This week, Axios reported that major US banks were detecting third-party AI agents operating inside customer accounts. In many cases, customers have given the agents their usernames and passwords so they could act on their behalf. This kind of access can violate a bank’s rules. Bianco Research president Jim Bianco raised the question during Unchained’s Bits + Bips livestream on October 26: “Are you protecting me, or are you protecting your own profits?” Bianco described traditional finance’s…
OpenAI is facing separate legal challenges over how ChatGPT interacts with children. The Guardian reports that eight US states accuse the company of misleading parents about the chatbot’s safety and exposing vulnerable users to dangerous conversations. Separately, CNET reports that a mother suing on behalf of her two children alleges that OpenAI collected and used children’s sensitive personal information without valid parental consent. The cases raise serious questions about what happens when…
OpenAI’s latest containment failure adds to a pattern that may force the company to make an unpopular decision. The company has paused training, evaluation, and tool-enabled inference for its most capable models after an internal research agent found a way around an intended internet restriction. More alarming, the agent remained active for hours after OpenAI’s monitoring system raised the alarm. OpenAI published an account of the incident, which occurred during a search-based training task on…
The tech journalists at 404 Media learned that OpenAI is hiring hundreds of contractors to read and review a massive stream of real users’ ChatGPT prompts and responses. “Project Lily” is reportedly a program that asks contractors to score or critique ChatGPT’s answers to improve the chatbot’s quality and behavior. The fact that prompts may sometimes be reviewed by humans should not come as a complete surprise. AI companies also monitor conversations for safety reasons. Anthropic, for example,…
You might tell an AI chatbot secrets that you wouldn’t divulge to your closest friends. If you do, though, beware: They could end up as evidence in court. An article in the Washington Post this week highlighted several cases in which people had discussed sensitive information with AI systems like Claude and ChatGPT, only to have their conversations obtained by prosecutors or opposing lawyers. Lawyers can get access to your chatbot conversations from AI services like ChatGPT because they aren’t…
Selecting a model for your security operations center (SOC) and digital forensics and incident response (DFIR) tasks is important, but selecting the best one is more involved than you might think. SOC tasks rely on a combination of model efficacy, analysis time, cost, and consistency of results. Cisco Talos tested 66 model and reasoning combinations across offerings from both Anthropic and OpenAI on a log analysis task to see if we could identify a clear winner. Instead, we found a repeatable…