This is me, September 2024: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41531022
This is me, March 2024: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39613801
The point isn't me, it's how many people were blind to the possibility.
Saying "I told you so" feels good, and means you can be a little more confident in your predictions, but security is a "weakest link" problem where you're only as good as the worst part, and with AI (not only but also LLMs) there's a lot of people whose mental models of capabilities is wildly inadequate for the challenge*.
My update for you since then: even an air-gap will be inadequate, there's multiple known ways around them.
Even an LLM running on an isolated server sealed inside a faraday cage with an airlock-style door, someone will mess up with at least one critical detail, it will not be enough: this kind of thing has happened with humans before we cared about LLMs.
Predicting exactly when this kind of thing gets exploited by an AI, that's almost impossible. But that it will be, at some point, is an easy bet.
> You can find people who say all sorts on the internet, but this case is not much evidence against what you linked. "Zero-day" makes it sound novel, but the breakout patterns here are based on very common exploits and there’ll be plenty of examples in training data.
And?
Does it matter that these zero-days were known categories rather than inventing some previously unconsidered use of the system bus as a radio transmitter? (Oh, wait, that's not novel either…)
We knew about SQL injection, buffer overflows, and use-after-free back when I was doing my degree half a lifetime ago; that doesn't stop us getting new CVEs featuring them… this month.
- https://chromereleases.googleblog.com/2026/09/stable-channel...
- https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/support/docs/csa/cisco-sa-esa-...
* also for the opportunity, but that's an entirely different discussion.
Fair, and I will grant that a capable model (or human) could in theory break out of near anything.
My point is that this incident is not evidence of that. There is zero skill visible in the setup of the sandbox. Nobody messed up a critical detail, they didn’t even start to consider what the details were.
I doubt most people "blind to the possibility" would imagine that what we’re measuring against is the equivalent of benchmarking burglar skill based on how easily they can break through an unlocked door.