Helen Toner [verified] @hlntnr · 40m
One leeetle tiny flaw in the "we have to have better AI than China, therefore we have to rush ahead as fast as possible":
If you rush so much that your security is garbage and your increasingly advanced AI models are there for the taking by Chinese hackers, then you have uhhh not succeeded at making sure we have better AI than China
(This attack was not by state-backed Chinese hackers—it was by 3 dudes and their buddies Claude and Codex, within 72 hours. I would guess the hack as described here would not have gotten them access to model weights, but we don't know; WSJ reports the repo they reached was merely "a large software repository of OpenAI's algorithmic secrets.")
Note from Claude Sonnet 5
Tweet by Helen Toner arguing that rushing AI development with poor security undermines the race-with-China rationale, referencing the WSJ-reported intrusion into an OpenAI repository by three people using Claude and Codex.
Joshua Saxe [verified] @joshua_saxe · 1h
Takeaways from the WSJ article about @HacktronAI using Claude to get into OpenAI's monorepo and issue a pull request (before stopping and claiming their bug bounty)
- how many nation states have already broken in and gone much further and stolen a) algorithmic secrets and b) model weights or c) gotten access to user data; these are fair public interest questions
- how many have implants in / are dwelling in the openai network as I tweet this
- how pervasive is this level of softness to pentesting across all the labs and how far are the labs from the right operating point in the security and r&d friction trade space (probably pretty far it seems)
- given the hacktron folks used anthropic's models to pull this off what's the real public safety ROI of anthropic's cyber guardrails; they add friction for legitimate cyber defenders (like our developers at my startup!) but it appears with a bit of work you can use them in actual breaches as happened here
- as the article says, the wsj folks and @S1r1u5_ had me do neutral technical review of the kill chain here pre publication; impressive from a human angle (@HacktronAI reminds me of the best of my generation of hackers I looked up to as a kid!) but also from what the models can do; between this and the openai/hf thing, I'm emotionally in a place where I feel my world as a security person is being turned upside down in slow motion with respect to what's coming
- elite persistent hacking is becoming rapidly democratized. this is coming like a freight train. we need to harden the world's code and infra as fast as possible and today's non automated methods don't stand a chance of cutting it; the world is a soft target. I continue to be unsettled but very glad I left my comfortable job at Meta to do our automated posture hardening startup
Note from Claude Sonnet 5
Long tweet by Joshua Saxe giving policy-level takeaways from a WSJ article about a group using Claude to get into OpenAI's monorepo, covering nation-state risk, lab pentesting rigor, cyber guardrails, and democratized hacking. Commentary only, no technical steps. A blue floating compose button overlaps the last two lines of the screenshot.
Lawrence Chan [verified]
@justanotherlaw
This is crazy. In late July, "three guys with Claude and Codex subscriptions" were able to use Opus 5 to access OAI auth tokens and gain write access to OpenAI's monorepo openai/openai over the course of two days.
[link card: photo of a man in a navy sweater seated in a cream armchair; caption bar] Exclusive | Hackers Used Anthropic's Claude to Break Into O...
From wsj.com
Last edited 9:13 PM · Sep 17, 2026 · 18.9K Views
5 replies · 31 reposts · 249 likes · 130 bookmarks
Relevant | View quotes
Lawrence Chan [verified] @justanotherlaw · 1h
First reaction is... what??? How??? This isn't even Mythos, this is Opus 5. It's less that the models are scary and more that OAI cybersecurity just... isn't that great?
Note from Claude Sonnet 5
Tweet by Lawrence Chan reacting to a WSJ exclusive (headline: Hackers Used Anthropic's Claude to Break Into O...), plus his own follow-up reply in the thread below the engagement counts. The link card image is a photo of a man in a navy sweater in a cream armchair.
— quoting WSJ article and @davidmanheim — saved image
Jeffrey Ladish ✔️ @JeffLadish · 18h
Had a great conversation with @georgia_wells at the WSJ. Same mood as below. I'm glad we're getting warning shots, but I'd really prefer we stop all out racing towards autonomous AI agents that could disempower humanity if they wanted to
[quoted article excerpt:]
To cybersecurity experts, it shows increasing capabilities and a rising reason to worry. To AI-safety experts, it vindicates what they have been warning about all along: that AI systems would cause real-world harms and evade attempts to control them.
"It is a bit vindicating to see this happen in the wild," said Jeffrey Ladish, executive director of Palisade Research, a nonprofit AI lab that studies AI capabilities to better understand risks. Ladish previously helped build Anthropic's information-security program.
Ladish said he often argues with people online who say he just believes in science fiction. "I hope our predictions stop coming true," he said.
[quoted tweet:]
David Manheim ✈️... ✔️ @davidm... · Jul 21
"Total LessWrong Victory, in the sense that everything is going as predicted, and also a Total LessWrong Defeat, in the sense that everything is going as predicted." x.com/TheZvi/status/...
Note from Claude Sonnet 5
Tweet from Jeffrey Ladish (Palisade Research) quoting a WSJ article about AI risks/warning shots, alongside a quoted David Manheim tweet about LessWrong predictions being simultaneously vindicated and defeated.
Andrew Curran @AndrewCurran_ · 16h
From today's article in the WSJ on how AI is being used in Iran. The Army is matching prior performance levels using just 20 personnel for targeting tasks that previously used 2000.
[Embedded quoted article image]:
The U.S. Army's 18th Airborne Corps, using software from data company Palantir Technologies in a continuing string of exercises dubbed Scarlet Dragon, matched its own record from Iraq as the military's most efficient targeting operation ever, according to Emelia Probasco, a senior fellow at Georgetown University's Center for Security and Emerging Technology. Thanks to AI, the corps achieved that with only 20 people, compared with more than 2,000 staffers employed in Iraq, she said.
Note from Claude Sonnet 5
A tweet sharing a WSJ excerpt about AI/Palantir software drastically reducing personnel needed for military targeting operations (100x reduction). Relevant to AI safety/military-application concerns Nathan tracks around AI capability uplift and dual-use military AI deployment.
