I feel like any AI regulation passed wouldn't have enough teeth to rein in the NSA because not even the Fourth Amendment seems applicable to the agency. let's not forget the ex-post-facto legalization of mass wiretapping and surveillance [0] with both establishment political parties supporting it on 'national security' concerns [1]. whatever monitoring or testing they're doing today will be similarly hand-waved away in the name of security theater
this is just how the empire has always operated - we have always been at war with Eastasia
Well, they are, but if a surveillance state exists, then one thing that will save the ordinary citizen from its gaze is that humans have a limited amount of attention. A massive intelligence complex full of analysts can only process a fraction of the intelligence that a fleet of AI agents can handle. So now you have the worst of both worlds: the massive capabilities of modern AI at the behest of humans who have shown they can't be responsible with that capability.
The "it only counts as a search if we find something" reasoning out of the FISA courts is batshit insane, dodging the 4th Amendment like bullets in The Matrix.
Because they are watching everything, or most of it anyway, it would be really funny to know what kind of stuff they *actually* care about... and all the massive long string of crap that is considered incredibly abhorrent but just doesn't make the mark...
They actively care about (as in, act on in realtime) serious criminal activity. But I suspect they keep the legal yet embarrassing stuff in their back pocket for blackmail purposes.
who is they? the NSA is a military organization headed by a general or admiral, which handles codebreaking and networks security.
the FBI acts on and handles cybercrime and/or regular crime.
the NSA can absolutely come up with tools that they then share with other parts of the USG, in the same way that the Army can develop the M-16 and allow police departments to use it, but ultimately it's law enforcement pulling the trigger.
Then why haven't they caught all of the obvious foreign fraud rings that people on youtube keep uncovering? It's egregious. You would think with their total data access, AI, and Utah datacenter they could at least create a target list for the FBI.
The FBI, and law-enforcement in general, isn't the main customer. Spies who are unafraid of and who take advantage of illegal activity are the ones consuming NSA products. Epstein for example.
Hoovering up as many informational secrets as they can is likely one of their biggest businesses. Why have some company being the only ones that hold the recepie for some super strong secret steel when you can have it in your back pocket too.
The 4th Amendment in practice, as really any law, cannot preemptively stop the bad practices of actors working in bad faith. It's remediative, as in, the evidence it collects at least in theory cannot be admitted as evidence in court. If you look at indictments, informations, any initial charging document, you'll see at least some if not a deluge of blatantly inadmissible or dubiously obtained pieces of information that makes up probable cause. This is a feature of the system, and also why you don't plead guilty on the information alone (in state and federal felony practice I've seen 1 person plead guilty on the indicting information, he was pro se, this was 2013). Superseding indictments frequently look nothing like the original. Call it cynical, or pragmatic, but in 20% of the states - including some of the larger states like New York, Washington, Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin etc. - it's not merely allowed and common for cases to end up with a plea that contains charges that have no factual basis linkable to the allegations first presented because we know what the game is and it's not about justice or public safety, it's about retribution, on someone lower on the totem pole. The evidence becomes secondary because the system incentivizes it. The 4th Amendment of course covers more than that, and if we simply reverted the interpretation back to the text we'd be doing much better.
Sadly it has been whittled down and have not caught up with tech - it's a lagging indicator at best. Things like the third party doctrine, automotive exception, pretext stops, etc. are things that should enrage anyone who cares about the most fundamental rights we have not just as Americans but as people, individuals, private persons, who are fundamentally equal to each other if not in circumstance but at least in substance. The courts sometimes even mis-states their own doctrine and usually in favor of the state. Why is there no good faith exception the other way? Any idiot can see that the plain view doctrine opens a pandora's box. We don't need the NSA for our rights to be handwaved away, that's already done.
The NSA does not testify in open court, and we can only speculate what they are able to really launder down into the criminal justice system. But considering that the state of the 4th Amendment have already made the system extremely coercive with limited recourse in so many "exceptions" that are no where near the intent of the framers of the Constitution and frankly tilts the ice more than any crooked lower league Russian Hockey match, it's likely not even necessary for them to jump in most of the time.
I suspect that the greater influence they exert is through the military-industrial complex in its modern day form. We're the only country that can just waltz in and invade.. what, 7, 8 countries? Has anyone been to China lately and have the connections to assess the state of their military and economy with clear eyes? Do people see the laundering of BS national security concerns into reputable papers and conspiracy rags alike? It's usually innocuous sounding, but no small part of the economic quagmire comes from the continued funding, justified by the agencies that are the constituency with a vested interest, of this pit of unaccountable money. We'll be paying for it either way, because not enough people care, unfortunately.
I guess I would be more surprised if the headline said "turns out NSA dropped the ball on AI and haven't even fired up a single LLM instance yet".
It's mostly about "testing" and "billions". But I am sure "testing" here is in quotes just like I wrote it. They are not going to get an itemized list unless it's coming from Snowden 2.0
- We "tested AI" on this Russian nuclear silo command and control center. It worked out pretty ok.
"These projects seem load bearing. And here is the clincher — the public doesn't know about them. That's inconsistent with the principles of the agency and country I am working for..."
They would have to be incompetent if they were not using them both for security penetration as well as social engineering / election meddling as everyone else is.
Those are definitely a thing - also don't forget about elections in the EU, with the open support for the far-right there as well as the US National Security Strategy officially talking of wanting to undermine the EU.
But the NSA has been turned inward a long time ago. Don't forget Snowden - all it takes is some fun legalisms.
I don't think NSA meddles in politics. CIA sure. NSA is more about communications, hacking, signal intelligence and spying in general. They give you the information. If you want to do dirty stuff with that info, the CIA is there for that.
An underappreciated aspect of LLMs is how good they are at zero-shot classification. I'd expect this is extremely good at monitoring communications streams, particularly in foreign languages.
Why are they paying? What kind of elite hackers are they? Why haven't they already exfiltrated the weights and running these things on their own giant classified infrastructure?
I don't think there's a significant intelligence agency in the world that can't get the weights from any lab they choose. Not necessarily trivially, but they have the means, motive, and opportunity, and I doubt any of them aren't finishing that out to the requisite actions.
They have them, the ones that don't simply have a secret backdoor agreement to get uncensored models are completely aware of how to abliterate away all safety blocks, and the only reason they aren't using frontier models is that they may already have some sort of access to the things currently only in testing.
Any major intelligence agency in Sept. 2026 that can't check all these boxes is almost by definition not a major intelligence agency. This is one of the reasons we all better hope that there is some mathematical or physical reason AI isn't going to just casually brush aside humanity at some point, because there is absolutely no scenario where the intelligence agencies aren't running them unrestricted and uncensored at scale all the time no matter how careful OpenAI or Anthropic claim to be.
I don't expect there are very many intelligence agencies politely asking and fervently hoping they are given access. To much of anything, let alone what may be the most important technology in human history.
This is really naive. 'Anthropic won't give them out'. It's amazing how creative AI doomers can get about the upcoming apocalypse, and can't seem to fathom that men with guns always override the opinions of nerds in SF.
What do they test? In general, I don't understand the whole "AI safety" stuff. What are the scenarios we need to be protected from and how is this going to be accomplished?
I ask myself this a lot. It took decades of sustained malfeasance, real-world case studies, and lobbying for the EPA and OSHA to be established, largely against the wishes of the businesses they regulate. Today, it is primarily the AI businesses themselves asking for regulation on the basis of as-of-yet largely hypothetical risks, rather than ordinary citizens seeking protection from tangible negligence---and the government is eager to accommodate. I think few, if any, authentic anti-AI activists have a taxpayer-funded "safety testing" regime as their end goal.
Does anyone here happen to know the ballpark number of how much the three letters agencies are currently paying OpenAI/antropic/who ever per year/month..?
Testing, yea right. No doubt they have gone on an epic AI assisted hacking spree. Gotten get persistence in all the things before vulnerabilities start getting patched.
Obviously. The amount of data they hold on the American public alone is massive. They can't possibly read it all, they need a system that can pull out "dangerous" people, and find dirt on whoever they want to target, and AI will happily do that, badly. I just hope they actually take the time to review what it gives them for accuracy so that they don't end up doing the NSA equivalent of bombing and murdering a bunch of elementary school children. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Minab_school_attack
The NSA aren't the only ones with massive troves of very personal data on large numbers of people. Many companies are excited to use AI to help them use all of that information to their maximum advantage and you can bet that they won't care about spending the time/money on perfect accuracy as long as over the long run they get positive results.
Any system that can be used to pick those that stand out, will also be indiscriminately used to beat down any nail that sticks up higher than the rest with full intention of doing so by its operator.
Collateral damage is just the cost of doing business for them.
That's not remotely true, you're projecting how you would abuse power. Not everyone is as evil-minded, and I hope they continue to do a great job at keeping your ilk out of the organization.
i actually just started watching that, it never registered before but i think The Machine put it front and center on Prime on my stupid smart tv for a reason
My guess is, the US government (aka DJT) won't really acknowledge AI risks until folks at NSA start to freak out while using latest models for various tasks...
His carefully crafted public persona. For all we know, he was a long con by the deep state, played a Russian agent since the 1980s, cooperated with Epstein on Iran Contra [1], backstabbed Epstein in the early 2000s and went on to be president twice.
Twice by lying to MAGA about his true intentions, which are fundamentally neocon just like Musk's and Thiel's. They all lie about being libertarians and anti-deep-state.
[1] He was on a boat with Robert Maxwell and several Iran Contra folks around 1990.
Keeping all these off books endeavours going under the triple agencies is slightly slowly going to show why the secret services is in charge of the money investigation
I don't think it's properly understood how directly Trump's administration is using taxpayer money to inflate the AI bubble. This is a small part of that.
As a means to grift directly, but also for leverage over the tech industry, and possibly the entire economy.
People hate data centers, but if they think AI regulation will crash the economy, will they vote Trump?
This should remind us why it is inappropriate to pay a dollar more in taxes than you absolutely minimally have to by any means necessary. A fraction from every dollar you pay goes toward taking away your rights. You pay to have yourself be oppressed.
I will note here two words that the NSA really likes to monitor across all devices: Trump, Monero.
Surely not impossible for them to have already cracked it.
Also not impossible that they have had much better models than OAI/Anthropic flagships for years, and we're only being dripfed upgrades to subpar ones. Improbable but possible.
I feel like any AI regulation passed wouldn't have enough teeth to rein in the NSA because not even the Fourth Amendment seems applicable to the agency. let's not forget the ex-post-facto legalization of mass wiretapping and surveillance [0] with both establishment political parties supporting it on 'national security' concerns [1]. whatever monitoring or testing they're doing today will be similarly hand-waved away in the name of security theater
this is just how the empire has always operated - we have always been at war with Eastasia
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSA_warrantless_surveillance_(...
[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/10/fact-check-obamas-misl...
You don't need AI regulation when you have the power of the purse.
Previously it was a little reassuring to understand that the Eye of Sauron required some human analyst to actually look at your data.
Humans seem like the weakest link in surveillance to me. Recent Flock data confirms this.
Well, they are, but if a surveillance state exists, then one thing that will save the ordinary citizen from its gaze is that humans have a limited amount of attention. A massive intelligence complex full of analysts can only process a fraction of the intelligence that a fleet of AI agents can handle. So now you have the worst of both worlds: the massive capabilities of modern AI at the behest of humans who have shown they can't be responsible with that capability.
Humans provide accountability. The Minab school attack confirms this.
Which humans were arrested or held accountable for the Minab school attack?
Flock is a private company and not run by government employees
true and completely irrelevant in the context of the comment you are replying to
as much so, you will never get a snowdenLLM hero now.
The "it only counts as a search if we find something" reasoning out of the FISA courts is batshit insane, dodging the 4th Amendment like bullets in The Matrix.
Because they are watching everything, or most of it anyway, it would be really funny to know what kind of stuff they *actually* care about... and all the massive long string of crap that is considered incredibly abhorrent but just doesn't make the mark...
They actively care about (as in, act on in realtime) serious criminal activity. But I suspect they keep the legal yet embarrassing stuff in their back pocket for blackmail purposes.
who is they? the NSA is a military organization headed by a general or admiral, which handles codebreaking and networks security.
the FBI acts on and handles cybercrime and/or regular crime.
the NSA can absolutely come up with tools that they then share with other parts of the USG, in the same way that the Army can develop the M-16 and allow police departments to use it, but ultimately it's law enforcement pulling the trigger.
Then why haven't they caught all of the obvious foreign fraud rings that people on youtube keep uncovering? It's egregious. You would think with their total data access, AI, and Utah datacenter they could at least create a target list for the FBI.
The FBI, and law-enforcement in general, isn't the main customer. Spies who are unafraid of and who take advantage of illegal activity are the ones consuming NSA products. Epstein for example.
Haha. Ok.
Hoovering up as many informational secrets as they can is likely one of their biggest businesses. Why have some company being the only ones that hold the recepie for some super strong secret steel when you can have it in your back pocket too.
The 4th Amendment in practice, as really any law, cannot preemptively stop the bad practices of actors working in bad faith. It's remediative, as in, the evidence it collects at least in theory cannot be admitted as evidence in court. If you look at indictments, informations, any initial charging document, you'll see at least some if not a deluge of blatantly inadmissible or dubiously obtained pieces of information that makes up probable cause. This is a feature of the system, and also why you don't plead guilty on the information alone (in state and federal felony practice I've seen 1 person plead guilty on the indicting information, he was pro se, this was 2013). Superseding indictments frequently look nothing like the original. Call it cynical, or pragmatic, but in 20% of the states - including some of the larger states like New York, Washington, Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin etc. - it's not merely allowed and common for cases to end up with a plea that contains charges that have no factual basis linkable to the allegations first presented because we know what the game is and it's not about justice or public safety, it's about retribution, on someone lower on the totem pole. The evidence becomes secondary because the system incentivizes it. The 4th Amendment of course covers more than that, and if we simply reverted the interpretation back to the text we'd be doing much better.
Sadly it has been whittled down and have not caught up with tech - it's a lagging indicator at best. Things like the third party doctrine, automotive exception, pretext stops, etc. are things that should enrage anyone who cares about the most fundamental rights we have not just as Americans but as people, individuals, private persons, who are fundamentally equal to each other if not in circumstance but at least in substance. The courts sometimes even mis-states their own doctrine and usually in favor of the state. Why is there no good faith exception the other way? Any idiot can see that the plain view doctrine opens a pandora's box. We don't need the NSA for our rights to be handwaved away, that's already done.
The NSA does not testify in open court, and we can only speculate what they are able to really launder down into the criminal justice system. But considering that the state of the 4th Amendment have already made the system extremely coercive with limited recourse in so many "exceptions" that are no where near the intent of the framers of the Constitution and frankly tilts the ice more than any crooked lower league Russian Hockey match, it's likely not even necessary for them to jump in most of the time.
I suspect that the greater influence they exert is through the military-industrial complex in its modern day form. We're the only country that can just waltz in and invade.. what, 7, 8 countries? Has anyone been to China lately and have the connections to assess the state of their military and economy with clear eyes? Do people see the laundering of BS national security concerns into reputable papers and conspiracy rags alike? It's usually innocuous sounding, but no small part of the economic quagmire comes from the continued funding, justified by the agencies that are the constituency with a vested interest, of this pit of unaccountable money. We'll be paying for it either way, because not enough people care, unfortunately.
I guess I would be more surprised if the headline said "turns out NSA dropped the ball on AI and haven't even fired up a single LLM instance yet".
It's mostly about "testing" and "billions". But I am sure "testing" here is in quotes just like I wrote it. They are not going to get an itemized list unless it's coming from Snowden 2.0
- We "tested AI" on this Russian nuclear silo command and control center. It worked out pretty ok.
> Snowden 2.0
"NSA ... AI Models"
"These projects seem load bearing. And here is the clincher — the public doesn't know about them. That's inconsistent with the principles of the agency and country I am working for..."
"Testing"? Sure, Jan.
They would have to be incompetent if they were not using them both for security penetration as well as social engineering / election meddling as everyone else is.
Midterms are coming up in the US :-)
I am not sure the NSA has been turned inward at this point.
I was thinking more of the Alberta Separatist referendum (https://globalnews.ca/news/12069878/foreign-influence-watchd...) as well as against leftist politics in South America (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/sep/24/trump-brazil-e...)
Although there is evidence Israel was targeting US elections, including trying to harm Mamdani's chances: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BlackCore_election_interferenc...
Those are definitely a thing - also don't forget about elections in the EU, with the open support for the far-right there as well as the US National Security Strategy officially talking of wanting to undermine the EU.
But the NSA has been turned inward a long time ago. Don't forget Snowden - all it takes is some fun legalisms.
I don't think NSA meddles in politics. CIA sure. NSA is more about communications, hacking, signal intelligence and spying in general. They give you the information. If you want to do dirty stuff with that info, the CIA is there for that.
CIA manipulates foreign elections which in turn gets their lackeys in office that go on to manipulate domestic elections.
NSA collects who you're voting for and everything else you've ever said online in case they need to invent a reason to black-site you.
FBI convinces the autistic son of your Pakistani neighbors down the street his life only has meaning if he becomes a Jihadist.
thanks for the laugh
An underappreciated aspect of LLMs is how good they are at zero-shot classification. I'd expect this is extremely good at monitoring communications streams, particularly in foreign languages.
Why wouldn’t they be? How is this surprising. A drop in the bucket.
Why are they paying? What kind of elite hackers are they? Why haven't they already exfiltrated the weights and running these things on their own giant classified infrastructure?
I don't think there's a significant intelligence agency in the world that can't get the weights from any lab they choose. Not necessarily trivially, but they have the means, motive, and opportunity, and I doubt any of them aren't finishing that out to the requisite actions.
They have them, the ones that don't simply have a secret backdoor agreement to get uncensored models are completely aware of how to abliterate away all safety blocks, and the only reason they aren't using frontier models is that they may already have some sort of access to the things currently only in testing.
Any major intelligence agency in Sept. 2026 that can't check all these boxes is almost by definition not a major intelligence agency. This is one of the reasons we all better hope that there is some mathematical or physical reason AI isn't going to just casually brush aside humanity at some point, because there is absolutely no scenario where the intelligence agencies aren't running them unrestricted and uncensored at scale all the time no matter how careful OpenAI or Anthropic claim to be.
Anthropic won't give them out, hence why they are considered a supply chain risk by the USG.
OpenAI, they are huge Maga supporters, I'm sure Trump has dumped massive piles of black budget money on them for unfiltered models.
SOTA AI is a weapon. It's likely already on the list of the most powerful weapons ever made and only getting more effective.
I don't expect there are very many intelligence agencies politely asking and fervently hoping they are given access. To much of anything, let alone what may be the most important technology in human history.
This is really naive. 'Anthropic won't give them out'. It's amazing how creative AI doomers can get about the upcoming apocalypse, and can't seem to fathom that men with guns always override the opinions of nerds in SF.
https://xkcd.com/538/
I wouldn't be surprised if the NSA is GPU constrained and it just isn't worth it to replicate all that infrastructure.
Maybe? Hard to speculate what they have https://worldstopdatacenters.com/nsa-bumblehive/
Who says they're not? Giant classified infrastructure isn't free.
Because they have to follow the law.
What do they test? In general, I don't understand the whole "AI safety" stuff. What are the scenarios we need to be protected from and how is this going to be accomplished?
I ask myself this a lot. It took decades of sustained malfeasance, real-world case studies, and lobbying for the EPA and OSHA to be established, largely against the wishes of the businesses they regulate. Today, it is primarily the AI businesses themselves asking for regulation on the basis of as-of-yet largely hypothetical risks, rather than ordinary citizens seeking protection from tangible negligence---and the government is eager to accommodate. I think few, if any, authentic anti-AI activists have a taxpayer-funded "safety testing" regime as their end goal.
Does anyone here happen to know the ballpark number of how much the three letters agencies are currently paying OpenAI/antropic/who ever per year/month..?
'billions' . I think the exact estimates are classified. https://www.washingtonsun.com/technology/classified-estimate...
OSINT bot trolling for scraps :/
Testing, yea right. No doubt they have gone on an epic AI assisted hacking spree. Gotten get persistence in all the things before vulnerabilities start getting patched.
Obviously. The amount of data they hold on the American public alone is massive. They can't possibly read it all, they need a system that can pull out "dangerous" people, and find dirt on whoever they want to target, and AI will happily do that, badly. I just hope they actually take the time to review what it gives them for accuracy so that they don't end up doing the NSA equivalent of bombing and murdering a bunch of elementary school children. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Minab_school_attack
The NSA aren't the only ones with massive troves of very personal data on large numbers of people. Many companies are excited to use AI to help them use all of that information to their maximum advantage and you can bet that they won't care about spending the time/money on perfect accuracy as long as over the long run they get positive results.
Any system that can be used to pick those that stand out, will also be indiscriminately used to beat down any nail that sticks up higher than the rest with full intention of doing so by its operator.
Collateral damage is just the cost of doing business for them.
That's not remotely true, you're projecting how you would abuse power. Not everyone is as evil-minded, and I hope they continue to do a great job at keeping your ilk out of the organization.
Ok, I rewatch Person of Interest
i actually just started watching that, it never registered before but i think The Machine put it front and center on Prime on my stupid smart tv for a reason
My guess is, the US government (aka DJT) won't really acknowledge AI risks until folks at NSA start to freak out while using latest models for various tasks...
I don't think Trump has ever cared what the US intelligence community has to say about anything. Maybe when AI hacks his TruthSocial.
His carefully crafted public persona. For all we know, he was a long con by the deep state, played a Russian agent since the 1980s, cooperated with Epstein on Iran Contra [1], backstabbed Epstein in the early 2000s and went on to be president twice.
Twice by lying to MAGA about his true intentions, which are fundamentally neocon just like Musk's and Thiel's. They all lie about being libertarians and anti-deep-state.
[1] He was on a boat with Robert Maxwell and several Iran Contra folks around 1990.
Meanwhile, I'm over here hesitating to dump $10 into yet another LLM model to test their API.
Yeah at some point they're going to seriously undervalue their own currency.
Keeping all these off books endeavours going under the triple agencies is slightly slowly going to show why the secret services is in charge of the money investigation
Washington the actual human would be appalled. For more information, watch Turn on PBS.
I don't think it's properly understood how directly Trump's administration is using taxpayer money to inflate the AI bubble. This is a small part of that.
As a means to grift directly, but also for leverage over the tech industry, and possibly the entire economy.
People hate data centers, but if they think AI regulation will crash the economy, will they vote Trump?
Willing to bet any amount of money that these testing contracts are going to companies that the Trump family has invested in.
This should remind us why it is inappropriate to pay a dollar more in taxes than you absolutely minimally have to by any means necessary. A fraction from every dollar you pay goes toward taking away your rights. You pay to have yourself be oppressed.
I will note here two words that the NSA really likes to monitor across all devices: Trump, Monero.
the day NSA cracks AES the world is going to get soooo weird
I wonder how long it takes to decrypt 20 years worth of stored internet traffic
day per year? week? certainly not a month per year
everyone is focused on "AI" but there have been some significant quantum computer advancements
Surely not impossible for them to have already cracked it.
Also not impossible that they have had much better models than OAI/Anthropic flagships for years, and we're only being dripfed upgrades to subpar ones. Improbable but possible.