Ronan Murphy @Smarttech01

The loudest voices stoking fears about AI dangers have made tremendous headway in the past two weeks. AI technology has not taken some unexpected, dangerous turn, but the hype around it — propelled by what appears to be a well orchestrated PR campaign — has drummed up considerable fear. I worry that it represents a setback for our field. I have written frequently that fears of AI are overhyped. AI’s capabilities can be uncannily human-like and unpredictable, and it’s rational to worry when people who are directly involved express concerns. But I see the problems as a sign of the engineering work that ahead, rather than insurmountable barriers or the sky falling. AI technology continues to advance — which is a good thing! — but technical advances, poorly understood by the public, give those who seek to generate hype repeated opportunities to do so. First, I don’t see any step up in the risk of human extinction from AI compared to a few months ago. The theories about this remain the same fantastical, science fiction scenarios as a few months ago. The biggest change in AI risk is its cybersecurity capabilities — a topic which we should take seriously — but this, too, will not lead to the end of the world. The most notable recent event leading to increased fear was when an OpenAI team deployed an agent swarm that hacked into Hugging Face. Much of the popular press contained significant hype. For example, some publications reported that a swarm of 1,200 agents carried out the attack. While this was technically accurate, as I write this, I have about 1,300 processes running on my laptop. Yes, the ability to get large swarms of agents to work in parallel on a task is a significant technical advance, And, in computing, many processes run at the same time. So this shouldn’t be seen as some magical capability. Additionally, OpenAI’s buggy sandboxing and monitoring processes were key to enabling this incident. Fixing these bugs and putting in place improved monitoring would be appropriate fixes, not pausing AI. There are many well known ways to attack software systems. The main advantage of AI agents is that they are relentless. They will tirelessly try many tactics — and have the patience to chain vulnerabilities together — that previously would have taken an infeasible amount of human effort. But in the long term, I believe the advantage will lie with defenders (because they have more information with which to identify bugs, which they can fix), but the cyber-threat landscape has changed significantly. There are still bottlenecks to identifying and exploiting a vulnerability. AI agents still have to try a lot of things to see what works, and taking these actions takes time and might be detected by defenders. This is why, even though it is now easy to obtain versions of leading open weight models that have had their guardrails removed or weakened, so they will not refuse to try to execute cyber attacks, the world has not ended. I am also concerned about the anthropomorphization of AI in a lot of reporting, where LLMs and agents are unnecessarily treated as if they were people. If I wield a hammer, miss a nail, and accidentally dent the wall, it’s not the fault of the hammer. The problem lies in how I used the hammer. Similarly, if I prompt an agent and it hacks into someone else’s system, the responsibility lies with me, not the agent. Of course, we want to build systems that are as safe and predictable as possible. (For example, an unsafe hammer would be one whose head randomly flies off under normal use.) Today’s agentic systems are not predictable, but I see no reason why, by applying sound engineering practices, we won’t be able to make them extremely safe to use. One new element in the forecasts of AI-enabled doom is AI companies disclaiming responsibility for their own products. “I didn’t do it; my out-of-control agent did!” There’s a balance to be struck between the responsibility of the tool maker and the tool user, but when something goes wrong, let’s hold the people building and/or using the hammer responsible, rather than the hammer. (By the way, if you’re worried about AI bioweapon risk, David Bellamy has a great post on why this, too, is overhyped. Briefly, the bottleneck in building a bioweapon is not intelligence, but lab work and manufacturing.) Pausing AI progress will create much more harm than benefit. First, our adversaries will certainly not slow down. Second, engineering requires discovering problems empirically so we can fix them. If we pause AI by a decade, we will also delay finding and implementing safety engineering fixes by about the same duration. Of course, the incentive to stoke fears — for regulatory capture, to garner attention, or to make one’s technology seem more powerful — remains the same as before. Disclaiming responsibility is a new one. Taking a hard technical look at the actual risks however, I see little factual basis for the degree of fear that’s been stoked up. We still have hard research and engineering work ahead to improve AI safety, but the beneficial applications continue to vastly outweigh the risks, and we should keep building. [Original text (with links): deeplearning.ai/the-batch/issu… ]

Dario has written that we need to “pace the frontier,” and Sam has agreed. People may be surprised by my response: go ahead. You guys are the frontier. By any reasonable metric — market share, revenue growth, model capability — the two of you have a duopoly on frontier intelligence. You’ve also claimed the lead is widening because of recursive self-improvement. I don’t see what you see in the lab. If the unreleased models are scary enough that you think you should slow down, I support your decision to be responsible. But stop pretending you need anyone else’s permission. Stop pretending antitrust law has to be suspended so you can form a cartel. Stop pretending you need a regulatory approval process that supersedes product liability. Stop pretending METR is independent when it is intertwined with Anthropic’s investors and staff. Stop pretending you need those same evaluators to police competitors who aren’t even at the frontier. Most of all, stop pretending the motivation to slow down is purely altruistic. You face massive product-liability exposure if your products enable a truly damaging cyberattack. The market already punishes models that behave in unpredictable or unauthorized ways. After the Hugging Face episode, it is simply good business for OpenAI and Anthropic to trade some raw power for reliability and predictability. Call it alignment if you want. It is also just giving customers what they want. Pacing the frontier would also create breathing room for a more intelligent conversation about regulation than Bernie Sanders’ “shut it all down.” China is very unlikely to join a global agreement, as you know, and that has to be taken into account as well. So go ahead and pace the frontier. You are the ones setting it. The easiest way not to build superintelligence is for you to agree not to build it. Demanding your preferred regulatory framework as the price of that will look like blackmail of the public and the political system. So just do it. If you do, you’ll buy goodwill for the next conversation. If you don’t, we’ll know this was just another bid for regulatory capture — or an election-season psyop.

That’s a wrap #Blackhat 2026

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My team loves Claude from @AnthropicAI . But this new policy of retaining prompts and usage is a red line...we simply can't give over our usage. Prompts contain our IP; literally all our design files and docs. Why would this ever have been ok? It's sad because everyone was looking forward to using the new model. Sigh.

Worth a watch

Episode 19 of @CodedForChaos is out now. @Smarttech01 joins host @HankThomasDC from @OneRSAC 2026 to talk AI, data, and what’s actually changing. Watch/listen to the full episode below ↓

Coded For Chaos @CodedForChaos

6 months ago

Episode 19 of #CodedForChaos is now live! Host @HankThomasDC & @ForcepointSec's @Smarttech01 dive into: - What’s actually changing in AI - Ronan’s path to Forcepoint and lessons along the way - What stood out at @OneRSAC and what’s coming next Full episode in the thread below

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@ForcepointSec's @Smarttech01 joined host @HankThomasDC at our @OneRSAC pop-up studio. Episode dropping soon...

Hank Thomas @HankThomasDC

6 months ago

Day 2 of the @OneRSAC Conference and I've officially lost my voice, which is quite a challenge at an event focused on conversation 🤣 Despite this setback, I'm powering through because my interview for the @CodedForChaos Podcast with @ForcepointSec Chief Strategy Officer

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Day 2 of the @OneRSAC Conference and I've officially lost my voice, which is quite a challenge at an event focused on conversation 🤣 Despite this setback, I'm powering through because my interview for the @CodedForChaos Podcast with @ForcepointSec Chief Strategy Officer @Smarttech01 was a blast. It was definitely worth sacrificing the last remnants of my vocal chorus! Current recovery stack: salt water, tea, honey, and sheer determination. Although a Stella Artois seemed to work for a brief moment last night too. If you see me today, expect enthusiastic nodding, animated hand gestures, and possibly some broken barking. Hoping to be back in some sort of vocals comms shape by our 10th anniversary @SCV_Cyber Ventures party this evening!

You know #RSAC is in full swing when you meet @HankThomasDC 👊

#Handala is a cyber group that emerged publicly around 2023, focusing its hacking campaigns primarily on Western targets. This group is characterized as a hacktivist organization, driven by political motivations, and is linked to Iranian cyber influence networks. Activity right now is high ! Be on Alert.

Excellent day with Amazon Web Services in Dublin. Excited for the partnership to bring @ForcepointSec to our joint customers globally.

Generative AI traffic is up 890%, and 87% of organizations report AI-driven attacks. EC-Council has launched four AI certifications plus Certified CISO v4 to help teams handle adoption, security, and governance as AI risk grows. 🔗 Framework and certification details → thehackernews.com/2026/02/ec-cou…

Charlie Munger’s 1998 Harvard speech is the ultimate cheat code for life. He compressed 74 years of billionaire wisdom into just 30 minutes. Most people spend 4 years in college and learn less than what’s in this video. Save this video, you will come back to this.

@ralucasaceanu discussing all things digital and cyber with @MichealMartinTD

Coming up | 12pm with @andreagilligan ➡️Should we decriminalise drugs? 🐶Would you clone your pet? 📷Do we not have privacy anymore? @Smarttech01 👶Making Babies: Weight & Age @DrShaneHiggins8 😁Reasons to be Happy @mista_osullivan

🚨 BREAKING: Chat Control BLOCKED in EU! 🎉 Germany just refused to back the EU's mass surveillance "Chat Control" regulation after public pressure! This blocks the required majority in the EU Council and derails next week's planned vote. NICE JOB EVERYONE! 💪

Enjoyable discussion with @cisotradecraft youtu.be/KH-i8-B9rko?si…

LISTEN BACK What Next For Blackpool Credit Union Customers After Hack What can happen to the information and what is the best thing to do next @pjcoogan asks Ronan Murphy of Smarttech247 @Smarttech01 Penetration Testing & Security shows.acast.com/corks-96-fm-op…

🚨 UPDATE: Zscaler confirms it’s the latest victim of the Salesloft Drift breach. Attackers accessed its Salesforce instance, stealing customer contact details, licensing info, and some support case text. No misuse seen yet. Access revoked, tokens rotated. Details → thehackernews.com/2025/08/google…

Awesome @ralucasaceanu ! 🤩