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  • Hacker News
  • Inb4 govt intervention
  • Why create an offensive tool rather than a repo-scanning tool?

    I can't think of any way to safely release an offensive tool publicly.

  • You need both, scanning for your own code, pen testing to actually prove vulnerabilities, otherwise it can be very noisy and one of the things that most tools currently suffer from is they give you too many false positives. For the moment. The pen testing we gated it for now until we resolve the debate of safety.
  • They are only protecting corporate interests in insecure code bases by doing this. If everyone could have Mythos in their pockets, all the poorly written bottom dollar rush developed software would be rightfully shown to be the trash it always was. It would spur engineering liability legislation for commercial software and operations: speed-release poor insecure code --> corporate bankruptcy and maybe even prison for the software PE who signed off on it. Software, infrastructure, and hardware security won't improve massively until the "bad actors" start running rampant on the steaming pile!
  • At my job we have tooling that scans our code repos with Opus. Yes it can find stuff however it doesn’t find everything.

    I am able to get Opus and Sonnet to function as a red team agent. We don’t have some crazy special sauce, just a lot of trial and error. Basically add enough context proving we own the code and running services that it will run attempts to compromise our services.

    It found tons of stuff that was not found with just scanning the code. It found serious security issues that had been in productions for years that humans never found. They weren’t things that were accessible externally but serious enough that we are thrilled to have these tools.

    I can say that Fable did refuse to function with our harness. I am worried that soon you have to be in the special club to do this stuff with the SOTA models. A small company like ours doesn’t get accepted to their programs that remove guardrails. Even though our CEO has found and disclosed vulnerabilities to multiple companies and holds a patent around federated authentication.

  • >This won't be made available to anyone and everyone

    >no benchmarks on standard Cyber benchs

    ok

  • What was your approach to benchmarking an adversarial agent?

    This is an open problem that I came across (in a different domain), as the search space can be really wide. It's hard to measure results for non-trivial tasks.

    Would be really interested if you can share your eval approach :)

  • Any generic abliterated or ubcensored open weight model (such as a qwen variant) will happily comply with requests like this.
  • Fantastic. Could you share more details what it was like post-training a model?
  • The RL is easy to describe, hard to do. The nice thing about pen testing is the reward isn't a vibe like training for code quality, the exploit either lands or it doesn't. The day to day is not glamorous at all, mostly fighting for stable gpu access, watching a cluster sit half-idle with nodes you somehow can't book.
  • Show HN: We told Claude to generate a marketing page for a theoretical pentesting model
  • The tool is live, you can test it.
  • IMO the most interesting thing about this is Kimi K2.6, an extremely capable model, can be relatively easily post-trained to allow pen tests.

    This in its own right proves that the defenses of Fable and others are temporary blocks, and AI based hacking is going to be effectively available to all parties regardless of stop gaps, as long as open models exist.

    by jjcm
  • Agreed, and that's basically our premise. If a 5 person team can post-train an open model to do this, so can the people you don't want doing it, model-level refusals on open weights are a speed bump. Which is the argument for defenders having it too, not against.
  • Relevant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48016224 what's the differnce between this vs running shannon on aws/bedrock fully airgapped in my vpc? I've got some pretty great results with shannon [no subprocessor and can pay via aws credits]. Even better using claude code token [effectively free with our $200/mo cc subscription] I tried kimi but it generally spins it's wheels extensively in it's thinking tokens. kimi2.7 is an attempt at reducing this. But doing finetuning, means you will always be behind the latest.

    as a side note - I think it's very unprofessional and very shitty to not mention kimi2.6 at all in your marketing copy. and i feel that you posted that in this hn post begrudgingly since the hn crowd would have flagged that. confirmed with a google search too: https://www.google.com/search?q=kimi+site%3Aargusred.com

    All around your marketing website you keep mentioning - 'A model lab built it'. A fintune does not maketh you a model lab - some humility please :)

    finally - doesn't Kimi's licensing prohibit you from not mentioning them? Didn't cursor run into the same issue?

  • It's named throughout our main website, the RL is on Kimi K2.6, benchmarks are vs K2.6: https://cosine.sh/blog/introducing-lumen-outpost. The ArgusRed page is a week old so it's not on there yet, but nothing's hidden. And K2.6 only needs attribution above a certain scale, the threshold Cursor hit and we haven't.

    On Shannon airgapped in your VPC, if it works for you, you might not need us. A normal model will refuse or hedge on offensive tasks, we post-trained ours to just run the authorised stuff. For this one narrow job, a specialist that'll actually attack beats a generalist that won't.

  • > This won't be made available to anyone and everyone, but we do believe that responsible SMEs and midmarket companies also need access to these tools in order to identify key vulnerabilities in their systems; not just enterprises.

    So this is the same policy that Anthropic and OpenAI have, it is just based on your criteria rather than theirs.

  • Reminds me of a time when Tailscale cofounder went on a rant about how big bad AWS charges too much for bandwidth, and his solution was to send that money to Tailscale instead
  • I think the policy universally makes sense, who would want to give a tool like this to bad actors? But it does leave a big section of the market underserved. Particularly when Mythos was made accessible to very large orgs and then Fable was pulled on export grounds.
  • I actually wonder how valuable this verbiage is

    To me it looks like copycat marketing more than a strongly held stance

    Artificial scarcity, membership club criteria to make members feel special

    Perhaps there is an organization that awards this “responsibility” behavior, the EU comes to mind but not lucrative enough

    As far as engagement farming goes, it got us to engage and boost its reach, for something we might otherwise ignore with more benign language

    Once I get the answers I will execute

  • As soon as I read that I literally scoffed. Doublethink at its finest. Doubleplusungood.