THE ATLANTIC – Technology | Internet & Technology

Earlier this fall, a team of security experts at the AI company Anthropic uncovered an elaborate cyber-espionage scheme. Hackers—strongly suspected by Anthropic to be working on behalf of the Chinese government—targeted government agencies and large corporations around the world. And it appears that they used Anthropic’s own AI product, Claude Code, to do most of the work.Anthropic published its report on the incident earlier this month. Jacob Klein, Anthropic’s head of threat intelligence, explained to me that the hackers took advantage of Claude’s “agentic” abilities—which enable the program to take an extended series of actions rather than focusing on one basic task. They were able to equip the bot with a number of external tools, such as password crackers, allowing Claude to analyze potential security vulnerabilities, write malicious code, harvest passwords, and exfiltrate data.Once Claude had its instructions, it was left to work on its own for hours; when its… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.

Over the weekend, Elon Musk’s X rolled out a feature that had the immediate result of sowing maximum chaos. The update, called “About This Account,” allows people to click on the profile of an X user and see such information as: which country the account was created in, where its user is currently based, and how many times the username has been changed. Nikita Bier, X’s head of product, said the feature was “an important first step to securing the integrity of the global town square.” Roughly four hours later, with the update in the wild, Bier sent another post: “I need a drink.”Almost immediately, “About This Account” stated that many prominent and prolific pro-MAGA accounts, which signaled that they were run by “patriotic” Americans, were based in countries such as Nigeria, Russia, India, and Thailand. @MAGANationX, an account with almost 400,000 followers and whose bio says it is a… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.

We cannot say for sure if Elon Musk dialed up the flattery quotient on his chatbot, Grok, after the author Joyce Carol Oates publicly humiliated him this month. What we can say is that, yesterday, Grok did assert, in response to a question from an X user, that “Musk edges out” Jesus Christ, son of God, as a role model for society; the bot cited Musk’s “relentless innovation, risk-taking, and a commitment to preserving our species through space exploration and AI safeguards.”Musk triumphed in many such hypotheticals. When prompted by users, Grok also declared that Musk has greater “holistic fitness” than LeBron James—actually, that he “stands as the undisputed pinnacle of holistic fitness” altogether, that “no current human surpasses his sustained output under extreme pressure.” One user asked if Musk would be better than Jeffrey Epstein at running a private island, and Grok explained that “if Elon Musk ever tried… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.

Elon Musk, already the world’s richest man, is now on the path to becoming its first trillionaire. Tesla’s shareholders recently approved a massive pay package for the CEO, including some $1 trillion in stock options. But the payout will happen only if certain targets are met—including Musk’s successful deployment of 1 million Optimus robots.Named after a Transformers character, because of course it is, Optimus is a humanoid machine that’s supposed to be able to complete boring and dangerous work in place of humans. The robot was unveiled in 2021, when Tesla held an “AI Day” event detailing its future plans. Musk declared then that Tesla needs to be “much more than an electric-car company,” and to that end, it would combine its advancements in chips, autonomous driving, and batteries into this robot.Optimus would be able to do factory work, sure, but that’s just the starting point. Over time, Musk has… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.

On Wednesday, I texted Nick Fuentes about being the center of an existential crisis in American conservatism. Fuentes, a white-nationalist influencer, appeared on The Tucker Carlson Show in October, which has enraged a number of prominent figures on the right and set off a spiraling conversation about where to draw the line on whom the party welcomes into its mainstream. “I don’t consider myself to be hateful or prejudiced,” he told me. “Just provocative and maybe tribalistic.”Fuentes has repeatedly praised Hitler, likened “organized Jewry” to a “transnational gang,” said that women should be “subordinate” to their husband, and called Chicago “nigger hell.” In our text exchange, I reminded him of a clip from 2019 in which he said Jim Crow “was better for them; it’s better for us.” “What that 10 seconds clip from 7 years ago that is clearly a joke?” he responded. “You think thats a fair characterization… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.