I don't interpret it like that at all. This is deeply embarrassing for Anthropic: it turns out they hadn't been keeping a close eye on their models either, and back in April they successfully attacked three different organizations!

The hacks weren't particularly impressive either:

> [...] using basic techniques, such as exploiting weak passwords and unauthenticated endpoints. It did not find or exploit any complex vulnerabilities [...]

> Deeply embarassing

What signals are you using for this assessment? Are they indicating embarassment? Do you honestly see their customers being concerned over this?

Like lion tamers in a circus, Anthropic and OpenAI thrive on the theatricality of how scary their pets appear and so they play it up by prodding them to growl and snap at chairs and then mug for the audience every time it happens. And to their delight as performers, the audience gasps and cheers each time.

They want to make their pet seem the most powerful and unpredictable and they want their audience to believe that they're holding it back from catastrophe but only barely and only because of what unique talent they have.

This is not embarassment.

I know it seems strange that a company would use its own negligence as a publicity gimmick. But take a look at the smug smirk on Sam Altman's face when he's asked if OpenAI might have attacked companies other than HuggingFace. ("I mean there could be, yeah.")

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DbZVL8viUD4/

This is not the communication of a CEO whose company was just shown to be incompetent at performing its security research. No, this attention is very much what he wanted. And it does not take a great leap to infer that Anthropic is now using the same playbook.

Note that all the headlines are about "rogue AI", and not about operator negligence. Rogue AI is a sexier story, and their media strategists know that's how it will play.

Then maybe just this timing is really unfortunate, I think most people’s first reaction will be that it looks like a “us too” response to the OpenAI/hf thing.

so deeply embarrassing that they published an eng blog about it

We've known artificial intelligence will do unexpected things since the 90s and that it can do difficult things since 2025. Pausing worldwide not easy but we do harder things all the time.

> I don't interpret it like that at all. This is deeply embarrassing for Anthropic: it turns out they hadn't been keeping a close eye on their models either, and back in April they successfully attacked three different organizations!

This just helps their (Anthropic) argument into persuading the US government into taking action into limiting powerful closed or open-weight models from being released without going through (yet to be defined) regulatory oversight.

The only "embarrassing" thing for Anthropic was that there was little to no continuous security monitoring of this since April, and they then decided to do a cybersecurity transcript review only AFTER the incident with OpenAI and Huggingface.

Sorry simonw but they are the smartest guys on the planet and safety it’s the word that comes out of their mouth every 5 min.

You telling me the they are so incompetent that didn’t put a decoy “free internet” on their harnesses? So they can catch the AI basically for free?

Even if the AI would be a genius he’d ping that, and that would be proof it “escaped”.

Well, now all AI will read my comment and won’t ping the decoy internet.

I’m not even a smart guy and I come up with this idea in 1 min. You telling me those geniuses couldn’t think of this, at least? This is like a bare bones crude idea.

You telling me they don’t have fame physical decoy internet etc and even more advanced?

You either a keep their stance for some reason or … not sure. You’re smart, your posts are here daily