Science news:

Scientists have finally cracked a long-standing mystery about squid and cuttlefish evolution by analyzing newly sequenced genomes alongside global datasets. The research reveals that these bizarre, intelligent creatures likely originated deep in the ocean over 100 million years ago, surviving mass extinction events by retreating into oxygen-rich deep-sea refuges. For millions of years, their evolution barely changed—until a dramatic post-extinction boom sparked rapid diversification as they moved into new shallow-water habitats.

As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered.

Blog moderation policy.

It was used to track a Dutch naval ship:

Dutch journalist Just Vervaart, working for regional media network Omroep Gelderland, followed the directions posted on the Dutch government website and mailed a postcard with a hidden tracker inside. Because of this, they were able to track the ship for about a day, watching it sail from Heraklion, Crete, before it turned towards Cyprus. While it only showed the location of that one vessel, knowing that it was part of a carrier strike group sailing in the Mediterranean could potentially put the entire fleet at risk.

[…]

Navy officials reported that the tracker was discovered within 24 hours of the ship’s arrival, during mail sorting, and was eventually disabled. Because of this incident, the Dutch authorities now ban electronic greeting cards, which, unlike packages, weren’t x-rayed before being brought on the ship.

404 Media reports (alternate site):

The FBI was able to forensically extract copies of incoming Signal messages from a defendant’s iPhone, even after the app was deleted, because copies of the content were saved in the device’s push notification database….

The news shows how forensic extraction—­when someone has physical access to a device and is able to run specialized software on it—­can yield sensitive data derived from secure messaging apps in unexpected places. Signal already has a setting that blocks message content from displaying in push notifications; the case highlights why such a feature might be important for some users to turn on.

“We learned that specifically on iPhones, if one’s settings in the Signal app allow for message notifications and previews to show up on the lock screen, [then] the iPhone will internally store those notifications/message previews in the internal memory of the device,” a supporter of the defendants who was taking notes during the trial told 404 Media.

EDITED TO ADD (4/24): Apple has patched this vulnerability.

ICE has admitted that it uses spyware from the Israeli company Graphite.

Grupo Seguritech is a Mexican surveillance company that is expanding into the US.

The New York Times has a long article where the author lays out an impressive array of circumstantial evidence that the inventor of Bitcoin is the cypherpunk Adam Back.

I don’t know. The article is convincing, but it’s written to be convincing.

I can’t remember if I ever met Adam. I was a member of the Cypherpunks mailing list for a while, but I was never really an active participant. I spent more time on the Usenet newsgroup sci.crypt. I knew a bunch of the Cypherpunks, though, from various conferences around the world at the time. I really have no opinion about who Satoshi Nakamoto really is.

Pretty fantastic video from Japan of a giant squid eating another squid.

As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered.

Blog moderation policy.

Last week, Anthropic pulled back the curtain on Claude Mythos Preview, an AI model so capable at finding and exploiting software vulnerabilities that the company decided it was too dangerous to release to the public. Instead, access has been restricted to roughly 50 organizations—Microsoft, Apple, Amazon Web Services, CrowdStrike and other vendors of critical infrastructure—under an initiative called Project Glasswing.

The announcement was accompanied by a barrage of hair-raising anecdotes: thousands of vulnerabilities uncovered across every major operating system and browser, including a 27-year-old bug in OpenBSD, a 16-year-old flaw in FFmpeg. Mythos was able to weaponize a set of vulnerabilities it found in the Firefox browser into 181 usable attacks; Anthropic’s previous flagship model could only achieve two.

This is, in many respects, exactly the kind of responsible disclosure that security researchers have long urged. And yet the public has been given remarkably little with which to evaluate Anthropic’s decision. We have been shown a highlight reel of spectacular successes. However, we can’t tell if we have a blockbuster until they let us see the whole movie.

For example, we don’t know how many times Mythos mistakenly flagged code as vulnerable. Anthropic said security contractors agreed with the AI’s severity rating 198 times, with an 89 per cent severity agreement. That’s impressive, but incomplete. Independent researchers examining similar models have found that AI that detects nearly every real bug also hallucinates plausible-sounding vulnerabilities in patched, correct code.

This matters. A model that autonomously finds and exploits hundreds of vulnerabilities with inhuman precision is a game changer, but a model that generates thousands of false alarms and non-working attacks still needs skilled and knowledgeable humans. Without knowing the rate of false alarms in Mythos’s unfiltered output, we cannot tell whether the examples showcased are representative.

There is a second, subtler problem. Large language models, including Mythos, perform best on inputs that resemble what they were trained on: widely used open-source projects, major browsers, the Linux kernel and popular web frameworks. Concentrating early access among the largest vendors of precisely this software is sensible; it lets them patch first, before adversaries catch up.

But the inverse is also true. Software outside the training distribution—industrial control systems, medical device firmware, bespoke financial infrastructure, regional banking software, older embedded systems—is exactly where out-of-the-box Mythos is likely least able to find or exploit bugs.

However, a sufficiently motivated attacker with domain expertise in one of these fields could nevertheless wield Mythos’s advanced reasoning capabilities as a force multiplier, probing systems that Anthropic’s own engineers lack the specialized knowledge to audit. The danger is not that Mythos fails in those domains; it is that Mythos may succeed for whoever brings the expertise.

Broader, structured access for academic researchers and domain specialists—cardiologists’ partners in medical device security, control-systems engineers, researchers in less prominent languages and ecosystems—would meaningfully reduce this asymmetry. Fifty companies, however well chosen, cannot substitute for the distributed expertise of the entire research community.

None of this is an indictment of Anthropic. By all appearances the company is trying to act responsibly, and its decision to hold the model back is evidence of seriousness.

But Anthropic is a private company and, in some ways, still a start-up. Yet it is making unilateral decisions about which pieces of our critical global infrastructure get defended first, and which must wait their turn.

It has finite staff, finite budget and finite expertise. It will miss things, and when the thing missed is in the software running a hospital or a power grid, the cost will be borne by people who never had a say.

The security problem is far greater than one company and one model. There’s no reason to believe that Mythos Preview is unique. (Not to be outdone, OpenAI announced that its new GPT-5.4-Cyber is so dangerous that the model also will not be released to the general public.) And it’s unclear how much of an advance these new models represent. The security company Aisle was able to replicate many of Anthropic’s published anecdotes using smaller, cheaper, public AI models.

Any decisions we make about whether and how to release these powerful models are more than one company’s responsibility. Ultimately, this will probably lead to regulation. That will be hard to get right and requires a long process of consultation and feedback.

In the short term, we need something simpler: greater transparency and information sharing with the broader community. This doesn’t necessarily mean making powerful models like Claude Mythos widely available. Rather, it means sharing as much data and information as possible, so that we can collectively make informed decisions.

We need globally co-ordinated frameworks for independent auditing, mandatory disclosure of aggregate performance metrics and funded access for academic and civil-society researchers.

This has implications for national security, personal safety and corporate competitiveness. Any technology that can find thousands of exploitable flaws in the systems we all depend on should not be governed solely by the internal judgment of its creators, however well intentioned.

Until that changes, each Mythos-class release will put the world at the edge of another precipice, without any visibility into whether there is a landing out of view just below, or whether this time the drop will be fatal. That is not a choice a for-profit corporation should be allowed to make in a democratic society. Nor should such a company be able to restrict the ability of society to make choices about its own security.

This essay was written with David Lie, and originally appeared in The Globe and Mail.

Interesting research: “Humans expect rationality and cooperation from LLM opponents in strategic games.”

Abstract: As Large Language Models (LLMs) integrate into our social and economic interactions, we need to deepen our understanding of how humans respond to LLMs opponents in strategic settings. We present the results of the first controlled monetarily-incentivised laboratory experiment looking at differences in human behaviour in a multi-player p-beauty contest against other humans and LLMs. We use a within-subject design in order to compare behaviour at the individual level. We show that, in this environment, human subjects choose significantly lower numbers when playing against LLMs than humans, which is mainly driven by the increased prevalence of ‘zero’ Nash-equilibrium choices. This shift is mainly driven by subjects with high strategic reasoning ability. Subjects who play the zero Nash-equilibrium choice motivate their strategy by appealing to perceived LLM’s reasoning ability and, unexpectedly, propensity towards cooperation. Our findings provide foundational insights into the multi-player human-LLM interaction in simultaneous choice games, uncover heterogeneities in both subjects’ behaviour and beliefs about LLM’s play when playing against them, and suggest important implications for mechanism design in mixed human-LLM systems.

This article on the walls of Constantinople is fascinating.

The system comprised four defensive lines arranged in formidable layers:

• The brick-lined ditch, divided by bulkheads and often flooded, 15­-20 meters wide and up to 7 meters deep.
• A low breastwork, about 2 meters high, enabling defenders to fire freely from behind.
• The outer wall, 8 meters tall and 2.8 meters thick, with 82 projecting towers.
• The main wall—a towering 12 meters high and 5 meters thick—with 96 massive towers offset from those of the outer wall for maximum coverage.

Behind the walls lay broad terraces: the parateichion, 18 meters wide, ideal for repelling enemies who crossed the moat, and the peribolos, 15–­20 meters wide between the inner and outer walls. From the moat’s bottom to the highest tower top, the defences reached nearly 30 meters—a nearly unscalable barrier of stone and ingenuity.

This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak:

• I’m speaking at DemocracyXChange 2026 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, on April 18, 2026.
• I’m speaking at the SANS AI Cybersecurity Summit 2026 in Arlington, Virginia, USA, at 9:40 AM ET on April 20, 2026.
• I’m speaking at the Greater Good Gathering in New York City, USA, on Tuesday, April 21, 2026.
• I’m speaking at the Nemertes [Next] Virtual Conference Spring 2026, a virtual event, on April 29, 2026.
• I’m speaking at RightsCon 2026 in Lusaka, Zambia, on May 6 and 7, 2026.
• I’m giving a keynote address and participating in a panel discussion at an ICTLuxembourg event called “Europe at the Crossroads of AI, Power & the Future of Democracy.” The event will be held at the University of Luxembourg’s Belval Campus on May 12, 2026.
• I’m speaking at the Potsdam Conference on National Cybersecurity at the Hasso Plattner Institut in Potsdam, Germany. The event runs June 24–25, 2026, and my talk will be the evening of June 24.
• I’m speaking at the Digital Humanism Conference in Vienna, Austria, on Tuesday, June 26, 2026.
• I’m speaking at the Nuremberg Digital Festival in Nuremburg, Germany, on Wednesday, July 1, 2026.

The list is maintained on this page.

Interesting paper: “What hackers talk about when they talk about AI: Early-stage diffusion of a cybercrime innovation.”

Abstract: The rapid expansion of artificial intelligence (AI) is raising concerns about its potential to transform cybercrime. Beyond empowering novice offenders, AI stands to intensify the scale and sophistication of attacks by seasoned cybercriminals. This paper examines the evolving relationship between cybercriminals and AI using a unique dataset from a cyber threat intelligence platform. Analyzing more than 160 cybercrime forum conversations collected over seven months, our research reveals how cybercriminals understand AI and discuss how they can exploit its capabilities. Their exchanges reflect growing curiosity about AI’s criminal applications through legal tools and dedicated criminal tools, but also doubts and anxieties about AI’s effectiveness and its effects on their business models and operational security. The study documents attempts to misuse legitimate AI tools and develop bespoke models tailored for illicit purposes. Combining the diffusion of innovation framework with thematic analysis, the paper provides an in-depth view of emerging AI-enabled cybercrime and offers practical insights for law enforcement and policymakers.

I’m skeptical about—and not qualified to review—this new result in factorization with a quantum computer, but if it’s true it’s a theoretical improvement in the speed of factoring large numbers with a quantum computer.

This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak:

• I’m giving the Ross Anderson Lecture at the University of Cambridge’s Churchill College at 5:30 PM GMT on Thursday, March 19, 2026.
• I’m speaking at RSAC 2026 in San Francisco, California, USA, on Wednesday, March 25, 2026.
• I’m part of an event on “Canada and AI Sovereignty,” hosted by the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, which will be held online via Zoom at 4:00 PM ET on Monday, March 30, 2026.
• I’m speaking at DemocracyXChange 2026 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, on April 18, 2026.
• I’m speaking at the SANS AI Cybersecurity Summit 2026 in Arlington, Virginia, USA, at 9:40 AM ET on April 20, 2026.
• I’m speaking at the Nemertes [Next] Virtual Conference Spring 2026, a virtual event, on April 29, 2026.
• I’m speaking at RightsCon 2026 in Lusaka, Zambia, on May 6 and 7, 2026.

The list is maintained on this page.

Some good news: squid stocks seem to be recovering in the waters off the Falkland Islands.

As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered.

Blog moderation policy.

In 2025, Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Meta collectively spent US$380 billion on building artificial-intelligence tools. That number is expected to surge still higher this year, to $650 billion, to fund the building of physical infrastructure, such as data centers (see go.nature.com/3lzf79q). Moreover, these firms are spending lavishly on one particular segment: top technical talent.

Meta reportedly offered a single AI researcher, who had cofounded a start-up firm focused on training AI agents to use computers, a compensation package of $250 million over four years (see go.nature.com/4qznsq1). Technology firms are also spending billions on “reverse-acquihires”—poaching the star staff members of start-ups without acquiring the companies themselves. Eyeing these generous payouts, technical experts earning more modest salaries might well reconsider their career choices.

Academia is already losing out. Since the launch of ChatGPT in 2022, concerns have grown in academia about an “AI brain drain.” Studies point to a sharp rise in university machine-learning and AI researchers moving to industry roles. A 2025 paper reported that this was especially true for young, highly cited scholars: researchers who were about five years into their careers and whose work ranked among the most cited were 100 times more likely to move to industry the following year than were ten-year veterans whose work received an average number of citations, according to a model based on data from nearly seven million papers.¹

This outflow threatens the distinct roles of academic research in the scientific enterprise: innovation driven by curiosity rather than profit, as well as providing independent critique and ethical scrutiny. The fixation of “big tech” firms on skimming the very top talent also risks eroding the idea of science as a collaborative endeavor, in which teams—not individuals—do the most consequential work.

Here, we explore the broader implications for science and suggest alternative visions of the future.

Astronomical salaries for AI talent buy into a legend as old as the software industry: the 10x engineer. This is someone who is supposedly capable of ten times the impact of their peers. Why hire and manage an entire group of scientists or software engineers when one genius—or an AI agent—can outperform them?

That proposition is increasingly attractive to tech firms that are betting that a large number of entry-level and even mid-level engineering jobs will be replaced by AI. It’s no coincidence that Google’s Gemini 3 Pro AI model was launched with boasts of “PhD-level reasoning,” a marketing strategy that is appealing to executives seeking to replace people with AI.

But the lone-genius narrative is increasingly out of step with reality. Research backs up a fundamental truth: science is a team sport. A large-scale study of scientific publishing from 1900 to 2011 found that papers produced by larger collaborations consistently have greater impact than do those of smaller teams, even after accounting for self-citation.² Analyses of the most highly cited scientists show a similar pattern: their highest-impact works tend to be those papers with many authors.³ A 2020 study of Nobel laureates reinforces this trend, revealing that—much like the wider scientific community—the average size of the teams that they publish with has steadily increased over time as scientific problems increase in scope and complexity.⁴

From the detection of gravitational waves, which are ripples in space-time caused by massive cosmic events, to CRISPR-based gene editing, a precise method for cutting and modifying DNA, to recent AI breakthroughs in protein-structure prediction, the most consequential advances in modern science have been collective achievements. Although these successes are often associated with prominent individuals—senior scientists, Nobel laureates, patent holders—the work itself was driven by teams ranging from dozens to thousands of people and was built on decades of open science: shared data, methods, software and accumulated insight.

Building strong institutions is a much more effective use of resources than is betting on any single individual. Examples demonstrating this include the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, the global team that first detected gravitational waves; the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a leading genomics and biomedical-research center behind many CRISPR advances; and even for-profit laboratories such as Google DeepMind in London, which drove advances in protein-structure prediction with its AlphaFold tool. If the aim of the tech giants and other AI firms that are spending lavishly on elite talent is to accelerate scientific progress, the current strategy is misguided.

By contrast, well-designed institutions amplify individual ability, sustain productivity beyond any one person’s career and endure long after any single contributor is gone.

Equally important, effective institutions distribute power in beneficial ways. Rather than vesting decision-making authority in the hands of one person, they have mechanisms for sharing control. Allocation committees decide how resources are used, scientific advisory boards set collective research priorities, and peer review determines which ideas enter the scientific record.

And although the term “innovation by committee” might sound disparaging, such an approach is crucial to make the scientific enterprise act in concert with the diverse needs of the broader public. This is especially true in science, which continues to suffer from pervasive inequalities across gender, race and socio-economic and cultural differences.⁵

Need for alternative vision

This is why scientists, academics and policymakers should pay more attention to how AI research is organized and led, especially as the technology becomes essential across scientific disciplines. Used well, AI can support a more equitable scientific enterprise by empowering junior researchers who currently have access to few resources.

Instead, some of today’s wealthiest scientific institutions might think that they can deploy the same strategies as the tech industry uses and compete for top talent on financial terms—perhaps by getting funding from the same billionaires who back big tech. Indeed, wage inequality has been steadily growing within academia for decades.⁶ But this is not a path that science should follow.

The ideal model for science is a broad, diverse ecosystem in which researchers can thrive at every level. Here are three strategies that universities and mission-driven labs should adopt instead of engaging in a compensation arms race.

First, universities and institutions should stay committed to the public interest. An excellent example of this approach can be found in Switzerland, where several institutions are coordinating to build AI as a public good rather than a private asset. Researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL) and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich, working with the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre, have built Apertus, a freely available large language model. Unlike the controversially-labelled “open source” models built by commercial labs—such as Meta’s LLaMa, which has been criticized for not complying with the open-source definition (see go.nature.com/3o56zd5)—Apertus is not only open in its source code and its weights (meaning its core parameters), but also in its data and development process. Crucially, Apertus is not designed to compete with “frontier” AI labs pursuing superintelligence at enormous cost and with little regard for data ownership. Instead, it adopts a more modest and sustainable goal: to make AI trustworthy for use in industry and public administration, strictly adhering to data-licensing restrictions and including local European languages.⁷

Principal investigators (PIs) at other institutions globally should follow this path, aligning public funding agencies and public institutions to produce a more sustainable alternative to corporate AI.

Second, universities should bolster networks of researchers from the undergraduate to senior-professor levels—not only because they make for effective innovation teams, but also because they serve a purpose beyond next quarter’s profits. The scientific enterprise galvanizes its members at all levels to contribute to the same projects, the same journals and the same open, international scientific literature—to perpetuate itself across generations and to distribute its impact throughout society.

Universities should take precisely the opposite hiring strategy to that of the big tech firms. Instead of lavishing top dollar on a select few researchers, they should equitably distribute salaries. They should raise graduate-student stipends and postdoc salaries and limit the growth of pay for high-profile PIs.

Third, universities should show that they can offer more than just financial benefits: they must offer distinctive intellectual and civic rewards. Although money is unquestionably a motivator, researchers also value intellectual freedom and the recognition of their work. Studies show that research roles in industry that allow publication attract talent at salaries roughly 20% lower than comparable positions that prohibit it (see go.nature.com/4cbjxzu).

Beyond the intellectual recognition of publications and citation counts, universities should recognize and reward the production of public goods. The tenure and promotion process at universities should reward academics who supply expertise to local and national governments, who communicate with and engage the public in research, who publish and maintain open-source software for public use and who provide services for non-profit groups.

Furthermore, institutions should demonstrate that they will defend the intellectual freedom of their researchers and shield them from corporate or political interference. In the United States today, we see a striking juxtaposition between big tech firms, which curry favour with the administration of US President Donald Trump to win regulatory and trade benefits, and higher-education institutions, which suffer massive losses of federal funding and threats of investigation and sanction. Unlike big tech firms, universities should invest in enquiry that challenges authority.

We urge leaders of scientific institutions to reject the growing pay inequality rampant in the upper echelons of AI research. Instead, they should compete for talent on a different dimension: the integrity of their missions and the equitableness of their institutions. These institutions should focus on building sustainable organizations with diverse staff members, rather than bestowing a bounty on science’s 1%.

References

1. Jurowetzki, R., Hain, D. S., Wirtz, K. & Bianchini, S. AI Soc. 40, 4145–4152 (2025).
2. Larivière, V., Gingras, Y., Sugimoto, C. R. & Tsou, A. J. Assoc. Inf. Sci. Technol. 66, 1323–1332 (2015).
3. Aksnes, D. W. & Aagaard, K. J. Data Inf. Sci. 6, 41–66 (2021).
4. Li, J., Yin, Y., Fortunato, S. & Wang, D. J. R. Soc. Interface 17, 20200135 (2020).
5. Graves, J. L. Jr, Kearney, M., Barabino, G. & Malcom, S. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 119, e2117831119 (2022).
6. Lok, C. Nature 537, 471–473 (2016).
7. Project Apertus. Preprint at arXiv https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2509.14233 (2025).

This essay was written with Nathan E. Sanders, and originally appeared in Nature.

Apple announcement:

…iPhone and iPad are the first and only consumer devices in compliance with the information assurance requirements of NATO nations. This enables iPhone and iPad to be used with classified information up to the NATO restricted level without requiring special software or settings—a level of government certification no other consumer mobile device has met.

This is out of the box, no modifications required.

Boing Boing post.

Canada has a choice to make about its artificial intelligence future. The Carney administration is investing $2-billion over five years in its Sovereign AI Compute Strategy. Will any value generated by “sovereign AI” be captured in Canada, making a difference in the lives of Canadians, or is this just a passthrough to investment in American Big Tech?

Forcing the question is OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, which has been pushing an “OpenAI for Countries” initiative. It is not the only one eyeing its share of the $2-billion, but it appears to be the most aggressive. OpenAI’s top lobbyist in the region has met with Ottawa officials, including Artificial Intelligence Minister Evan Solomon.

All the while, OpenAI was less than open. The company had flagged the Tumbler Ridge, B.C., shooter’s ChatGPT interactions, which included gun-violence chats. Employees wanted to alert law enforcement but were rebuffed. Maybe there is a discussion to be had about users’ privacy. But even after the shooting, the OpenAI representative who met with the B.C. government said nothing.

When tech billionaires and corporations steer AI development, the resultant AI reflects their interests rather than those of the general public or ordinary consumers. Only after the meeting with the B.C. government did OpenAI alert law enforcement. Had it not been for the Wall Street Journal’s reporting, the public would not have known about this at all.

Moreover, OpenAI for Countries is explicitly described by the company as an initiative “in co-ordination with the U.S. government.” And it’s not just OpenAI: all the AI giants are for-profit American companies, operating in their private interests, and subject to United States law and increasingly bowing to U.S. President Donald Trump. Moving data centres into Canada under a proposal like OpenAI’s doesn’t change that. The current geopolitical reality means Canada should not be dependent on U.S. tech firms for essential services such as cloud computing and AI.

While there are Canadian AI companies, they remain for-profit enterprises, their interests not necessarily aligned with our collective good. The only real alternative is to be bold and invest in a wholly Canadian public AI: an AI model built and funded by Canada for Canadians, as public infrastructure. This would give Canadians access to the myriad of benefits from AI without having to depend on the U.S. or other countries. It would mean Canadian universities and public agencies building and operating AI models optimized not for global scale and corporate profit, but for practical use by Canadians.

Imagine AI embedded into health care, triaging radiology scans, flagging early cancer risks and assisting doctors with paperwork. Imagine an AI tutor trained on provincial curriculums, giving personalized coaching. Imagine systems that analyze job vacancies and sectoral and wage trends, then automatically match job seekers to government programs. Imagine using AI to optimize transit schedules, energy grids and zoning analysis. Imagine court processes, corporate decisions and customer service all sped up by AI.

We are already on our way to having AI become an inextricable part of society. To ensure stability and prosperity for this country, Canadian users and developers must be able to turn to AI models built, controlled, and operated publicly in Canada instead of building on corporate platforms, American or otherwise.

Switzerland has shown this to be possible. With funding from the federal government, a consortium of academic institutions—ETH Zurich, EPFL, and the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre—released the world’s most powerful and fully realized public AI model, Apertus, last September. Apertus leveraged renewable hydropower and existing Swiss scientific computing infrastructure. It also used no illegally pirated copyrighted material or poorly paid labour extracted from the Global South during training. The model’s performance stands at roughly a year or two behind the major corporate offerings, but that is more than adequate for the vast majority of applications. And it’s free for anyone to use and build on.

The significance of Apertus is more than technical. It demonstrates an alternative ownership structure for AI technology, one that allocates both decision-making authority and value to national public institutions rather than foreign corporations. This vision represents precisely the paradigm shift Canada should embrace: AI as public infrastructure, like systems for transportation, water, or electricity, rather than private commodity.

Apertus also demonstrates a far more sustainable economic framework for AI. Switzerland spent a tiny fraction of the billions of dollars that corporate AI labs invest annually, demonstrating that the frequent training runs with astronomical price tags pursued by tech companies are not actually necessary for practical AI development. They focused on making something broadly useful rather than bleeding edge—trying dubiously to create “superintelligence,” as with Silicon Valley—so they created a smaller model at much lower cost. Apertus’s training was at a scale (70 billion parameters) perhaps two orders of magnitude lower than the largest Big Tech offerings.

An ecosystem is now being developed on top of Apertus, using the model as a public good to power chatbots for free consumer use and to provide a development platform for companies prioritizing responsible AI use, and rigorous compliance with laws like the EU AI Act. Instead of routing queries from those users to Big Tech infrastructure, Apertus is deployed to data centres across national AI and computing initiatives of Switzerland, Australia, Germany, and Singapore and other partners.

The case for public AI rests on both democratic principles and practical benefits. Public AI systems can incorporate mechanisms for genuine public input and democratic oversight on critical ethical questions: how to handle copyrighted works in training data, how to mitigate bias, how to distribute access when demand outstrips capacity, and how to license use for sensitive applications like policing or medicine. Or how to handle a situation such as that of the Tumbler Ridge shooter. These decisions will profoundly shape society as AI becomes more pervasive, yet corporate AI makes them in secret.

By contrast, public AI developed by transparent, accountable agencies would allow democratic processes and political oversight to govern how these powerful systems function.

Canada already has many of the building blocks for public AI. The country has world-class AI research institutions, including the Vector Institute, Mila, and CIFAR, which pioneered much of the deep learning revolution. Canada’s $2-billion Sovereign AI Compute Strategy provides substantial funding.

What’s needed now is a reorientation away from viewing this as an opportunity to attract private capital, and toward a fully open public AI model.

This essay was written with Nathan E. Sanders, and originally appeared in The Globe and Mail.

EDITED TO ADD (3/16): Slashdot thread.

Countries around the world are becoming increasingly concerned about their dependencies on the US. If you’ve purchase US-made F-35 fighter jets, you are dependent on the US for software maintenance.

The Dutch Defense Secretary recently said that he could jailbreak the planes to accept third-party software.

It’s called AirSnitch:

Unlike previous Wi-Fi attacks, AirSnitch exploits core features in Layers 1 and 2 and the failure to bind and synchronize a client across these and higher layers, other nodes, and other network names such as SSIDs (Service Set Identifiers). This cross-layer identity desynchronization is the key driver of AirSnitch attacks.

The most powerful such attack is a full, bidirectional machine-in-the-middle (MitM) attack, meaning the attacker can view and modify data before it makes its way to the intended recipient. The attacker can be on the same SSID, a separate one, or even a separate network segment tied to the same AP. It works against small Wi-Fi networks in both homes and offices and large networks in enterprises.

With the ability to intercept all link-layer traffic (that is, the traffic as it passes between Layers 1 and 2), an attacker can perform other attacks on higher layers. The most dire consequence occurs when an Internet connection isn’t encrypted­—something that Google recently estimated occurred when as much as 6 percent and 20 percent of pages loaded on Windows and Linux, respectively. In these cases, the attacker can view and modify all traffic in the clear and steal authentication cookies, passwords, payment card details, and any other sensitive data. Since many company intranets are sent in plaintext, traffic from them can also be intercepted.

Even when HTTPS is in place, an attacker can still intercept domain look-up traffic and use DNS cache poisoning to corrupt tables stored by the target’s operating system. The AirSnitch MitM also puts the attacker in the position to wage attacks against vulnerabilities that may not be patched. Attackers can also see the external IP addresses hosting webpages being visited and often correlate them with the precise URL.

Here’s the paper.