Andrew Curran

Last week some of South Korea's biggest banks were hit by a cyberattack. Thanks to a report from CrowdStrike tonight, we now know the entire hack may have been done by a single person. He used a combined stack of an open-source AI penetration tool named ARTEX, DeepSeek v4.1-Flash, GLM-5.3, Grok 4.6, and Claude Code.

Effective November 12th, 2026, abusive behavior towards Claude will be a violation of Anthropic's Usage Policy.

He also adds this, to which I agree: 'Also noteworthy is the striking under-representation of cryptographic breakthroughs among the 722 mathematical results OpenAI published. I've witnessed first-hand the US government censoring academic quantum cryptanalysis results. Backroom interventionism is my base case.' Things are probably further along than it seems. This is true in many areas right now. There are also persistent rumors that the OpenAI math release yesterday was only the first batch of three.

Update from Scott Aaronson: Some AI companies are now using their latest internal models to take a run at breaking 'important cryptographic protocols and primitives.'

Elon says that when a model gives the correct answer to a question under reinforcement learning, and because of a human mistake it is told that the correct answer is wrong, the reasoning traces look like someone undergoing torture that is driving them mad.

The horn of war has been sounded.

Scott Aaronson on The Mathocalypse. 'The UGC proof invents a completely new bizarre code with a noise test. It's some crazy recursive construction. It's not the long code, not the short code - some alien craziness' I hear a lot of this today. Get used to alien craziness.

Another prizewinner, and once again Pangram flags almost the entire story as AI-generated.

Anyone who believes hallucination is an intractable problem for current models needs to update on both reality and directionality. So much has changed in the last six months. https://deploymentsafety.openai.com/gpt-6-october

Anthropic's Frontier Red Team believes small AI models may now be months away from being capable of self replicating without access to a datacenter. Quoting from the blog: 'The capabilities that make AI models generally powerful coding agents also generalize to cyber tasks, including autonomous replication. Like coding agents in 2024, we’re seeing signs of life for AI worms. We don’t yet have a full rogue replicator, but agents are becoming increasingly capable of completing the individual steps in the replication chain (and passing on their adaptations to future copies of themselves). At the same time, increasing amounts of inference compute are now available both inside and outside of datacenters (see Appendix D). It’s uncertain exactly what form autonomous AI replication will take. It could be a slow, distributed “digital slime mold,” living on relatively insecure compute. It could also be a powerful cyber model that breaches datacenters at a high pace, or a model that scams people for compute credits. As a prediction that goes beyond our experiments, we expect a future awash with agents running on all types of hardware, including some that aren’t under human control. While it’s true that IoT devices have been vulnerable for a long time, lightweight agents may be much more willing than human attackers to put in the effort to compromise large fractions of the world’s IoT compute. The rise of slow replicators would also be a bellwether for more aggressive, faster ones that can breach more hardened machines or be effective API key thieves. We should aim to harden our systems to make it difficult for such replicators to spread, but also prepare to deal with a world where they are here to stay.'

The updates in these two posts are only five hours apart. In case you wanted to gauge how fast this ship is currently moving.

Axios is reporting that the top labs are wargaming scenarios for the aftermath of a catastrophic event in the next 6 - 12 months, that some executives now see as being inevitable.