> ...how would they possibly be able to run this airgapped?

A logical airgap that the tool would have to reconfigure the DC's networking infrastructure to overcome [0] would be for the DC staff to put the machines running the tools under test on a VLAN that doesn't have access to anything other than computers on the VLAN. Try to cross over into some other subnet/VLAN or reach out to the Internet, your packets get dropped and/or rejected. It doesn't matter if you change your IP or MAC addresses because the infrastructure only cares about what VLAN your traffic comes from. If you attempt to tag your traffic to avoid this, the infrastructure drops it on the floor because it does the VLAN tagging.

As far as the possibility of physical airgaps, how do you imagine that AWS's Top Secret regions work?

The truth of the matter is that neither OpenAI nor Anthropic wanted to actually isolate this stuff. Their conduct doesn't look like what you'd expect from people who believe that they're working on something so dangerous that it could plausibly wipe out all of humanity.

[0] ...and if the workloads running on client hardware are in a position to be able to attempt to reconfigure the DC's networking infrastructure, someone done fucked up...

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jonhohle 43 minutes ago | parent [-]

I really don’t get it. as mentioned elsewhere, this was something we were doing in colos 20 years ago. Not with AI, but we had duplicated infra for setting up clusters. Infra as a service didn’t even exist, but we could replicate environments on different networks. This seems like table stakes for testing these things now.

	▲	simoncion 15 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> This seems like table stakes for testing these things now. It is, and has been! > I really don’t get it. When clued-in people call shit like this "marketing stunts", this is what they're talking about. They're not saying "No, the actual events you describe didn't happen, you're lying."... they're saying "You've set things up -whether deliberately or incredibly negligently- so that you can apply quite a lot of 'spin' and get a hype-sustaining headline that provides material for your fearmongers to sell to the general public and lawmakers.". Everything below this line is a combination of facts and educated speculation: Both OpenAI and Anthropic have IPOs coming up soon. Companies preparing for IPOs engage in a lot of cost-cutting, because that's when their financials will be scrutinized by the public. On top of that, the rumor is that their datacenter deployments are going far slower than planned, and that in order to keep up the pace of improvements that they've set over the years, they've having to spend immensely more with each new product release. Being able to point to newly-minted US regulations that allow them to to dramatically slow the pace of new product releases [0][1] as the reason why they've dramatically slowed the pace of development -while failing to mention that that's exactly what would have happened had those regulations not been created- would be incredibly good for both companies. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and former FTC chair Lina Khan both have publicly stated that there are many existing laws and regulations that prohibit much of the conduct that OpenAI and Anthropic have engaged in. If the CEOs of those companies genuinely believe that they're working on software tools that are so incredibly dangerous that they're likely to wipe out all of humanity, they can simply stop working on them. Given that they have no interest in doing that, state and federal government can apply the laws and regs that already exist to stop them from continuing work on these WMDs [2] and punish them for the harms that they've caused over the years while working on those WMDs and their precursors. [0] ...and/or regulations that obligate them to sell only to US Government and pre-vetted US business customers and ignore the low-to-negative-profit consumer customers... [1] ...which in turns lets them probably not get crucified by investors and business partners for saying "It turns out that new restrictive regulations mean that we don't need all of those datacenters, so don't worry about how way fewer than we said we'd build got built!"... [2] I think it's fair to call any tool that has a 10% chance of wiping out all of humanity a "WMD".