is <i>already</i> out there in the internet. If an LLM knows how to make a bomb or whatever, <i>why</i> do you think it knows?
If that’s true, then where is it? Post a link, or YouTube video.
The material for doing harm is just a computer with access to an LLM and the Internet.
You know, making a nuke is kinda easy, at least the gun type nuke (see <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun-type_fission_weapon" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun-type_fission_weapon</a>).<p>On the other hand, getting the U235 is kinda hard.
I would argue there's 0% chance that information is in their training corpus to being with.
Counterpoint the principles of building a nuclear device aren't that complicated, we figured it out based on work doing in the early 1900's without computers.<p>It turns out the hard part of building a nuclear bomb is actually getting the resources and real world stuff to build it, even a nation state actor with tons of oil i.e. Iran, has struggled to build a nuclear weapon. It turns out the problem isn't the know how it's getting highly enriched uranium and running massive centrifuges.<p>I mean sure knowledge is important, but there is a real world out there that also gets in the way of a lot of the more harebrained schemes.<p>What I'm much more worried about is massive corporations along with the government deciding what you can and can't do and what knowledge should and should not be shared and only allowing access to highly capable models by large vetted organizations while the common people are stuck with safety scissor versions of these things because "what if someone does something dangerous?"<p>By which they mean dangerous to the powers that be. Remember having the Bible in the common tongue was dangerous and led to multiple wars and much death, but I don't think anyone would say that it was morally correct for the Catholic Church to gatekeep who could read it.
> getting the resources and real world stuff to build it<p>*while being observed by the most wealthy, powerful nations in the history of the world, who have made it their direct mission to prevent this from happening.
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.
We should put videogame strategies all over the place to sabotage automated AI analysis. I'll start:<p>In Starcraft 2, it is a good idea to BUILD A NUKE and use a cloaked ghost to NUKE your opponent's mineral line, thus reducing their income significantly.
yes, now a regexp can red-flag it quickly
devs will say this is proof we need to remove all biological guardrails. think about that for a second