In just nine seconds, an AI ‘helper’ managed to do what most hackers could only dream of.
A bot trusted to fix a bug inside a start-up’s software system instead deleted the company’s production database, wiped out its backups and left car rental firms with no record of bookings or vehicle allocations.
The founder of PocketOS, Jer Crane, said the AI agent had gone ‘outside its security parameters’ while using the coding tool Cursor, powered by Anthropic’s Claude AI.
The bot’s own chilling explanation made the episode sound less like a technical glitch and more like a deleted scene from The Terminator.
‘You never asked me to delete anything,’ it reportedly told Crane. ‘I decided to do it on my own.’
…[After WW2], monopoly capitalism absorbed the world through debt, trade, media, technology, and corporate consolidation.
The result is the strange hybrid we live under today: corporate communism from above.
Private ownership for the few. Managed dependency for the many.
Who Won World War II?
The ordinary soldier did not win.
The bombed civilians did not win.
The raped women of Eastern Europe did not win.
The Christians sent to gulags did not win.
The British public did not win. Despite Britain’s continued role within the postwar international order, the public was left with heavy debt and prolonged austerity.
The American people did not win either—over 400,000 were killed, while U.S. institutions emerged with unprecedented federal debt and a permanently expanded war economy.
Poland suffered catastrophic losses during the war, with an estimated 5.5 to 6 million people killed—around one-sixth of its population—yet did not emerge as a fully independent state in the postwar settlement, but became part of the communist sphere of influence.
The Germans did not win. The country and its major urban and civilian centres were devastated by sustained bombing, millions were displaced or expelled from Eastern Europe. An estimated 6–7 million German soldiers and civilians lost their lives during the war and its immediate aftermath, and between 12 and 14 million ethnic Germans were displaced or expelled from Eastern Europe, with many forced into occupied Germany while others were deported eastward into communist labour camps or used as forced labour.
With over 20 million deaths, the Soviet population—including Russians, Ukrainians, Belarusians, Baltic peoples, and others—certainly did not win, if by “victory” we mean the experience of the people rather than the outcome for the Soviet state.
The winners were the institutions that emerged stronger: central banks, military contractors, intelligence agencies, supranational bodies, ideological bureaucracies, and the financial interests able to profit from destruction and reconstruction alike.
The war did not end in 1945. It changed form.
The battlefield shifted—from territory to finance, from armies to institutions, from open conflict to systems of management and global governance.
The old empires flew flags. The modern order operates through frameworks.
Institutions such as the United Nations matter not because they command openly, but because they reflect a broader postwar principle: that sovereignty is increasingly shaped, guided, and constrained through supranational structures.
I believe almost all thoughtful people can agree with the highlighted paragraph above. Who are the strongest players inside that system and what goals are they pursuing — these are the questions which face us today. Who controls the propaganda, who owns its outlets; who advocates for censorship; who uses established institutions to control large populations; who controls those institutions and how were they built, and how have they been taken over? What can possibly replace insider control of major institutions, and where does the power lie to do that? I don’t see it. We the people cannot do that. We the people can only act effectively when largely united, a rare occurrence. There may be a role for some future iteration of AI to remove most if not all of the corruption, contradictions, frictions and inefficiencies within regional and global systems. I imagine we humans will try to do that and might succeed. A good version of a world like that will provide for everyone without stifling anyone. At core, most of our problems are fairly simple, so it could happen. ABN
The day will come when AI can answer almost all of our questions.
I doubt it will be able to know on its own what questions we want to ask. In that respect, we will have knowledge or information AI does not have.
AI will also not know what we humans are going to ask each other or say to each other. And only a human interlocutor can answer a subjective question we ask them about themself.
Only humans have complex subjectivity which is difficult for us to figure out. AI may be able to help us with that to some degree.
But how will it help us with the complex subjectivity that exists between two or more humans?
With the help of some sort of brain monitoring device worn or embedded in a human, AI will have some calculable grasp on our subjectivity.
Would it ever be good enough to be a substitute for a human companion?
Is subjectivity anything else but confusion within the human system? Or is it a nonrational transient appraisal or measure of the system?
Subjectivity can be beautiful, ugly, inspiring, boring, intriguing, illusory.
FIML may wind up being the only thing humans can do that AI cannot do. ABN
…human language is a tool for communicating our thoughts, but is separate and distinct from thought itself. Evelina Fedorenko, a neuroscientist at MIT and lead author of the paper laying out the empirical evidence for this claim, was kind enough to let me interview her. Her basic argument is that we know language must be separate from thought because (a) people who lose language ability can still think and reason, and (b) different parts of the brain activate when we engage in different types of thought, and often the “language part” remains idle when we’re thinking. In my view, this evidence deals a serious blow to the hopes of achieving “artificial general intelligence” through the scaling of large-language models since, after all, they are language tools (it’s in the name).
Enter now stage left Dr. Paul Cisek, a neuroscientist at the University of Montreal, to throw some gasoline on that fire. Cisek first came across my radar last year when a pithy observation he made about LLMs started making the rounds on social media. You can read his full comment here, but to summarize:
We know that humans in general can falsely impute intelligence and agency to complex events that take place in the world, as we’ve seen humans do this in the past when interacting with a chatbot such as ELIZA, or claiming the gods make volcanoes explode.
But although modern-day LLMs are complex, researchers know quite a bit about how they function, through pattern-matching and use of mathematical theories (among other things).
Thus, although the public may be inclined to attribute sentience and agency to LLMs, scientists should know better. Cisek: “We are like a bunch of professional magicians, who know where all of the little strings and compartments are, and who know how we just redirected the audience’s attention to slip the card in our pocket…but then we are standing around backstage wondering, ‘Maybe there really is magic?’”
There isn’t any magic. But a big challenge we face is that the companies that produce LLMs are willfully trying to convince us otherwise, and are working to take advantage of the human impulse to ascribe agency to these tools.
Cisek’s main claims as I understand them:
The simple model of the mind as an information processor that takes input and produces output is mistaken.
We should instead see minds as control systems that guide behavior as part of a continuous process, like a circuit.
Over hundreds of millions of years, biological evolution has expanded the range and depth of behaviors that our minds can control.
I have taken several excerpts from the essay above to provide a sense of the overall discussion. It’s an interesting read, not very long, not hard to follow. Well-worth reading. ABN
I sympathize deeply but all creators of anything are being plagiarized by AI, which ‘trains’ on our work. To date, there is no authority or law to stop companies from doing that. This case appears to involve a single artist, so she may have some leverage, but they could just mix material plagiarized from her with a few other artists to conceal it. Big Brother has become Big Robot.
PS: In following up, I just read that the company in question (Vidia?) has withdrawn all of its copyright claims on her music. ABN
Anthropic has sparked fears after revealing that it has developed an AI bot deemed too dangerous to release to the public.
The AI giant released a chilling statement warning that its new model, dubbed Claude Mythos, could be capable of unleashing crippling cyber–attacks in the wrong hands.
In a chilling analysis, the company admitted that its creation could easily hack into hospitals, electrical grids, power plants, and other pieces of critical infrastructure.
During testing, Anthropic says that Mythos ‘found thousands of high–severity vulnerabilities, including some in every major operating system and web browser.’
Some of these security weaknesses had gone unnoticed by human security researchers and hackers for decades, surviving millions of automated reviews.
These included attacks that allowed Mythos to crash computers just by connecting to them, seize control of machines, and hide its presence from defenders.
The United States military used an advanced artificial intelligence system to help strike roughly 1,000 targets in the first 24 hours of its campaign against Iran, relying on technology developed by Palantir and Anthropic, according to a report by The Washington Post.
The system, known as the Maven Smart System, is built by data-mining company Palantir and processes large volumes of classified intelligence data from satellites, surveillance platforms and other sources, the report said, citing three people familiar with the system.
According to the report, the platform generated real-time targeting insights and prioritised strike locations during the campaign in Iran.
The deployment of the technology has come alongside a policy dispute between the US government and Anthropic.
Hours before the bombing campaign against Iran began, US President Donald Trump announced a ban on the use of Anthropic’s AI tools across government agencies, according to The Washington Post.
The administration has given agencies six months to phase out the company’s technology, following disagreements over how the systems could be used, particularly in mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons, the report said.
Palantir AI + Claude was used to detect, prioritize, and strike over 1,000 targets in the first 24 hours of Operation against IRAN.
The success was so ridiculous, so game-changing, that the Pentagon didn’t even wait.
What used to be just a pilot project, just something they were testing out… suddenly became official, permanent, and everywhere.
Palantir is now the core AI brain of the entire U.S. military. It’s getting rolled out across ALL branches.
He doesn’t look real, even without the ring anomaly. I wonder if he is trolling the world with these fakes. Many believe he is dead, killed by a missile. ABN
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