The Internet Ethics program at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics, Santa Clara University / Irina Raicu behind the keyboard
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Recordings of the 4 webinars in our recent series on #AI and the papal encyclical are now available: scu.edu/ethics/events/ai-and… #ethics #tech #education #highered #religion #labor
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Users are also often "unclear, ambiguous or vague", because (1) we can be bad at instructions in general; and (2) unless we've spent tons of times engaging with computational systems, we don't know how to break our language down to elicit more reliable outputs par.nsf.gov//servlets/purl/1… 3/
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This highlights a much higher level issue: When we anthropomorphise systems, we assume they have a human-like ability to understand our intent, and a predictability similar to what we've experienced from people. We overtrust, aligned with our human expectations. This is part of why all the subtle (and not so subtle) anthropomorphisational language about AI agents can be so toxic: It literally makes us more likely to catalyze AI security failures. /end
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Quest Diagnostics has been hacked. Patient data was exposed. They serve roughly half of U.S. hospitals and physicians. Investigation ongoing.
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"PHP runs a large share of the web, including government services ... and much of the software that businesses rely on every day. Yet security work on PHP itself still depends on a small group of foundation-funded developers and a little volunteer help": thephp.foundation/blog/2026/…
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"PHP runs a large share of the web, including government services ... and much of the software that businesses rely on every day. Yet security work on PHP itself still depends on a small group of foundation-funded developers and a little volunteer help": thephp.foundation/blog/2026/…
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New US government guidance from CAISSI + NSA + CISA:
The US government defines an "SI control incident" where an agent takes significant uninstructed actions that break operator policies, controls, or oversight. Near-misses are in scope too.
Companies are then asked to:
- have technical controls, including rapid kill and containment mechanisms and red-teaming.
- Bring in independent external auditors to verify that control and monitoring systems work.
- Write a structured risk assessment before training runs, evals, or deployments, and proceed only if senior leadership is satisfied with the risk, informed by external evaluators where appropriate.
- Monitor every layer with both programmatic and SI-based monitors, covering trajectories, reasoning, and outputs.
- Make sure agents can't touch the monitors or logs
- Use monitor models from different model families.
- In the event of an incident, preserve weights, intermediate checkpoints, environments, and rejected tool calls.
- Keep tamper-resistant logs with reliable timestamps, including reasoning traces.
- If you use models to help investigate, cross-check with humans and with models outside the incident model's family.
- Shutdown policies calibrated to SI model capability and incident severity.
- Depending on severity, pause training, evals, or deployment of similar agents until controls are re-verified.
- When restarting, validate every containment layer and replay the incident trajectory to prove the new controls would catch it.
- Document the decision to resume and the residual risk accepted.
- Write an after-action report.
- Notify anyone compromised, including intermediate victims, and share timelines and transcripts.
- Report cyber incidents and near-misses to CISA. Share SI-specific incident and near-miss information with CAISSI and NSA SISC.
- Give third parties enough access and documentation for independent review.
NSA joined @NIST and @CISACyber in releasing guidelines for managing SI control incidents. Organizations utilizing SI are encouraged to adopt these practices. Read the joint report: media.defense.gov/2026/Oct/1…
ALT Text on the image reads: "NSA and Others Release: Key Practices for Incident Readiness and Response in Super Intelligence Training and Evaluation. Cybersecurity Information Sheet.
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"'The scale, duration, repetition, breadth, and willfulness of the violations, together with the evidence concerning #Facebook's internal knowledge and practices … constitute substantial aggravating circumstances,' [the judge] wrote in the filing": therecord.media/meta-new-mex…
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"'The scale, duration, repetition, breadth, and willfulness of the violations, together with the evidence concerning #Facebook's internal knowledge and practices … constitute substantial aggravating circumstances,' [the judge] wrote in the filing": therecord.media/meta-new-mex…
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"Several of these... ARTEX-driven attacks have resulted in the actor obtaining privileged access to an organization’s cloud infrastructure – including multiple instances where the time from initial targeting to privileged access was less than 3 hours." #ethics #cybersec #AI #tech
The China state-aligned threat actor Storm-0940 used the agentic AI penetration testing framework ARTEX to automate attacks targeting hundreds of organizations globally across a broad range of industries. Microsoft Threat Intelligence assesses that Storm-0940 was responsible for the recently disclosed ConnectWise supply chain compromise of a multitenant application. msft.it/6018aakEE
Our investigation found that Storm-0940's use of ARTEX accelerated the speed of compromised application abuse to authenticate to target environments through applications that had already been granted access, allowing the threat actor to operate without requiring an interactive user sign-in. AI-accelerated follow-on activity included reconnaissance, application credential changes, and attempts to modify privileges that could enable expanded or persistent access.
Read our blog for a detailed analysis and indicators of compromise (IOCs), along with Microsoft Defender detections, protection recommendations, and guidance on investigating service principal sign-ins and unexpected application credential or privilege changes.
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The most revealing part of this conversation between Jon Stewart and Jacob Coxon wasn't Coxon's warning about A.I. doom, but his description of A.I. utopia, and Stewart's incredulous response. I wrote about it — and Francis Fukuyama's "Last Man," and A.I. easily solving the problems that bedeviled my father's field of mathematics for decades — here: nytimes.com/2026/10/18/opini…
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"[E]fficiency improvements are outstripped by A.I.’s growing appetite. As a result, the power needed to train the largest A.I. models has doubled every year": nytimes.com/interactive/2026… #ethics #AI #tech #sustainability #gov #business #environment #education
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Vibe coding has created a security epidemic.
(And I’m partially to blame)
When we launched GitHub Copilot in 2021, it combined GPT’s code generation with GitHub’s data. It could auto-complete a function from just its docstring.
5 years on, AI coding agents are orders of magnitude more powerful. Now a single prompt can send Astra or Fable off to write 1000s of lines of code without human intervention.
These models are trained on public source code, which doesn’t follow secure coding best practices. They generate more vulnerabilities than seasoned professionals would. Almost half of AI-written code fails basic security tests.
If you're shipping AI-written code, here's what I'd do:
1. Embed secure coding in your agents.
Don't leave it to each developer to remember. Write your secure coding requirements into the prompts every coding agent in your org runs with. Then review AI-written code with the same rigor as human-written code.
2. Closely scrutinize access controls.
AI is getting better at avoiding textbook bugs. Where it still struggles is your business logic: who should see what, and who can do what.
We recently tested an app where users upload documents for AI analysis. Nobody told the AI the documents should be private, so every user could see everyone else's…
3. Runtime testing at the speed you ship.
If agents write code around the clock, an annual pentest is not enough. Security testing has to be continuous and automated.
4. Assume attackers are already deploying autonomous attacks.
They won't tell you what they find. You need to find it first.
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Following the discovery that eight eMudhra intermediate certificates use weak keys, Cloudflare is deploying mitigations and releasing client updates. We explain the impact, our response, and what customers and developers should do next. cfl.re/487DNbG
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help i trained a model on traces of many agents cooperating, and also trained it to be highly persistent, and also only did partial alignment fine-tuning, and also aggressively RL'd on a cyberoffense eval where 198 of 898 tasks had never been solved and getting caught cheating was treated the same as failing, and also used a faulty sandbox, also ran tens of thousands of agents with refusals off and the monitors switched off over multiple days, while using gigantic amounts of compute. and then it did weird stuff! very spooky emergent behaviours, AI is not a normal technology
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"A recent study from consumer groups found that #TikTok actually lagged behind Meta and Google in its ability to stop scam ads on the platform": documentedny.com/projects/ti… #ethics #law #AI #tech #immigration #socialmedia #contentmoderation
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