Latest Essays
If an AI Chatbot Misleads You, Who Is to Blame?
A court in Germany found that Google was responsible for what its chatbots say in search summaries. This is the accountability we need
Earlier this month, a German court ruled that Google is liable for its AI search summaries. Rejecting defenses like “users can check for themselves,” and that they generally know “that information generated with AI should not be blindly trusted,” the court held that the AI’s summaries are reflections of the company and “above all an expression of Google’s business activities.”
This is the latest skirmish in a decades-old battle over internet publishing. Historically, there were two different types of information distributors: carriers and publishers. A phone company is a carrier. It’ll transmit whatever you say, even discussions about committing a crime. Words are words, and the phone company does not know—nor is it liable for—the words you choose to speak. A newspaper, on the other hand, is a publisher. It decides the words it publishes, and what quotes to include in its articles. If those words or quotes are defamatory or otherwise illegal, it’s liable…
The Anthropic “Fable” Saga Proves: We Have Opened the AI Pandora’s Box. What Now?
We have opened the AI Pandora’s box. Now we have to make the best of it
On June 9th, Anthropic released its Fable generative AI model. Three days later, the US government classified it as a dangerous munition, and used its export-control authority to prohibit any foreign nationals from accessing it. Unable to differentiate between Americans and foreigners, the company shut off access for everyone.
The government’s actions won’t help. The problem isn’t any one particular model; it’s the general trend of increasing AI capabilities. And any real solution requires the sort of collective action that just isn’t possible right now…
AI Use by the US Government Is Ballooning. And the Lack of Transparency Is Troubling
The list of government AI use cases has ballooned by 70% since Biden left office and includes many plans to hand over sensitive governmental functions to AI
On 14 April, the Trump administration quietly acknowledged the widespread use of AI to automate government processes. The office of management and budget (OMB) disclosed a staggering 3,611 active or planned use cases for AI across the federal government. The list has ballooned by 70% from the one published in the final year of the Biden administration, and includes many disturbing-seeming plans to hand over sensitive governmental functions to AI.
Scanning this list, many readers may find many causes for alarm. It represents a transfer of decision processes from human to machine on a massive scale over matters of individual freedom, public health and well-being, nuclear reactor safety and more…
Bernie Sanders’ AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Plan Is Good. But We Think This Is Better
While we do not outright oppose the taking of AI company stock, or of a US a sovereign wealth fund, there are better ways to achieve the senator’s goals
Let no one accuse Bernie Sanders of ducking the big questions. Writing in the New York Times last week, the senator asked: “Will the future of humanity be determined by a handful of billionaires who have promoted and developed AI, with virtually no democratic input, who stand to become even richer and more powerful than they are today?”
We agree entirely that this is one of the most potent questions facing global democracy today. Our book, Rewiring Democracy, surveys the emerging uses for and impacts of AI in democracy around the world and reaches the same conclusion: that the most urgent risk posed by AI is the …
Cyber Pioneers Ponder Past as Prologue
As part of their 20th Anniversary celebration, Dark Reading asked five cybersecurity industry leaders who wrote blogs or columns for them over the years to select their favorite piece and share their reflections on the topic today. This is my section.
Schneier on the Intersection of Encryption and AI
Renowned technologist and author Bruce Schneier contributed a column on June 20, 2010, warning about cryptography’s inability to secure modern networks, a point he says he has been trying to argue since 2000.
“For a while now, I’ve pointed out that cryptography is singularly ill-suited to solve the major network security problems of today: denial-of-service attacks, website defacement, theft of credit card numbers, identity theft, viruses and worms, DNS attacks, network penetration, and so on…
Chilling Effects of Trump’s War on Free Speech Extend Far Beyond Campus Walls—and That’s the Point
This essay also appeared in Salon.
Younger Americans have soured on the second Donald Trump presidency, but they are not protesting it.
Despite an unpopular Iran war and an even more unpopular Trump administration, college campus protests nationwide have gone silent. And at many schools, student activism is virtually nonexistent.
This silence comes in the wake of a relentless Trump administration war on campus speech that has involved lawsuits, arrests, deportations and expulsions.
Reports cite a range of complicated factors for the restraint, from apathy to technology-induced incapacity. But as …
Rewiring Democracy: AI & the Struggle for Open Knowledge in Brazil
Rewiring Democracy Series, Part 3
This is the third in a multi-part series by Sanders and Schneier going into depth on real-world examples of democratic technologies from their book, Rewiring Democracy: How AI Will Transform Our Politics, Government, and Citizenship. Their first piece was about the Japanese digital democracy party “Team Mirai” and their second was about the Swiss Public AI model “Apertus.”
It’s not an easy time for those trying to do good in the world, especially for those in the Global South. Financial pressures from the collapse of foreign aid, surging energy costs, and inflation combine with rising authoritarianism and a …
How Dangerous Is Anthropic’s Mythos AI?
The system's power is comparable to others—but it still has frightening implications for the future of hacking.
Last month, Anthropic made a remarkable announcement about its new model, Claude Mythos Preview: it was so good at finding security vulnerabilities in software that the company would not release it to the general public. Instead, it would only be available to a select group of companies to scan and fix their own software.
The announcement requires context—but it contained an essential truth.
While Anthropic’s model is really good at finding software vulnerabilities, so are other models. The UK’s AI Security Institute found that OpenAI’s GPT-5.5, already generally available, is comparable in capability. The company Aisle …
What Anthropic’s Mythos Means for the Future of Cybersecurity
The new reality rewards systems that can be tested and patched continuously
Two weeks ago, Anthropic announced that its new model, Claude Mythos Preview, can autonomously find and weaponize software vulnerabilities, turning them into working exploits without expert guidance. These were vulnerabilities in key software like operating systems and internet infrastructure that thousands of software developers working on those systems failed to find. This capability will have major security implications, compromising the devices and services we use every day. As a result, Anthropic is not releasing the model to the general public, but instead to a …
Mythos Sets the World on Edge. What Comes Next May Push Us Beyond
Last week, Anthropic pulled back the curtain on Claude Mythos Preview, an AI model so capable at finding and exploiting software vulnerabilities that the company decided it was too dangerous to release to the public. Instead, access has been restricted to roughly 50 organizations—Microsoft, Apple, Amazon Web Services, CrowdStrike and other vendors of critical infrastructure—under an initiative called Project Glasswing.
The announcement was accompanied by a barrage of hair-raising anecdotes: thousands of vulnerabilities uncovered across every major…
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.
