A.I. Safety Is So Back + Mythos Mayhem with Nikesh Arora + Hot Mess Express

After several years of dismissing A. I. safety as doomer fear-mongering, parts of the Trump administration now seem ready to support regulation.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:32Speaker 01

  Casey, will you record my audiobook for me?

• 0:35Speaker 02

  Yes, I would love to, actually.

• 0:36Speaker 01

  OK, thanks. Yeah, because I got the briefing yesterday on what this would entail for me. They want 36 hours in the studio to record this audiobook.

• 0:46Speaker 02

  That's, wait, hold on. Eight, 16, 24. That's over four days worth. That's four and a half days of recording. That's like almost a full week.

• 0:54Speaker 01

  I know.

• 0:55Speaker 02

  Oh, my god.

• 0:56Speaker 01

  I know. But apparently, people have a connection to us because of our voices. So they didn't want me using like an AI clone to do it.

• 1:02Speaker 02

  It makes it, you know what? I really think that there would be a case that I should do this because it would force me to read your book. You know what I mean? Like, put me like, then I really can't get out of it. Like, I'm on the hook to read this thing for real. And so that might be the best way to do it.

• 1:17Speaker 01

  You can insert your little, like, snotty wisecracks if you want, like, mystery science theater it.

• 1:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, a little, a little extra commentary on the side. Like, oh, I see we're using that transition again. Hmm. Oh, boy, he really ended this whole thing with time will tell. I, um, I would have suggested a different direction. Was this book edited?

• 1:38Speaker 01

  No, wait, now I kind of actually want you to do it.

• 1:47Speaker 02

  I'm Kevin Russett, tech columnist at The New York Times. I'm Casey Newton from Platformer. And this is Hard Fork. This week is AI safety back? The Trump administration seems to be changing its tune. Then Palo Alto Network CEO Nikesh Arora joins us to discuss what's real and what's hype in the freak-out over Claude Mythos. And finally, the train has returned to the station. It's the Hot Mess Express.

• 2:09Speaker 01

  Buckle up.

• 2:10Speaker 02

  People don't typically buckle a seatbelt on a train.

• 2:13Speaker 01

  This is a very safe train.

• 2:15Speaker 02

  All right.

• 2:23Speaker 01

  Well, the big news this week is that President Trump headed to China with a cohort of American business executives to have a series of meetings about Chinese trade policy and AI and other things with Xi Jinping and other leading Chinese officials.

• 2:39Speaker 02

  Now, is it true when they walked off the plane, a bunch of H100s fell out of the leg of Jensen Huang's pants?

• 2:44Speaker 01

  I haven't heard that confirmed, but I'll look into it.

• 2:49Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 2:49Speaker 01

  I want to talk about this, but less through the lens of like sort of President Trump and United States trade policy than through this sort of larger shift that I think we've both observed over the past week or so, which is that after several years of kind of dismissing AI safety and doomer fear mongering about AI, the Trump administration, or at least parts of the Trump administration, seem to be getting quite scared about what's happening.

• 3:12Speaker 02

  Yes, and while this is something that I think was honestly inevitable, it still has been jarring to see it happen because it seems like this administration has really turned on a dime when it comes to this subject.

• 3:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, so let's talk about what's been going on and some of the data points that support the idea that the Trump administration is sort of changing its AI posture, at least has several different AI postures that it's considering. But first, let's do our AI disclosures. I work for the New York Times, which is suing OpenAI, Microsoft, and Perplexity.

• 3:41Speaker 02

  And my fiance works at Anthropic.

• 3:43Speaker 01

  So first, there was this executive order, or rumored executive order, that my colleagues at the New York Times reported on last week. This would be a new executive order to create an AI working group that would bring together tech executives and government officials to potentially come up with new ways of overseeing or regulating AI. One of the potential plans being discussed is a formal government review process for new AI models before they are released. So this is still ongoing. We still don't know exactly what the executive order will or won't include, but we are expecting more news on that.

• 4:20Speaker 02

  Yes, and the reason that is notable, Kevin, is that on President Trump's first day in office in his second term, he canceled- Biden's executive order on AI, which, among other things, included this, a very similar kind of review process for new frontier AI models, right? Like, the Biden people were very confident that we would one day get models that could be used to commit great harm. And so they wanted to get a handle on that before those models were released. And when Biden did that, many Republicans were saying, this is anti-innovation, you're going to make us lose to China. Well, well, well, now the shoe is on the other foot and they're saying, hey, slow down, don't release those things quite so fast.

• 5:00Speaker 01

  It's so remarkable how fast the Overton window has shifted on this idea. I mean, as you just said, like, during the Biden administration, during the SB 1047 fight here in California over this proposed AI bill, people in tech and on the tech right and sort of among the more libertarian crowd were incensed about the idea that the government might ask them to do pre-release testing of their models that they then submit the results of to the government. They called this, you know, communist. They were, they were sort of implying this would be kind of the end of free enterprise as we know it. And now, just a couple of years later, they are reportedly considering doing something similar. So what do you think happened here?

• 5:44Speaker 02

  Well, I think that, basically, to use a phrase you sometimes like to use, like, the Trump administration's view of AI just did not survive contact with reality, right? And that, in a word, what has changed here is Mythos, the model that Anthropic now has released in a preview to a very small group that includes now many federal agencies. This model is very good, apparently, at finding novel vulnerabilities in code that can be used to create exploits. And that appears to be true across many, many, many programs. And so the administration, I think, took a look at this, and the serious people over there said, look, you know, whatever your views may be about, you know, free trade and the threat of losing to China, like, we have a model right now that if it were

• 6:29Speaker 02

  just sort of unleashed on the public, could just create vast amounts of harm. And I think, to their credit, the Trump administration said, okay, then what would be a policy to prevent harm from happening?

• 6:39Speaker 01

  Yes, mythos is the proximate cause here for a lot of this, but I think it's also worth talking about the various factions within the Trump administration that appear to be battling over control of this new AI regulatory push. There appears to be a turf war breaking out between the Center for AI Standards and Innovation, or Casey.

• 7:01Speaker 02

  Shout out to Casey.

• 7:03Speaker 01

  Which is formerly known as the US AI Safety Institute. This was a group within the Commerce Department that was set up under the Biden administration. The Trump administration came in and basically they didn't like that this was, you know, what they considered sort of a bunch of doomers. So they sort of made some changes, including to the name. But this is a group of AI researchers and safety experts who work in the Commerce Department, who want to be involved in vetting new models.

• 7:28Speaker 02

  And there is just something so funny about these people coming in and saying AI safety is such a stupid idea that we have to remove safety from the name of this institute. And then one year later be like, well, AI safety is really going to be a focus for us from now on.

• 7:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, so there are some people who believe that the vetting of frontier models should take place like in the intelligence community among like the NSA and various other organizations. So there's some turf war there. There's also just like this interesting kind of posture war over like whether the kind of let it rip approach to AI development, or as former AIs are, David Sacks put it, the let them cook philosophy of laissez faire regulation, and this more sort of hawkish, safety oriented faction within the Republican Party that does see these models as a big threat and wants to take steps to reel them in.

• 8:22Speaker 02

  Right. So do we know at this point who seems to be winning that battle? And do you think it matters to the average person which side gains the upper hand?

• 8:31Speaker 01

  I do. I think there's obviously going to be some back and forth. We'll see when this executive order comes out, like what they do about the the testing requirements and where they locate that. If it's like, we're going to let the NSA do this, or we're going to let Casey do this. I think that all might matter a little bit, but I think the The general posture of the administration changing from AI safety is ridiculous. And these doomers are using hyped up fears to enact regulatory capture is very different from what we are seeing now, which is, oh, wait, these models are very powerful. And we don't want our adversaries to get access to them. But we should also say it is entirely confused and incoherent right now at the level of the federal government.

• 9:16Speaker 01

  Because on one level, you have President Trump inviting Jensen Huang of Nvidia onto Air Force One to fly with him to China to try to make a deal to presumably like open up the export of Nvidia's most powerful AI chips to China. While at the same time, you have other high ranking government officials saying, we need to institute some kind of safety regime because these models are potentially very dangerous.

• 9:40Speaker 02

  Yes, and nowhere is that schism more apparent than in the Pentagon, Kevin, where on one hand, the Pentagon has designated Anthropic as a supply chain risk because it refused to amend its contract to enable any, quote, lawful use of its technology, as we talked about on the show for a few months. That designation, the Pentagon is still arguing for in court. But at the same time, we learned that this week during the period where the Pentagon is supposed to be unwinding all of Anthropic's technology from the Pentagon, the Pentagon is also implementing Mythos and using it to try to scan for vulnerabilities.

• 10:19Speaker 01

  It's truly wild.

• 10:20Speaker 02

  I want to be in the meeting where the person who has to remove Anthropic from the Pentagon sits down with the person who's installing Anthropic into the Pentagon and just sort of hear what those talks are like.

• 10:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, so aside from the obvious sort of incoherence and maybe hypocrisy of these conflicting positions, like which side do you think is going to come out on top here?

• 10:42Speaker 02

  Well, obviously, I'm always going to side with Casey. You know, Casey is a great agency, great people over there. And I mean, honestly, like they were just set up to do this exact thing, right? Like when it was established under President Biden, the idea was these models are getting better. Pretty soon, they're going to be dangerous. We need to have. A way of evaluating them before they are released. And frankly, they've just sort of like hired a lot of people who I think ordinarily might not work in a Trump administration, but felt like this is so important that I'm going to swallow hard and go over there and try to, you know, serve my country by protecting us from the worst things that AI can do. And so to me, like, that seems like they would be very well set up to do this kind of work.

• 11:22Speaker 02

  Where I think we still just have an obvious gap, though, Kevin, is it's not entirely clear to me what is supposed to happen in the case when a company like Anthropic comes up with a model that is too dangerous to release in the view of something like Casey, but wants to release it anyway. And I assume we are just going to get there, like sometime within the next six months, one of these companies is going to say, yeah, it's risky, but, you know, we, we think it's sort of fine to put out there. We have like business imperatives. We're going to talk ourselves into it. And like, then what happens?

• 11:48Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, it's also just so clearly unfortunate that the issue of AI safety has become polarized in the way that it did over the past couple of years. That sort of caring about safety, talking about safety became sort of like vaguely woke coded. And people in the Trump administration thought it was like a bunch of hysterical liberals, you know, using fears of AI to like get heavy handed regulation into place. Like, I don't think that was ever true, but I think it has become especially untrue now when you have very senior people in the Republican Party talking about how we need to restrain these systems. So it's just, it's frustrating because I think you and I both saw like this technology is real. It's going to get, you know, even more powerful than it is.

• 12:33Speaker 01

  And at that point, it's not going to matter whether you're a Republican or a Democrat. Like, you do not want this stuff falling into the, the hands of, of our adversaries.

• 12:42Speaker 02

  True, but I think the Trump administration was always out on a limb here in a really weird way. Like, we have talked a lot recently about what the surveys show when it comes to the public opinion of AI in America. Republicans and Democrats are like largely aligned in being like deeply skeptical of it. And even, you know, outright hating it. And that's why you see so many Republican state legislators trying to pass laws to rein in AI, right? Like, you did not have to convince Republicans. State legislatures that AI was dangerous and needed to be regulated like they were racing to do it. And the Trump administration has had to put a lot of energy into trying to pass a moratorium so that it can preserve its sort of all gas, no brakes approach to AI. So what I think happened here was that there was basically like a minority of Republicans

• 13:26Speaker 02

  that happened to be running the country that said, let the labs do whatever they want. And then Mythos comes out and the bill comes due and they're they sort of have their pants down and they have to change their tune.

• 13:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:35Speaker 02

  Just to sort of throw a lot of metaphors in there.

• 13:39Speaker 01

  Pants, tunes.

• 13:41Speaker 02

  I'll come up with more, don't worry.

• 13:42Speaker 01

  We're getting there.

• 13:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 13:43Speaker 01

  One other thing here is that you are starting to see the issue of catastrophic or existential risk floating up and percolating on the right. This is something that people like Bernie Sanders have now been talking about on the left for a couple of months. But on Tuesday of this week, Ted Cruz was talking about catastrophic risk and the need to protect against it. So I just think that the improvement of these models and the fact that they are so clearly useful for dangerous things like cyber attacks is going to scramble some of the usual partisan allegiances here.

• 14:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, look, the idea that a large language model might eventually get so good that it could like break into your computer and wreak havoc like that was not a liberal view. Like that was just a view grounded in an observation of like the rate of improvement in the model. In truth, I am glad that they are reversing course on this. And they're doing it before we've had a massive catastrophe. Maybe an asterisk there, though, which is, I truly feel like every single day for the past week, I've seen news of a major cyber attack. And increasingly, we're getting word that these may have had AI systems involved in identifying these vulnerabilities.

• 14:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, so there may be a catastrophe unfolding under our noses. We just don't know about it yet.

• 14:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, stay tuned for next week's episode.

• 15:01Speaker 01

  I want to talk a little bit about this China trip and what, if anything, we think that has to do with AI regulations. So there was some reporting in the Wall Street Journal last week that both the US and China have been considering a series of official discussions around AI. We know that AI is on the agenda for President Trump's meetings with Xi in China this week. And we also know that China has been looking to get access to Mythos. There was a great story recently in The Times that talked about the fact that a representative from a Chinese think tank approached Anthropic officials at a meeting in Singapore last month to basically lobby them to open this model up to China.

• 15:41Speaker 02

  And we want to give them the hard fork chutzpah award for shooting your shot.

• 15:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:45Speaker 02

  If you work at a Chinese think tank and you think Dario Emmeide was about to hand you Mythos, like, that is truly, like, I aspire to your level of self-confidence.

• 15:52Speaker 01

  Listen, you miss 100% of the shots you don't take. So along with Jensen Huang, who finagled a last-minute invite on Air Force One after there were news reports that he was not going to be going on this trip, Elon Musk, Tim Cook, and Dina Powell McCormick from Meta are also on the trip with Trump. What's going on here? And how would you characterize the blunt rotation among those tech executives?

• 16:20Speaker 02

  You know, I mean, this is a group of executives that are aligned with the Trump administration, and they have all found in various ways that the more time you spend flattering President Trump, the more like tax breaks and other forms of relief your company gets. So, I mean, you know, this is exactly what we talked about expecting Tim Cook to do. Once he announced that he'd be stepping down as CEO, is, you know, you're just kind of like a Trump whisperer, and you follow him around, and you say, you know, go President Trump, and also, please give Apple what we want. So, you know, Meta, Apple, and Nvidia have all had huge success with this administration. And now, as their reward, they get to be, you know, photographed with the president flying around China.

• 16:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think, like, I am just very unsure where all of this settles out because I can imagine, you know, Trump wanting to go to China and make a bunch of deals. And obviously, Jensen Huang and Nvidia want to be able to sell their chips in China. And so I can see them, on one hand, like, giving some kind of expanded access to Chinese AI companies to get these American chips. But then I can also see them not wanting China to get access to models like Mythos. So I just, I don't know how that resolves. And I see it as basically inherently contradictory that you want to give China or sell China the means to make its own Mythos caliber models while at the same time trying to block them from getting access to the one that we have today.

• 17:40Speaker 02

  This is where it would be helpful to have a coherent strategy, but we don't, right? It's like the same administration that is like installing and uninstalling Anthropic at the same time is kind of having a similar level of confusion over in China where it seems like the administration is just like highly susceptible to like blowing wherever the wind is today.

• 18:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I am generally not all that optimistic about the government's ability to regulate technology in a way that is timely and relevant. And I hope I'm wrong here, but I just, I think that we will see this sort of incoherence and contradiction until there is like some big event that kind of forces everyone to like sit up straight.

• 18:21Speaker 02

  I mean, my question is, will this be a case of the same AI safety minded people who were dismissed for the past couple of years by the Trump administration be proven right again in the future when it turns out that China did use access to American technology to build Mythos or better level models? And will there be any regrets, you know, that we sort of paved the way for them to do that? I mean, you know, I don't think it's unlikely.

• 18:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's interesting, though. Like, I had a conversation with a federal official recently, like, in the last couple of weeks, where this person was basically telling me that AI is just a normal technology, sort of taking the line that we've heard again and again from the people who, who don't want to regulate this stuff, saying like, this is just the internet, this is just the PC, it's not some special technology that requires special rules. And that position has just become so untenable, to me at least. When you have models that are out there finding zero day exploits like clearly our military, our intelligence agencies. They don't think this is a normal technology. They think it's it's more like a step change that requires them to like act in different ways.

• 19:30Speaker 01

  So I am very curious what happens to the sort of AI's normal technology camp inside the Trump administration as the technology continues to grow. They may change their arguments or they may not like that's the thing. You just don't know how committed these people are to their view. You don't. We should also talk about some of the international reaction to Mythos because it's not just China who wants into this thing. Germany's Digital Affairs and Cyber Security Agency are out this week with a proposal for establishing their own version of something like the US KC. They are also demanding access to state of the art models like Mythos. So it just seems like this model has sort of forced conversations around the world

• 20:13Speaker 01

  about who should have access to which models, when should the public have access? Should governments have access? Which governments should have access? It just seems like we are kind of like in a new era of AI brinksmanship.

• 20:25Speaker 02

  For sure. And, you know, I what I hope that we will see in the coming months is more and more cooperation. Like, the whole reason that we had that series of AI action summits over the past few years was to try to get more cooperation among the Western powers with this stuff. And then last year, the US sort of came in and said, that's over. The US is winning the AI race and and you can like it or learn to live with it, basically.

• 20:48Speaker 01

  Right.

• 20:49Speaker 02

  And, you know, so it's no wonder to me that these other, you know, Western powers are seeking access to these models. And I think there's probably honestly a good case that they should get access to these models. Because when it comes to, you know, fixing every vulnerability on the internet, I think we could probably use all the help we can get.

• 21:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I remember that AI action summit. I didn't go to this, the most recent one in India, but the one in Paris before that, I remember it was just like, oh, we're just not going to talk about any of this. Like, we're just not going to talk about the dangers that this technology might create because we're so. Invested in this sort of accelerationist posture. So how far we've come and yet we are still in the very early innings of this.

• 21:26Speaker 02

  Does it make you wonder what would have happened if the Trump administration had just been listening to Hard Fork a year ago? Could they have saved themselves some trouble here?

• 21:34Speaker 01

  It's possible. So Casey, the politics of AI and AI regulation are obviously shifting very quickly. We may learn more this week after these meetings in China. But like, what is your take on what this latest burst of news signals about AI or AI regulations?

• 21:52Speaker 02

  My take is this is a rare bit of good news when it comes to AI regulation, right? Like, I am somebody who's been worried about AI safety for a long time. And one of the main reasons I've been worried about it is that our government has seemed to have this feeling of like, let's just see what happens. Whereas to me, it was seemed pretty obvious what was going to happen. Now we have arrived at that point. We have a super powerful model. And to their credit, the Trump administration is saying, okay, it seems like we were wrong about how capable these models were going to be. Let's make some changes.

• 22:22Speaker 01

  And do you think there's any way that this turns out to backfire? I mean, I'm just remembering like, people wanting social media to be regulated. And then when the Trump administration started doing things in the realm of social media, it amounted to what you and I would consider sort of censorship, or at least wanting to strong arm the social media companies into doing their bidding. So do you think there's, it's possible that something similar happens with AI? Where it's like, we get the regulation, but it's just the wrong kind? Or this pre-release testing is testing for the wrong kind of thing?

• 22:54Speaker 02

  Yes, I am very sympathetic to those who believe that this is, could amount to a kind of prior restraint on free speech and that there is the risk that there are, you know, members of the Trump administration will effectively say, you can't release that model, not because it's actually dangerous, but just because it seems woke and gay. And I think that we need to keep an eye out for that. And, you know, potentially someone is going to need to sue over it. But when I look at how I want to balance those things, for the moment, I would rather have an administration saying, the crazy cyber model, don't give that to everyone.

• 23:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think I'm landing at a pretty similar place where I'm like, I'm a little worried that this regulatory push from the right is going to be confused and maybe too sudden. And there's going to be some sort of overreaction that ends up with something more like the sort of censorship that you mentioned. But I am glad that after many years of kind of denying that this technology was important, that it would become as good as the people at the lab said, that our government at least appears open to the idea that maybe they need to step in and do something here. I'll take the little wins where I can get them.

• 24:03Speaker 02

  That's what I'm saying. When's the last time we talked about a win on this show?

• 24:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:09Speaker 01

  When we come back, what is Claude Mythos doing to the world of cybersecurity? We'll talk to Palo Alto Network's CEO Nikesh Arora.

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• 26:07Speaker 02

  Well, Kevin, is it just me, or every time you look at the tech news, do you see some new cyber attack that seems to have befallen some company or another?

• 26:16Speaker 01

  Yes, this is my experience of social media over the past two weeks. I log in, I see three posts from companies about how they've discovered more bugs in a 24-hour window than in the previous, you know, 80 years of their company's history. And then everyone's reposting that with just like, "It begins," or "It is over," or "Hydra kids."

• 26:34Speaker 02

  Yes, just to name a few of those. Mozilla was one of those companies, saying that it had pushed 423 security bug fixes in April alone, compared to an average of about 22 per month throughout 2025. Google announced on Monday that for the first time ever, its threat intelligence group had identified an attacker using a zero-day exploit that the group believes was developed with AI. So that's kind of a grim milestone. And then if you're a student, perhaps you noticed the cyber attack on the learning platform Canvas last week, which forced the site down for several hours. And the company behind Canvas, which is called Instructure, had to negotiate a deal with hackers for the return and destruction of the stolen data.

• 27:16Speaker 02

  So, you know, on one hand, there are cyber attacks going on all the time, but it does seem like some new inflection point has been reached. And of course, a reason that people think we might be seeing more of these is AI.

• 27:27Speaker 01

  Yes, so we have talked about Claude Mythos preview, the model that Anthropic did not release widely, but released to a select group of companies and open source maintainers. And today, we're actually going to talk to someone who has used Mythos and who has been on the front lines of this frantic sprint to secure the infrastructure of modern life.

• 27:49Speaker 02

  Yes, our guest today is Nikesh Aurora. Nikesh is the CEO and chairman of Palo Alto Networks, the largest cybersecurity firm in the world, which supports more than 70,000 customers, including the vast majority of the Fortune 100. And as you mentioned, Kevin, Palo Alto was among the organizations given early access to Claude Mythos as well as GPT-5.5 cyber.

• 28:10Speaker 01

  Yes, and Nikesh is one of the people, I think, who is best positioned to see the effects that these models are having on cybersecurity, because they do work so broadly across industries. They're also a big government contractor. So I'm just really interested in what he thinks is different about this new class of models.

• 28:27Speaker 02

  Yes, and something I appreciate about Nikesh is that in an industry where there is a lot of hype, because of course, the more scared that a cybersecurity executive can make you, the more likely you might be to buy their software. Nikesh is somebody who, I think, tries to maintain an even keeled approach here and not to ring alarm bells where none are needed. But that said, I do think that he is quite concerned about some of the things that he's seeing.

• 28:49Speaker 01

  Well, let's bring him in.

• 28:58Speaker 01

  Nikesh Aurora, welcome to Hard Fork.

• 29:00Speaker 04

  Well, thank you for having me.

• 29:01Speaker 01

  I want to just start with your account of what it feels like to run a major cybersecurity company right now. Casey and I have talked with people at these companies for many years, usually because something terrible has happened. And I feel like the vibe we get is like, this is the worst, most dangerous time ever in cybersecurity. What is your subjective experience as someone who's been in this field for a long time?

• 29:25Speaker 04

  I'm a little more perhaps relaxed than what you're trying to ascribe, that people come here, tell us it's the worst moment. Historically, what's happened is, in the last seven years, you've seen the time from somebody breaching an organization and being able to extract, well, say, crown jewels, has been measured in days. Unfortunately, with the emergence of AI, the arrival of vast technologies, that timeframe has shrunk down to minutes. And when that happens in minutes, your defense systems have to be able to be activated and defend yourselves for minutes. And fundamentally, the cybersecurity infrastructure was designed for days. Some parts of it are making it to seconds, the good parts where you know how to stop them. But we have to go basically overhaul the backend infrastructure to make

• 30:08Speaker 04

  sure it's AI ready, so we can fight AI with AI. So you're seeing that, you're seeing AIs out there, you're seeing people like Anthropic launch models like Mythos, you see an OpenAI do that, it's 5.5 cyber. They're showing you the art of the possible from a bad actor perspective. So we have to make sure we move as fast as them, or faster perhaps, to try and plug those holes, make the infrastructure better.

• 30:30Speaker 01

  So, your company recently put out a report on some patches that you all had made to your own systems. You disclosed 26 critical exploits covering 75 issues, and you said that's against a typical baseline of under five?

• 30:47Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 30:48Speaker 01

  Meaning that they discovered like five times as many in a comparable period?

• 30:51Speaker 04

  Five to seven times, yeah, depending.

• 30:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, so he's like, is that pretty standard for what kind of spike you all are seeing in exploits or discovered exploits as a result of Mythos and similar models?

• 31:03Speaker 04

  So what we've discovered, some of the newer models that have come out in the last few weeks, perhaps a month or so, is AI models are getting really good at coding. Well, guess what? As the models start to understand what good code looks like, they also start developing and understanding what bad code looks like. So if you point this model and say, okay, now look through all this code repository I have and find me bad code, it will. And unfortunately, humans have been writing bad code for a very long time. So, on average, we'll find about one-fifth or one-seventh of what was found in the last six weeks using these models. Now, of course, remember, we ran a concerted effort to see what the models are going to find. We had hundreds of engineers working on it to make sure we look under every rock on every product, right? It's almost like this is a great cleansing, right? So it's a great cleansing moment. We found seven times the volume that we would have normally

• 31:48Speaker 04

  found in a normal period. It's not going to happen again, hopefully, because we have hopefully cleared out a whole bunch of the, let's call it the tech debt or the vulnerability debt. But I think a lot of organizations will have to go through this moment to understand how much of their code written in the past. suffers from these vulnerabilities. They will have to do their own work. They'll have to make sure that is fixed. I think the challenge we're going to run into is most companies use a large corpus of open source. And open source doesn't get bashed or remediated as quickly as your own proprietary code can. The other thing we found very interestingly with MITOS and other models is it's really good at daisy chaining vulnerabilities. And that's what needs to be sort of contended for.

• 32:31Speaker 02

  I'm trying to get a sense of the scale of this issue because I feel like within the past few weeks, I've heard a lot of stories like the one you just described about your own company. Mozilla has been publishing blog posts about discovering

• 32:43Speaker 04

  Yes, exactly.

• 32:43Speaker 02

  hundreds of bugs, you know, over a period where maybe previously they only would have discovered a couple of dozen. My sense is that as more companies sort of like undertake this audit, they're they're going to find that they have similar problems. So like, what is the time scale that we might expect these kinds of issues to be fixed? And is there enough time to fix particularly like critical infrastructure before our adversaries gain access to similarly capable models?

• 33:11Speaker 04

  That's a great question, Casey. I think that that's what should keep us up at night, right? Because not every organization has resources to fix code that could have been written 20 years ago. Now, the good news is that, you know, pretty much most of the cyber defenders have had access to the models. They understand the scale and enormity of the problem to some degree. I think what we have been able to do is we've been able to enlist the support of many of the system integrators in the world, like the IBMs, the Pricewaterhouse, the Lloyds, the Accentures, et cetera, who are all rallying to make sure they make resources available to many of these customers to be able to patch these things. But I think we are in the midst of sort of testing interesting solve

• 33:54Speaker 04

  where we can, once we know the vulnerabilities in an organization, we can write signatures into our perimeter defense firewalls to say, if you see somebody trying to go in this direction, we know there's an unpatched piece of code behind it. Block them. So we can create a temporary scaffolding to let organizations have a little bit more time to go fix their vulnerabilities. But, you know, it has to be done. And the risk, like you rightly articulated, is that open source or nation states or third parties can start building models that are similar to what Anthropic or OpenAI have built. And the risk is that They get there faster than the patches or have been enabled in many enterprises. Yeah.

• 34:32Speaker 02

  I want to understand a little bit more about the defense side of this now that you have access to this Mythos model. There's been a lot written about it. It's the subject of much debate at the highest levels of power. And I kind of just want to ask, like, what is it like to use it? Does it feel different than using like Claude code? You know, like if you've used another anthropic product, does it feel kind of the same? Or just like, what is it like to use Mythos?

• 34:57Speaker 04

  In the beginning, it was not that impactful. Because when you're looking for a bad code, it's going to find everything. Remember, I mean, 30% are false positives. Right? So it's not like always going to get the right thing, but unfortunately, we got to test every one of them out to see which is real. But what became more and more fascinating is the more context we gave it, the better it became.

• 35:18Speaker 02

  What do you mean?

• 35:19Speaker 04

  Well, you showed a piece of code. It doesn't know what the code is trying to achieve.

• 35:22Speaker 02

  Right.

• 35:23Speaker 04

  Right? So you have to give it context and well, this code.

• 35:24Speaker 02

  So you're not just pointing it and say, go, go test this firewall and tell me what you find. You're actually like giving it some instructions beyond that.

• 35:31Speaker 04

  You have to give it context in terms of what is the purpose of the code? What does it do? What is normal behavior supposed to look like? Then you have to give it more context in terms of other threat research, like the models don't have all the threat research in the world. We sit on hordes of threat data saying this is how 10,000 attacks have been conducted in the past five years, which is data we store, we hold, because we write machine learning algorithms to protect against those instances. So we say, oh, we're arming you with all the past known techniques that have been used. Can you see if some of those known techniques can be applied in this scenario? Effectively, you're giving all the human training of the past to make sure that in the future, you can build defense against those techniques.

• 36:08Speaker 02

  You've mentioned using both Mythos and GPT 5.5 cyber. I'm curious, like in your mind, how comparable those models are? Like, are they in the same class or is one different than the other?

• 36:19Speaker 04

  You know, the most fascinating part is that they both found different things. Which tells you that based on their grounding, their training, whatever they've been used to train at. One of them was better at certain things, the other one was better at some other things. But it just tells you that there is still a lot that's going to get found.

• 36:36Speaker 01

  I mean, one thing that's stuck out to me as I was reading some of your blog posts and your sort of postmortems about your experiments with Mythos is like, if a cybersecurity company is finding five to seven times more vulnerabilities using this model, like, the average bank, the average insurance company...

• 36:54Speaker 02

  To say nothing of Kevin's personal website.

• 36:56Speaker 01

  My personal website? I mean, we're going to be looking at many multiples of that, right? Or is it the case that everything is so centralized and runs through just a few platforms that like, the average institution is not as screwed as I think they are?

• 37:11Speaker 04

  I wouldn't say the average is screwed. I think, look, there's a lot of work that needs to be done. It's not just good at finding vulnerabilities. The other thing we also found as part of our testing, it can even take a look at products you might be using perhaps to power your website, which you may have misconfigured. That's not a vulnerability, that's human error in the way you're using the product. We've left the door open. For example, many people will take products and say, "Ah, it's easier if this control pane of this product was accessible from home or from the internet, so I could just go access it from wherever I am and manage this thing." Well, you should not leave control panes of most products in your company exposed to the internet. Because if I can find it, other people can find it too.

• 37:48Speaker 01

  Right. When Mythos was first announced, there were a lot of people who were very skeptical. They said, "Oh, this is just marketing hype," or Anthropic doesn't have the compute to serve this model, which is why they're only releasing it to a select group of companies. A month or so later, do you still hear that kind of thing from people in your industry? That maybe this isn't the sort of apocalyptic moment that Anthropic and others have said?

• 38:15Speaker 04

  Yeah, I I look at it slightly from a longer term perspective. I think what the MITSOS model showed is what the art of the possible is going to be in the future. Once we are compute unconstrained, or we have better models in the future which are trained better. So it sort of gave us a window into what's coming, I think, which was very useful. I I think that's a bit of a, you know, it's a bit of a tough rap towards MITSOS that did this on purpose. I think, remember, these companies, whether it's OpenAI or or Anthropic, they're sort of working their way trying to understand how to do this. Both of them and OpenAI want to do it right. They want to do it so that AI is not used in a bad way, at least in this instance. I think they were trying to do the right thing. I think there is no easy solve to this.

• 39:00Speaker 04

  I I give them marks for trying to do the right thing, and I think they sort of, they partly got most of it right, some of it they fumbled on the way there, but I in credit to both of them for trying to get it done right.

• 39:12Speaker 02

  Speaking of how we fix this, so for decades, cybersecurity has operated using this sort of a 90 day dis- responsible disclosure window. Really, I find something, I find a bug, I sort of privately notify you, but you know, in 90 days, you know, I'm going to go public with this, so you better get your act together and fix it. And companies often do take 90 days or longer to sort of implement those bug fixes. So I I read a blog post this week by a researcher named Himanshu Anand, who wrote that, in his opinion, the 90 day responsible disclosure window is dead. I also saw that in your own company's blog post last week, you guys said that within 25 minutes, in an AI assisted scenario, somebody could get initial access to a system and exfiltrate the data. So do you agree that this 90 day window is dead?

• 39:57Speaker 02

  And if so, like, what the heck do we do about it?

• 39:59Speaker 04

  Like, I think the the principle of the 90 day window is to allow the owners of the product or the piece of software, a piece of code, to have enough time to investigate, to fix it, and make sure their customers are secure. I think the 90 day window is going to shrink, as you rightly articulated. How much does it shrink? Still up for debate. How long do we have? Like, think about it for what we just did, right? We announced this morning that we've patched. Almost thirty critical vulnerabilities. We've known about these for two or three weeks. We've had the time to go test it. We had time to build patches. Pretty much deployed everything that's available from a SaaS software perspective. The challenge is not the SaaS software, right? SaaS software you can find, you can fix, you can deploy. It's not a problem. The challenge is when there's a laptop sitting in front of you and I've got to go make sure

• 40:43Speaker 04

  you update your laptop because you're required to do something with it.

• 40:46Speaker 02

  And I can tell you, he will go like six months without installing the mandatory updates. I'm not even kidding.

• 40:50Speaker 01

  Delay, delay, delay. I mean, I am starting to see more of those just in my products and I'm getting more requests to update system software. Is that Mythos related? Like, no, seriously, like I'm wondering to myself every time I see it. I'm like, oh, what did Mythos find now? So it's like, are we starting to see as consumers evidence that some of these systems are needing to be patched more frequently?

• 41:16Speaker 04

  I think there is going to be, as I said, there is going to be the cleansing of the vulnerability backlog that has been built over the years. So you will most likely experience in the next three to six months, if you're in enterprise, you'll experience it in a lot more boxes that you buy. You buy servers, you buy switches, you buy routers, all those things where you have code lying on them will have to be looked at and will have to be patched or upgraded over time. So you're going to see some of that cleansing happen, but hopefully you can power through it and get to the other side.

• 41:42Speaker 02

  But it sounds like it is just a good time to install those software updates when you get them.

• 41:45Speaker 04

  I highly recommend you do that.

• 41:47Speaker 01

  One persistent question about these kind of models is whether they favor attackers or defenders. So I guess I'm just going to put that question to you. Like, is this technology better for people who want to break into systems or people who want to safeguard systems? And if you had attackers and defenders with an equal model, who would win?

• 42:08Speaker 04

  It's a great question.

• 42:09Speaker 02

  The classic Batman versus Superman.

• 42:12Speaker 04

  Remember, it's an unbalanced fight to start with. We have to be right 100% of the time. The bad guys right once. So it's an uneven playing field from that perspective. So the model, if you can find your five vulnerabilities and you can exploit one of them. It's a win for them and a loss for us. It doesn't matter if you protect it on the other four. We don't get eighty percent grade for protecting the other four. We get zero because it was able to find something to breach it. So for now, the bad actor is most likely able to use it much better than the good people. That's not a model constraint or model fault. It's because the model doesn't protect. Remember, the sensors protect. The sensors we apply around your perimeter protect. The sensor has to be smart enough to understand what the model's gonna find.

• 42:54Speaker 04

  And that's why the fact that we got this window of four to six weeks to test them to understand them. We're busy building defense techniques to make sure that as this tsunami of AI-based attacks starts to arrive, we have enough defense capability, which is still powered by AI, to give us a real-time response that we need.

• 43:12Speaker 01

  Is there a sector of the economy that you're most worried about when it comes to cybersecurity and the new capabilities of AI systems?

• 43:21Speaker 04

  You know, the challenge always is the companies which use technology, where their core business is ninety-five percent something else and the five percent part is technologies. And you can take that to mean small businesses. You can take that to mean sort of core industrial manufacturing output type businesses, where they're not spending as much time thinking about the technology. They're busy digging for gold or building infrastructure or something else.

• 43:44Speaker 01

  Or hospitals.

• 43:45Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 43:46Speaker 01

  That use technology. So you're worried about the non-tech businesses.

• 43:50Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 43:50Speaker 01

  That may not have as many resources or as many engineers working on it.

• 43:54Speaker 04

  And I'm not worried about financial institutions. They have more engineers than I do. So they will go rally against it. They'll put the resources to work and they've been protecting themselves for a very long time. They understand the implication of these things. It's like, you know, poor doctor's office. Remember that there was a breach that happened, I think almost a year ago now, slightly more, of Change Healthcare, which caused a whole bunch of the entire physician ecosystem to come to a halt. And the physician didn't know what to do about it.

• 44:17Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, like for the moment, like, do you sort of breathe a sigh of relief that these models are not generally available? Or do you think they could be released and it wouldn't be that big of a deal?

• 44:27Speaker 04

  Well, they have been released, right? Both Opus 4.7 Cyber and OpenAI's 5.5 have both been released with cyber capabilities and guardrails.

• 44:35Speaker 01

  But not Mythos.

• 44:36Speaker 04

  Not Mythos. Mythos has another unique property, which perhaps goes towards a conversation about constraints, is that Mythos runs in ultra mode. Ultra mode is a compute consumptive mode, which allows the model to persist for much longer than the flash mode that most models are released in. So if you're

• 44:56Speaker 02

  So you're saying it can just work for a lot longer, spend a lot more compute

• 45:00Speaker 04

  That's right, that's right, that's right.

• 45:01Speaker 02

  Than other models.

• 45:02Speaker 04

  The compute cost is from the persistence, perhaps, not from the capability. And the persistent allows the daisy chaining to happen much more effectively, right? Because it's trying different techniques, trying to see which was most likely to work. So that's what causes the daisy chaining to happen in a more effective fashion. So that's why.

• 45:17Speaker 02

  So is it a good thing that like the average person doesn't have access to that right now?

• 45:21Speaker 04

  I think so. I think every company should have a chance to be able to fix these things in the meantime. But again, I don't know what the average, who the average person is in this case, right? Is every company out there an average person? Then they should have access to it because they have to fix their stuff. You mean the average bad person?

• 45:35Speaker 02

  Basically, I mean, I'm just like thinking about, you know, all of these cyber attacks that we've seen just over the past couple of weeks. And I'm assuming that they do not have access to a mythos level model. And so I'm just asking myself like, well, what if they did?

• 45:45Speaker 04

  Yeah, what if they did that they'll, they'll, they'll find a way to attack companies much faster?

• 45:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 45:50Speaker 04

  Right. I don't think the nature of the attacks change. I don't think the nature of the outcomes change. Most likely, they will be used to leverage ransomware, perhaps cause economic harm. If you're looking at it from a nation state perspective, I think the entire sort of fundamentals of how the bad actor industry works is not going to change. What it does change is the pace and the volume, perhaps, of attacks are going to be made possible because the availability of these models.

• 46:13Speaker 02

  I want to talk a little bit about what, if anything, an average person can do here. I, I myself am the subject of an ongoing phishing attack where

• 46:22Speaker 04

  Somebody must like you.

• 46:23Speaker 02

  I mean, I, I hope so, but basically almost every day, somebody tries to get me to like, reset my X password from an email address that has nothing to do with X.com. And because I'm looking at my emails on the desktop, that's very easy for me to see. And I'm not fooled, you know, congratulations, but

• 46:38Speaker 01

  That's me. I've been trying this to

• 46:39Speaker 02

  Heaven, how could you? But I also believe that like within six months or a year, one of those emails is going to come in and it's just going to look way more convincing, right? It's just going to figure out a way to trick me. And one of my frustrations with talking about cybersecurity in general is it tends to leave people with the sense of like, well, everything's really bad. Sorry. Good luck to you. Usually we give people advice like create a strong password and use multi-factor authentication.

• 47:05Speaker 04

  That's right.

• 47:06Speaker 02

  Is that good enough or do people need to update the playbook?

• 47:10Speaker 04

  Like, I think one of the things, my frustration has always been that if you think about it, we have much better cybersecurity solutions in the enterprise world than we do for the consumers. For example, if you had a corporate email and all the phishing attacks will come to your corporate email, spam is coming to corporate email, we'd be pretty good at sussing these out because the X email address that you talk about that you're getting, which is not actually X, we see it in one customer, we'll block it everywhere else. Now, the problem is the consumer world doesn't have any such gatekeepers, right? Because we're effectively the gatekeepers of the enterprise, but consumer world doesn't have gatekeepers. The consumer gatekeepers are the email providers. The consumer gatekeepers are the telecom networks that give us, you know, if you were getting an attack on your corporate mobile device and we were sitting in front of it, it won't happen.

• 47:54Speaker 04

  But on our personal devices, we can all get spam, we can all get phished, we can all get, all this stuff happened to us. I think part of the frustration I have is that there are some consumer companies that need to implement better cyber controls for all of us consumers, which they're not.

• 48:09Speaker 01

  Well, like, any particular controls come to mind that you'd like to see out there?

• 48:11Speaker 04

  I mean, think about the email, right? I mean, you're telling me, is it, is it hard for the email provider to figure out that this is not an X email address? Like, we should, these be the same guys are building AI, right? These guys are building AI, it's just gonna anticipate what we want and do it for us. So somebody just needs to pay attention to it.

• 48:26Speaker 01

  That's, that's sort of, I mean, like, for what it's worth, so, you know, this is like my paid Google workspace for my, my, my work account. And like, you're, you're absolutely right. Like, it seems like a very simple classifier that Google makes to just be like, hmm, this probably isn't coming from X.com. How are your engineers feeling about all this? I mean, I imagine they're working a lot these days. Are they excited because there's this new tool, new set of tools available to them? Are they stressed out because all of a sudden their workload just got five times bigger? Like, what is the mood?

• 48:56Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 48:56Speaker 01

  All of it.

• 48:58Speaker 04

  Look, I can think about it. If you're a technologist, this is a phenomenal time to be doing this, right? The, the, the amount of opportunity to learn, the amount of opportunity to understand. Some of the people are fearful, like, how is this thing gonna work? And then you can find, I think, every emotion you can think of is probably in every engineering team out there. We have 9,000 plus technical people. I think it's not just the tool in front of us. I think it's the, the uncertainty of what this holds in the next two, three years. I mean, people are seeing OpenClaw being deployed. Now, OpenClaw is a scary thing from a security perspective. It's gonna take all your permissions, all your credentials, do all kinds of stuff for you, but it's cool. So the early adopters are doing cool shit. I had dinner with somebody, came to my house,

• 49:42Speaker 04

  like, I got OpenClaw on my phone. It's doing everything I've given it. The name's called Zara. And it's doing all the things I'm asking it to do. And the guy sitting next to us says, holy shit, that's a security nightmare. You're worried about your ex AI, uh, ex, you know, supposed to change your password? You don't need to change your password. OpenClaw is just going to tweet on your behalf because it's had a moment last night. Totally. Right? Yeah.

• 50:02Speaker 01

  Yeah. And for all of my objectionable tweets over the years, I would like to just formally say that was my OpenClaw acting autonomously.

• 50:09Speaker 04

  There we go.

• 50:10Speaker 01

  So are you personally like running any of these insecure, like, are you running OpenClaw? Are you experimenting with this stuff just from like a, I need to understand the landscape perspective?

• 50:19Speaker 04

  On a, on a segregated device, which has no connection to many of my things, which makes it totally useless, by the way. You can't even book a meeting in my schedule because I do not have access to my schedule. It can't respond to an email on my behalf because it doesn't have access to my email. So I'm still sort of using it the old fashioned way, which is I'm using Gemini in the end. But I did do that. I took my earnings script, sent it to Gemini and said, what do you think? Two quarters ago, it says, are you trying to hide something? You're too enthusiastic. You use the word momentum and excited too much more than you normally use. I'm like, holy shit, that's not bad. So I had to tone it down.

• 50:52Speaker 01

  Yeah. That's very funny. Is it changing your hiring plans at all?

• 50:57Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 50:58Speaker 01

  I mean, you employ thousands of cybersecurity engineers and researchers.

• 51:01Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 51:01Speaker 01

  You may need fewer of those people in the future?

• 51:04Speaker 04

  No, I need more. I think this is the fallacy out there, right? The fallacy is that organizations are going to get thirty, forty, fifty, sixty percent more productive from a development perspective and a testing perspective. So we need less people. The problem is every technologist that you talk to has a feature request list, which is longer than their arm. And typically people have product roadmaps that are six to 12 months out. Why is that? Because they don't have enough people. Or they cannot serialize something because it takes a lot of effort to get it done. So I think the first thing that's going to happen is as we create more capacity, we're going to try and fill the technological backlog and try and make that work. I do understand there are people out there, I'll call it reshaping their technical organizations by creating capacities. Everybody who's out

• 51:49Speaker 04

  there saying, I'm reducing my headcount by seven percent or fifteen percent or twenty percent, which you're beginning to see recently, I think they're just creating capacity. They're saying that capacity allows me to hire more people and make room for people that I need who have the newer skill set.

• 52:02Speaker 01

  Hmm. They're not just spending that salary money on tokens instead?

• 52:07Speaker 04

  Like, I think that the interesting part is, I was saying this earlier, I was speaking somewhere else. And the part we don't realize that we're dealing with a tsunami of a desire to transform. I think we're in a decade-long transformation of business ahead of us. Imagine, like, you have a new technology. My CFO would never come and say, I want to use AI to transform my team. He wants to transform his team and see if he can do it much more efficiently, but he wants AI. My head of HR wants AI because she wants to create an AI interviewer, an AI assessor, instead of having humans do it. So every function wants more AI to deploy. Now, the question is, where's the money going to come from? It's probably going to come from efficiency in those teams, those functions. So that's what's going to pay for the tokens.

• 52:49Speaker 01

  I have to say, I don't think anyone wants to be interviewed by the AI assessor. That's not a good vibe, you know?

• 52:55Speaker 04

  I don't know.

• 52:56Speaker 01

  Would you want to be interviewed, like, for a job by an AI?

• 53:00Speaker 04

  I think AI is most likely going to be better at assessing my domain skills than a human being.

• 53:07Speaker 01

  Really?

• 53:08Speaker 04

  Yes. If you're trying to hire a good coder, if you're trying to hire somebody who knows agentic AI really well, I mean, sitting and talking to them is not going to get me a better answer. If they can sit and code and deploy OpenClaw in front of me, it's like, I literally have done that interview. It's like, yes, well, I'm really conversant with AI. I'm like, really? That's cool. Well, what have you done for us? Like, well, I built myself an agent. I'm like, show me. It's like, what do you mean? I'm like, you're on Zoom? Show me. They say this, like, bizarre, like, you know, simplistic, like, oh, I got to make a shopping list from the recipe I saw. I'm like, dude.

• 53:36Speaker 01

  It's an AI girlfriend. It's like, actually, I shouldn't show you this.

• 53:42Speaker 01

  Yeah. So now we have an HR problem. Well, Nikash, thanks so much for coming in. Really great to talk to you and good luck out there.

• 53:49Speaker 04

  Fascinating. Thank you, Kevin.

• 53:50Speaker 01

  Please tell Mythos to spare our families in the coming uprising.

• 54:00Speaker 01

  When we come back, it's time for the Hot Mess Express.

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• 56:09Speaker 01

  Well, Casey, we've got a train to catch today. The Hot Mess Express is here.

• 56:21Speaker 02

  The Hot Mess Express is, of course, our segment where we take a look at the various calamities befalling people in and around the tech industry and at the end of discussing them decide, what kind of mess was this?

• 56:33Speaker 01

  What's pulling up to the station today?

• 56:35Speaker 02

  Well, let's see what's first here on the tracks.

• 56:38Speaker 01

  You just love the sound effect.

• 56:40Speaker 02

  Our first story today comes from The Verge. Oh, and this is truly the end of an era. Venmo is starting to test a big redesign of its app and as part of the changes, Kevin, it will be implementing a major new privacy feature. The onboarding process for new users will set their posts to only be viewable by their friends by default instead of being public. And this is very sad for me because for years now, every time I've opened up Venmo to, you know, pay a friend, I've seen a recent transaction from someone I hooked up with once in 2016. And the thought that other people aren't going to have that experience makes me really sad.

• 57:17Speaker 01

  So, you know, as a nosy person who loves to gossip, I am sad about this story because, you know, it was always fun to see which of your random phone contacts had been paying their fractional share of the rent or back for dinner. People put various jokey things on their transactions, you know, illicit drug deal, foreign arms trade, et cetera. And it's just sad that we won't get to experience that.

• 57:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, also, you know, the public by default Venmo transactions gave us many great stories over the years, including Joe Biden's secret Venmo, which was a BuzzFeed story. J.D. Vance had a public Venmo that Wired reported on. Matt Gaetz's Venmo payments were part of a federal inquiry into his payments to women, according to The New York Times. So I guess all of us investigative reporters are going to have to find a new, easy way of writing a story, Kevin.

• 58:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, now the only baffling security breach from these apps is that Telegram still does notify you when one of your phone contacts joins. And I always love to screenshot that and send it to people and be like, crypto or drugs? What is it this week?

• 58:22Speaker 02

  The only two possible answers. So what kind of mess is this Venmo mess?

• 58:27Speaker 01

  This is unfortunately a cleanup, not a mess. This used to be a very hot mess and now, you know, belatedly, it is getting cleaned up.

• 58:36Speaker 02

  Fair enough. R.I.P. Let's see what's coming down the tracks.

• 58:40Speaker 02

  Oh, well, this was interesting, Kevin, and ties in closely to something that you've written about recently. Amazon has started to widely deploy its in-house MeshClaw product in recent weeks, which allows employees to create AI agents that can connect to workplace software and carry out tasks on a user's behalf. But some employees are saying that colleagues are using the software to automate additional unnecessary AI activity to increase their consumption of tokens, which will then, of course, make them look better to their bosses. So did we see that one coming or what?

• 59:14Speaker 01

  Yes, I believe you invoked Goodhart's Law about what happens when a target becomes a measure. Or a measure becomes a target?

• 59:25Speaker 02

  When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to become a good measure, is of course Goodhart's Law.

• 59:28Speaker 01

  Thank you so much for that, yes. And I imagine that at the famously frugal Amazon, they are loving this era of people just spending a bunch of random tokens to move up the leaderboard.

• 59:39Speaker 02

  Here's the thing, I've talked to a lot of Amazon employees over the years. Tokens are the only thing at that company that is free. You want a Diet Coke from the vending machine? Get out your wallet, okay? So these guys finally find something free, and now they're getting in trouble.

• 59:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, the good news is they have unlimited tokens. The bad news is they can only use them on MeshClaw.

• 1:00:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm gonna say that this is actually a hot mesh. That's what kind of mess this is.

• 1:00:06Speaker 01

  Very good.

• 1:00:06Speaker 02

  All right, next up, Kevin. This comes to us from 404 Media, and boy, did I see this clip in about 14 different places over the past week. Students boo commencement speaker after she calls AI, quote, "the next industrial revolution." You see this one?

• 1:00:22Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:00:23Speaker 02

  Yes, so May 8th commencement speaker Gloria Caulfield, who's the Vice President of Strategic Alliances at Tavistock Group, told graduates of the University of Central Florida's College of Arts and Humanities and Nicholson School of Communication that AI is the next industrial revolution. She was met with thousands of booing graduates, and someone in the crowd, Kevin, yelled, "AI sucks." So what did you make of this commencement moment?

• 1:00:50Speaker 01

  Here's my thing.

• 1:00:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:00:52Speaker 01

  Students are allowed to feel however they want about AI.

• 1:00:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:00:55Speaker 01

  But if you boo the commencement speaker for suggesting that AI is a big deal, I want to see your chat GPT history. If you have used AI to write your exams, to help you with your problem sets in any way for your academic work, you are not allowed to boo it at commencement. That is my rule.

• 1:01:11Speaker 02

  I don't know. I think these students were fine to boo. I mean, you know, Ms. Caulfield was, after all, addressing the College of the Arts and Humanities, who I'm guessing is probably not the group of students at the university that are most excited to see AI come into their lives.

• 1:01:27Speaker 01

  So here's, here's the thing that I'll say that is sincere. I think this, I think people are radically underestimating how mobilized young people are against AI right now. I see this every time I go to a college to talk to students. They, there's like a, a small group of them who are like running open claws and, and very excited and like 80% of them are like, I hate this.

• 1:01:48Speaker 02

  Yeah. So look, if you have to give a commencement speech within the next few months, or a highly relatable situation that many of our listeners will be in, now you know. Careful, careful how you talk about AI.

• 1:01:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:58Speaker 02

  Okay. Kevin, our next story comes to us from the good folks at Variety. Dua Lipa has filed a $15 million lawsuit against Samsung for using her face to sell TVs. And this one is honestly a pretty incredible. Samsung has apparently used Dua Lipa's image on the cardboard packaging of its TVs starting last year. When Ms. Lipa became aware of it, she demanded that the company stop using her image and apparently like could not get through to anyone at Samsung. So Samsung finally responds on Monday and said, this was all the fault of some third party content partner. And Samsung said, we have a great respect for Ms. Lipa and the intellectual property of all artists.

• 1:02:40Speaker 02

  And they are actively seeking and remain open to a constructive resolution with Ms. Lipa's team. Well, it sounds like a constructive resolution could be taking her face off the packaging and paying her $15 million. And I understand her concern because the thing that people always forget about Samsung products is that they do explode when you least expect them. There was, of course, the famous series of explosions related to their phones. So if I see my face on a Samsung TV, I'm thinking, I do not want to be the literal face of an exploding piece of hardware.

• 1:03:06Speaker 01

  Yeah. What kind of mess is this?

• 1:03:07Speaker 02

  This is a true hot mess because the TV could have exploded.

• 1:03:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:12Speaker 02

  Now, here, you want to read one?

• 1:03:13Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:03:14Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:03:17Speaker 01

  All right, this next one comes to us from our colleagues at the New York Times. eBay rejects GameStop's $55 billion takeover bid. Last week, GameStop offered $55 billion to eBay in an unsolicited takeover attempt. According to some interviews, they appeared not to have $55 billion, which would put a damper on their plans. This week, eBay officially said no to the GameStop offer, calling it, quote, "neither credible nor attractive." Which is also what our last iTunes review of this podcast said.

• 1:03:51Speaker 02

  There you have it. You know, this one is an interesting story from the world of what I like to call companies that I can't believe still exist. I don't know what's happening on eBay. I don't know what's happening at GameStop. But what I do know is, uh, these companies probably don't belong together, Kevin.

• 1:04:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, I find this fascinating because it is just like the internet-brained CEO of GameStop. He's this guy, Ryan Cohen, who's like, you know, sort of rose to prominence during the meme stock mania of like 2020 and 2021. And now you can just do whatever you want. If you're the CEO of a company, you can just say, we're gonna buy a company that's like five times bigger than us. How? Shame on you for asking.

• 1:04:30Speaker 02

  I mean, is it unreasonable, given their history, to expect that they could have announced this and GameStop's stock could have gone through the roof? And all of a sudden, they would have had $55 billion by eBay?

• 1:04:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:04:41Speaker 02

  But that didn't happen.

• 1:04:42Speaker 01

  Well, if they had done this deal in typical GameStop fashion, they would have offered about half of what the market value for eBay was. Because it's used and probably doesn't even work on your console anymore.

• 1:04:54Speaker 02

  I like jokes that you'll only get if you have returned a video game to GameStop. It's kind of a...

• 1:05:01Speaker 01

  Listen, for our younger listeners, uh, there used to be a time when you could walk into GameStop with a box of old video games that you wanted to get rid of, and they would offer you between 50 cents and $1 for each video game.

• 1:05:13Speaker 02

  All right, this is the sort of mess where we're explaining the joke.

• 1:05:16Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:05:17Speaker 02

  Okay, so, we've got a few more items, Kevin.

• 1:05:22Speaker 02

  So Shein and Timu are fighting it out in UK courts, Kevin, as Shein has accused Timo of, quote, "astonishing levels of copyright infringement", and Timu accused Shein of waging, quote, "an aggressive and relentless battle using copyright allegations to undermine competition." This comes to us from Bloomberg, and the whole trial revolves around thousands of photographs that Shein says are from its website. According to Shein's lawyers, Timu sold identical clothing items using the same images and is seeking to piggyback off Shein's own investment in building up its supply chain and training and upskilling suppliers. What do you make of this fight?

• 1:05:58Speaker 01

  The fast fashion brands are fighting.

• 1:06:00Speaker 02

  They're fighting.

• 1:06:01Speaker 01

  I have, there's no one I'm rooting for in this fight. I've never bought an item of clothing from either of them, but it is very funny that two of the brands who have made their sort of entire existence ripping off the clothing from more established purveyors are now fighting each other about which one's ripping off the other one.

• 1:06:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, truly a situation where is there a way they both could lose and learn a hard lesson about intellectual property?

• 1:06:24Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:06:25Speaker 02

  We're rooting for them. Next up.

• 1:06:30Speaker 02

  Favorite story of the week, Kevin, and I imagine you heard about this one. People are seriously pissed that Grindr outed them with its latest Madonna advert. Did this happen to you?

• 1:06:40Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:06:40Speaker 02

  Okay. So this issue stems from the fact that Madonna has been doing this big campaign inside of Grindr to promote her upcoming album, Confessions on a Dance Floor 2, which is a concept album about a 68-year-old woman who still wants to be at a nightclub like after midnight. And she's advertising on Grindr, and apparently, over the past week, when you opened up Grindr, even if you had your phone volume turned off, you would hear a sound of Madonna saying loudly, "Hi, Grindr, it's mother."

• 1:07:12Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:07:13Speaker 02

  Which, first of all, it's grandmother, sorry. Second of all...

• 1:07:19Speaker 02

  Apparently, like, you know, people who are not out to their families were opening Grindr at the dinner table, which, you know, you're already sort of putting yourself in harms way there, maybe. But the last thing they expected was to have Madonna being like, "Hey, look at, look at this guy. He's on Grindr right now." So, truly one of the most misconceived ad campaigns in recent history.

• 1:07:40Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 1:07:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:07:41Speaker 01

  That's so wild. It's like if they put U2's Songs of Innocence on your phone, but it just outed you to your family.

• 1:07:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, the song was, "You're Gay." That was the, that was the song. This, here's the thing. This is a dangerous mess. It is not always safe for people to be outed to people in their immediate surroundings. So, shame on Grindr. They really should have known better.

• 1:08:02Speaker 01

  Yes. Push notifications should be illegal.

• 1:08:05Speaker 02

  All right, and one more, one more car coming down the train tracks here. Kevin, this is from the Elon OpenAI trial this week. Sam Altman was on the witness stand Tuesday and testified that at one point Elon thought he should run OpenAI. Sam asked him, "Hey, what do you think would happen to the company if you died?" And according to Sam, Elon replied, "I haven't thought about it a ton, but maybe control should pass to my children?"

• 1:08:30Speaker 01

  Question mark, question.

• 1:08:31Speaker 02

  Question mark, question mark. So, what do you think, do, well, let me just ask it this way. Do you think we would be better off if OpenAI was a hereditary monarchy controlled by the Musk clan?

• 1:08:42Speaker 01

  I, I do. I, that really is the idea. You know, we always talk about what is the ideal governance structure for AGI?

• 1:08:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:08:50Speaker 01

  I think we can all agree that it would be best if, you know, Elon's 27 children were involved somehow.

• 1:08:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, or just, you know, I don't know. They pick one at random. It, you know, one is probably, I don't know, 11 years old and rides a skateboard around town. They're like, "All right, kid, you run AGI now. Best of luck." So, yeah, that continues to be a legal mess.

• 1:09:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, the whole trial has just been fascinating to me, less because I care about the actual, like, legal issue on, on trial, and more because it has just produced all these amazing and incriminating files from like the early days of OpenAI, including all of their texts and emails and messy dramas. I live for it.

• 1:09:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, look, it's very hard to run a successful company without a lot of executives saying a bunch of really stupid things and writing them down. Like, we just see it over and over again.

• 1:09:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:09:36Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, let that be a lesson to us.

• 1:09:38Speaker 01

  Yep. Hot mess.

• 1:09:41Speaker 01

  And that is it for the Hot Mess Express. Thank you to all of this week's passengers and best of luck with your messes.

• 1:09:48Speaker 02

  Try to stay on the right side of the tracks.

• 1:09:59Speaker 05

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• 1:11:40Speaker 02

  Hey, before we go, one request. We want to hear what it's like for people who are undergoing major career changes in response to AI. So for example, if you have recently left a computer or desk job to do something more manual, like HVAC installation or tree trimming, we would love to hear how it's going. So anything in that realm, please send us an email. We would love for you to share your story with our audience. Our email, again, of course, is [email protected]. Tell us about your career shift and why you're making the change.

• 1:12:16Speaker 02

  Hard Fork is produced by Whitney Jones and Rachel Cohn. We're edited by Veeran Pavich. We're fact-checked by Caitlin Love. Today's show was engineered by Chris Wood. Original music by Alicia Maiteup, Rowan Nemusdo, and Dan Powell. Video production by Jake Nickel and Chris Schott. You can watch this whole episode on YouTube at youtube.com/hardfork. Special thanks to Paul Schuman, Quee Wink Tam, and Dahlia Hadad. You can email us at [email protected] with what you would do with Mythos if you could.

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