White hat, black box: AI’s next chapter

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1:05The Economist

1:12Hello and welcome to The Intelligence from The Economist. I'm your host, Jason Palmer. Every weekday, we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

1:27In India, there's a big political shift underway. The country's women are becoming an ever more potent force in the electorate. Whether what politicians are doing to win them over is vote-buying or genuinely empowering is not entirely clear. And my former co-host and a sports nut, John Fasman, is leading us up to the World Cup by profiling the countries of 10 teams that are in contention. This week, it's Senegal.

2:04First up, though.

2:14Alex Hern:Normally, when someone tells me they've got a new superhuman AI, but I'm not allowed to see it, they're telling tall tales. But with Anthropic's new mythos AI system, there's a chance they're telling the truth. Alex Hearn is the economist's AI writer. It's a superhuman hacker that's so dangerous they can't release it. It's forcing sceptics to accept that some of the dangers of AI may come sooner than they expected. And it's also making the AI industry reassess its own business model. So let's start with this new piece of mind-bending tech. What is Mythos? Clawed Mythos is the latest AI system from Anthropic, the makers of Clawed.

2:57Alex Hern:It's, as the name perhaps suggests, bigger and badder than its previous models, haiku, sonnet and opus. Those are getting larger each time, and Mythos is the biggest yet. But unlike those previous models, it's not been released. Anthropic went to all the effort of training it, and then as a preview version only, gave it to a select group of partners, 11 named groups and 40 smaller organizations. And that's because it is, Anthropic says, a tremendously good hacker. You pour money in one end, you get software vulnerabilities out the other. And that means Anthropic thinks it's too dangerous to make available for general release.

3:34So are you one of the mysterious 40-odd entities who has received the model? Have you had a play?

3:40Alex Hern:I am not. I have previously been given access to models that Dario Madej, now the head of Anthropic, says are too dangerous for a public release. But this time, no, it really is kept very much behind closed doors. But we have seen evidence of the claims that Anthropic are making. They have been putting it to work finding software vulnerabilities in open source code, things like operating systems and media encoders. And they've published a couple of the ones they found already. A complex bug in the operating system OpenBSD that had hidden unchanged for 27 years until Mythos discovered it. And so essentially the rest of those companies are being given access so they can find the holes in their own stuff and patch them before a general release.

4:23Is that the idea?

4:24Alex Hern:Yeah, exactly. So Anthropic picked 11 companies, including Apple, Microsoft, NVIDIA, JP Morgan, the only financial services provider, Palo Alto Networks, Broadcom, there's 11 of them. And it tried to select companies with systemic importance, operating system manufacturers, browser manufacturers, big financial institutions. And the idea is partially to check that Mythos can do what it can do and also just to give these huge systemic institutions time to build their defenses up before Mythos or something of equivalent quality is made available to people who might use it as an attacker. And you're putting aside your scepticism for the moment.

5:03I mean, it has to be said that saying it's this badass suggests that we have the best thing in the world and you should pay for it.

5:08Alex Hern:Absolutely. And there are a lot of reasons to be sceptical. This plays into Anthropics' entire bit very well. They are not only keen to present themselves as the makers of the best coding software in the world, and that's all hacking really is, right? A specialised form of coding. They also like presenting themselves as the most safety-oriented lab and this is the most safety-oriented move you can do. There's also lesser advantages. It lets them handle a compute crunch that they're going through with elegance and grace. This is a big, expensive-to-run model. It seems likely that were Anthropic to make it available for general release, they don't have the GPUs to run it at the level that their customers would want.

5:49Alex Hern:They would be forced to put prices up in a very obvious rationing move or just ration it directly with usage limits. so this sort of staged release lets them show off that they've got all of this power without admitting that they don't have the power to run it and then also it prevents the photocopiers from being started up if you make it available to a select group of partners those partners are trustworthy organizations who aren't going to take your intellectual property feed it in as training data to their own models and produce a fast follow in three to six months which is exactly what anthropic has already accused some of the largest chinese labs of doing with its previous opus models.

6:26I suppose though this brings us into an era that lots of people had said was coming, the idea of the dual-use nature of AI coming to bite us at some point when it got good enough.

6:36Alex Hern:Exactly. And this is one of the reasons why I'm less skeptical than that long list of reasons why this is the sort of thing Anthropic would love to do might suggest. We've known this is coming. AI systems have been getting better and better at software engineering for the last three years. they've passed a load of qualitative thresholds already and it was a matter of time until a system was created that was a very capable hacker because that's what happens when you get better and better at software engineering there were only really a few open questions one was whether or not you could make a system that was a good hacker and teach it the ethics required to not be a malicious hacker and the other was if someone made a system that was a good hacker and couldn't teach it those ethics, whether they would release it anyway.

7:24Alex Hern:Anthropic shows that one possible answer here is they cannot yet teach mythos to be safe, but they can keep it behind closed doors. So the next big question is whether, you know, we get these fast followers eventually catching up. And if anyone cracks the how to make this a safe thing to release before someone gives in and just releases the unsafe version to the public at large. But in a number of ways, this doesn't seem very sustainable or very equitable, I suppose. Although the companies that are inside the tent must be very pleased to get this early access, but it can't stay that way forever.

7:56Alex Hern:Right. I mean, whether or not it can stay that way forever is, I think, still an open question. It's not clear right now how quickly other people will catch up to Anthropic. And at least in the US, there seems to be broad agreement that general release for a model of this class isn't a smart thing to do. OpenAI is making hay about the fact that it wants a more democratic release schedule, but even that democratic release schedule still involves verifying people's real identities and checking they work in cybersecurity and so on. The question hovering over everyone's head is whether or not the Chinese labs will follow.

8:29Alex Hern:They tend to have had a more laissez-faire approach to safety, but at the same time, the Chinese government is making noises of concern. Everyone wants this sort of power, but I don't think anyone wants to be responsible for unleashing an era of all systems being hackable by all people. So there's a chance that some form of cautious release will become the norm in this space. But then, yes, the power dynamic that creates ought to, I think, concern a lot of us. If you need to prove your credentials to access a system that is required to secure your own networks, then that's inherently an advantage, a boost to those who can provide their credentials.

9:10Alex Hern:It harms startups, it harms people getting their leg up in the industry, and it helps people who are already on top. Dare I to ask how regulation might come into this, to even the score, to keep everybody honest? Well, I mean, the good news is this has provided a pretty obvious model for any government body to copy. Until Anthropic voluntarily did this behind closed doors access, it would have been a big thing for a government agency to enforce. Now that they've done it, it's somewhat easier for a regulator to look at the other labs and go follow their lead or will come down on you. A lot of government regulation begins as voluntary action from a sector and then gets reified over time.

9:47Alex Hern:And I think this will be no different. The question, yes, is whether or not the government feels like it has the responsibility or authority to verify who those insiders are. It adds democratic legitimacy if it does, but also has the uncomfortable overtones of a government picking winners, choosing insiders and banishing outsiders. One reason why they may well want to do that though is the whole thing has national security implications. You obviously want your software and that of your allies to be better protected than those of the people you are trying to hack at the same time. The American intelligence community has always struggled with this dual mandate that it protects American cyber security while also hoarding the ability to use American technology to hack its foes.

10:32Alex Hern:And I think this is no different. Alex, thanks very much for your time. Thank you for having me.

10:39You can hear lots more from Alex on our snazzy subscriber-only video shows, The Economist Insider and Inside Tech. He and our senior editors ask how powerful the five bosses of the big AI firms could become and whether they should have that much sway. Subscribers can find The Economist Insider on our app and homepage.

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11:51If he were here, he wouldn't just tell you about no fees or minimums. He'd also talk about how most Capital One cafes are open seven days a week to assist with your banking needs. Yep, even on weekends, it's pretty much all he talks about, in a good way. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. See CapitalOne.com slash bank. Capital One N.A. Member FDIC.

12:23A couple of weeks ago, I attended an election rally on the outskirts of Kolkata in the state of West Bengal. Kira Huyu is an Asia correspondent for The Economist. and as the rally goers for the ruling trinimal congress assembled on this narrow dirt road it occurred to me that what i was looking at was a perfect visualization of the trend that i'd come here to witness which was that like in indian elections women had moved center stage at the front you had an all-female marching block and they were dressed in bold prints they were loudly chanting their way through the town and then the men had gathered at the back almost like the women's shadow now this has been a busy month for state elections in india we have four states and one union territory voting across the country and in west bengal the election is taking place in two stages.

13:28The first one happening tomorrow, and then the second one on April the 29th. And what all of these elections turn out to have in common is a striking demographic shift. Women are determining and changing how Indian elections are fought. So that prominence of women in the electoral sphere is a new thing for India? It's most definitely a new thing. In India's first general election in the early 50s, you actually had a situation where 3 million Indian women were struck off the voter list because it had not occurred to them to register themselves with their own names. They had simply registered as wives or daughters of male family members.

14:10And now you have a situation where for the first time in 2019, female turnout actually surpassed male turnout. And that's something that we saw again in the 2024 national election. And so Indian women have gone from being a minor figure to being entirely central to who wins elections. And so this is just a straightforward story of modern women's empowerment in India? It is definitely the case that Indian women tend to vote more when they have a job, when they get a better education, when they're more politically exposed. And so in many ways, yes, voting reflects women's improved place in society.

14:48But I can say, having gone through the sweaty procession in West Bengal, that it was not in fact full of feminist postgrads. I spoke to a marcher who was a jobless widow with a disabled daughter. I spoke to a Dalit woman, formerly known as an outcast, who was struggling to even produce the right paperwork to vote in the upcoming election. And so what's happening in these kinds of spaces also suggests to you that there is a way in which Indian politicians have figured out how to speak to marginalized women as well. What do you mean that politicians have learned how to do that? What are they doing?

15:22We have some really great research by Sanjay Kumar and colleagues at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, which is India's premier social science institute. And that research has suggested that women are making Indian elections more pragmatic. Women are much more driven by really concrete, tangible welfare policies. Less than 10 % are interested in voting based on ideology or culture war issues. And that's quite distinct from the way that Indian men often vote. And so election strategists sat down and said, all right, what is the most tangible thing that you can possibly do in terms of welfare for women?

16:00And where we seem to have ended up is cash, sending women monthly cash transfers. But what do those programs look like in practice, on the ground? So the sums that are supplied range from about 800 to 2 ,500 rupees per month. That's about$9 to$27, which may not sound like a lot, but in India it is quite significant, given that Indian women are half as likely to hold a job as men. And so these kinds of sums are, in fact, quite life-changing. And so what you have is now at least 16 out of India's 28 states have female-only direct cash transfer schemes. And that's up from just a handful in 2022. And suspiciously, many of these were introduced just before Election Day.

16:51Are they means-tested? So they are never means-tested. There are varying criteria depending on the scheme, age, income, marital status. that once you've cleared those, there is nothing you have to do, nothing you have to prove that you're doing, and that might just get sent to you. But what about the notion that it is, or at least looks like, vote buying? There is a lot of interesting social scientific research that suggests that some of these schemes can be very beneficial. If you look at what's going on, even just in these state elections, though, a lot of it does look very haphazard. So move away from West Bengal to the state of Tamil Nadu, which is the other place where we have voting on the same day.

17:31It's now in West Bengal. And here, Chief Minister M.K. Starling, in anticipation of the elections, has dispatched what he calls a summer special package worth about$50 to more than 13 million women in Tamil Nadu. He's promised also to double the state's all-female cash grant if re-elected. This is a pledge that was quickly matched or outbid by all the opposition parties. Successful it might be. It does sound expensive, though. Yeah, the cash frenzy is getting a little out of hand. In the last financial year, the states that had these schemes spent more than$18 billion worth on unconditional cash transfer programs, mostly for women.

18:12If you look at Profligate West Bengal in particular, where state government debt is 38 % of the state's GDP, which is approaching record levels, Lakshmi Bandha alone, which is the flagship cash transfer scheme, consumes 10 % of the state's revenue receipts. And that's just one of West Bengal's many, many such program. I guess the question, putting the politics aside, is whether this does really improve Indian women's lot. There is some evidence suggesting that it improves financial independence. It allows women to invest in dreams beyond their survival, think about setting up businesses and so on and so forth.

18:52So at an individual level, there are certainly success stories. I think the big concern, though, is that what seems to be happening, and this is something that India's finance ministry warned us of a couple of months ago, is that the emphasis on cash transfer schemes is starting to distract from policies that might more durably, on some structural level, improve women's lives. So we're starting to really see a crowding out of investment in the delivery of education and health care. It is about time that India's political class takes seriously the other half of the world's largest democracy. But it would also be high time that these women were offered some more truly transformative policies.

19:35Kira, thanks very much for your time. Thank you for having me, Jason.

19:52A quick word about something exciting from our sister division, Economist Education. They've got a new course, developed by the kinds of senior editors and journalists that you hear on this show, and it's all about geopolitics. They're joined by guests from academia, business, and government to provide a nuanced view on how to think about and deal with international relations. The course is designed to give you insights you need to figure out how geopolitics affects you and your organization, navigate all the uncertainty and act decisively sign up by may 6th and tell them we sent you you can save 15 with the now familiar all caps code intelligence just go to education.economist.com intelligence

20:48Serbia's Chipotle Polo, their first ever Nations Cup title. So under these lights, history sharpens its pen. Senegal against Morocco, the two highest ranked teams on the continent, summoned here for the first ever meeting. African football has promised so much for so long. One of football's greats, Pele, once predicted an African team would win the World Cup by the year 2000. but it has so far failed to make a truly great impact on the world's biggest stage. John Fasman is our senior culture correspondent and is counting down to this summer's FIFA World Cup by introducing us to 10 of the teams taking part.

21:30Among the continent's record 10 teams in this year's tournament is Senegal, making its third consecutive World Cup appearance and fourth overall. It is one of just four African countries to have reached the quarterfinals, which it did in 2002. After defeating France, the defending champion, they lost to Turkey on a golden goal. The Lions of Taranga, as the team is known, have also won the Africa Cup of Nations, otherwise known as AFCON, twice. Sort of.