James Cooper

I think this story is important because it tells us about the future of cybersecurity (and of course what we can do better at Anthropic). But some of the Washington Post story / reaction on X is wrong. A few corrections: - it didn’t take 12 hours. we saw several days of attempts. After these attempts, they exploited two 3rd party vulnerabilities, one they reported and the other we identified independently (and cut off access) - nothing came close to our most sensitive systems, like model weights or Claude conversations - this wasn't an ordinary bug bounty finding – this involved exploiting 3rd parties and accessing data. While this is unusual and out of scope of our safe harbor policy, we’re grateful these issues were found From my researcher POV, the event is important because I'm concerned this is what the future will look like. Adversaries will use whatever models/tools they can. They’ll target everything with agents 24/7. They’ll hit your dependencies. I think models ~0.5-1 generations behind the current frontier can do this. And these are the dumbest models your adversaries will ever use! So, what to do? You probably want to red team yourself all the time. Current models are *very* creative. I also think we should redesign software / systems so that you’re fundamentally less exposed. (We put out some research recently on formally verifying software and reducing attack surfaces; my mental model is basically “secure code is cheap to write now, so why not rewrite everything”)