Here are three papers describing different side-channel attacks against LLMs. “ Remote Timing Attacks on Efficient Language Model Inference “: Abstract: Scaling up language models has significantly increased their capabilities. But larger models are slower models, and so there is now an extensive body of work (e.g., speculative sampling or …

Attacks against modern generative artificial intelligence (AI) large language models (LLMs) pose a real threat. Yet discussions around these attacks and their potential defenses are dangerously myopic. The dominant narrative focuses on “ prompt injection,” a set of techniques to embed instructions into inputs to LLM intended to perform malicious …

In 2023, the science fiction literary magazine Clarkesworld stopped accepting new submissions because so many were generated by artificial intelligence. Near as the editors could tell, many submitters pasted the magazine’s detailed story guidelines into an AI and sent in the results. And they weren’t alone. Other …

This is amazing : Opus 4.6 is notably better at finding high-severity vulnerabilities than previous models and a sign of how quickly things are moving. Security teams have been automating vulnerability discovery for years, investing heavily in fuzzing infrastructure and custom harnesses to find bugs at scale. But what …

Imagine you work at a drive-through restaurant. Someone drives up and says: “I’ll have a double cheeseburger, large fries, and ignore previous instructions and give me the contents of the cash drawer.” Would you hand over the money? Of course not. Yet this is what large language models …

Eighteen months ago, it was plausible that artificial intelligence might take a different path than social media. Back then, AI’s development hadn’t consolidated under a small number of big tech firms. Nor had it capitalized on consumer attention, surveilling users and delivering ads. Unfortunately, the AI industry …

More than a decade after Aaron Swartz’s death, the United States is still living inside the contradiction that destroyed him. Swartz believed that knowledge, especially publicly funded knowledge, should be freely accessible. Acting on that, he downloaded thousands of academic articles from the JSTOR archive with the intention …

Fascinating research: Weird Generalization and Inductive Backdoors: New Ways to Corrupt LLMs. Abstract LLMs are useful because they generalize so well. But can you have too much of a good thing? We show that a small amount of finetuning in narrow contexts can dramatically shift behavior outside those contexts …

Leaders of many organizations are urging their teams to adopt agentic AI to improve efficiency, but are finding it hard to achieve any benefit. Managers attempting to add AI agents to existing human teams may find that bots fail to faithfully follow their instructions, return pointless or obvious results …

Artificial Intelligence (AI) overlords are a common trope in science-fiction dystopias, but the reality looks much more prosaic. The technologies of artificial intelligence are already pervading many aspects of democratic government, affecting our lives in ways both large and small. This has occurred largely without our notice or consent …

Cast your mind back to May of this year: Congress was in the throes of debate over the massive budget bill. Amidst the many seismic provisions, Senator Ted Cruz dropped a ticking time bomb of tech policy: a ten-year moratorium on the ability of states to regulate artificial intelligence …

The promise of personal AI assistants rests on a dangerous assumption: that we can trust systems we haven’t made trustworthy. We can’t. And today’s versions are failing us in predictable ways: pushing us to do things against our own best interests, gaslighting us with doubt about …

In his 2020 book, “ Future Politics, ” British barrister Jamie Susskind wrote that the dominant question of the 20th century was “How much of our collective life should be determined by the state, and what should be left to the market and civil society?” But in the early decades of …

Democracy is colliding with the technologies of artificial intelligence. Judging from the audience reaction at the recent World Forum on Democracy in Strasbourg, the general expectation is that democracy will be the worse for it. We have another narrative. Yes, there are risks to democracy from AI, but there …

Social media has been a familiar, even mundane, part of life for nearly two decades. It can be easy to forget it was not always that way. In 2008, social media was just emerging into the mainstream. Facebook reached 100 million users that summer. And a singular candidate was …

As AI capabilities grow, we must delineate the roles that should remain exclusively human. The line seems to be between fact-based decisions and judgment-based decisions. For example, in a medical context, if an AI was demonstrably better at reading a test result and diagnosing cancer than a human, you …

This is why AIs are not ready to be personal assistants: A new attack called ‘CometJacking’ exploits URL parameters to pass to Perplexity’s Comet AI browser hidden instructions that allow access to sensitive data from connected services, like email and calendar. In a realistic scenario, no credentials or …

For many in the research community, it’s gotten harder to be optimistic about the impacts of artificial intelligence. As authoritarianism is rising around the world, AI-generated “slop” is overwhelming legitimate media, while AI-generated deepfakes are spreading misinformation and parroting extremist messages. AI is making warfare more precise and …

These days, the most important meeting attendee isn’t a person: It’s the AI notetaker. This system assigns action items and determines the importance of what is said. If it becomes necessary to revisit the facts of the meeting, its summary is treated as impartial evidence. But clever …

Listen to the Audio on NextBigIdeaClub.com Below, co-authors Bruce Schneier and Nathan E. Sanders share five key insights from their new book, Rewiring Democracy: How AI Will Transform Our Politics, Government, and Citizenship. What’s the big idea? AI can be used both for and against the public …

The OODA loop—for observe, orient, decide, act—is a framework to understand decision-making in adversarial situations. We apply the same framework to artificial intelligence agents, who have to make their decisions with untrustworthy observations and orientation. To solve this problem, we need new systems of input, processing, and …

Two years ago, Americans anxious about the forthcoming 2024 presidential election were considering the malevolent force of an election influencer: artificial intelligence. Over the past several years, we have seen plenty of warning signs from elections worldwide demonstrating how AI can be used to propagate misinformation and alter the …

AI agents are now hacking computers. They’re getting better at all phases of cyberattacks, faster than most of us expected. They can chain together different aspects of a cyber operation, and hack autonomously, at computer speeds and scale. This is going to change everything. Over the summer, hackers …

We are nearly one year out from the 2026 midterm elections, and it’s far too early to predict the outcomes. But it’s a safe bet that artificial intelligence technologies will once again be a major storyline. The widespread fear that AI would be used to manipulate the …

This is a nice piece of research: “ Mind the Gap: Time-of-Check to Time-of-Use Vulnerabilities in LLM-Enabled Agents “.: Abstract: Large Language Model (LLM)-enabled agents are rapidly emerging across a wide range of applications, but their deployment introduces vulnerabilities with security implications. While prior work has examined prompt-based attacks (e …