I must be missing something, because you're getting a bunch of upvotes. I don't disagree with anything you said, but it feels like a total non-sequitur to what I was saying.

Yes - proper air-gapping is a good idea. But asking the big AI labs to air gap is kind of pointless. Liability already gives them legal incentives to avoid incidents. If that didn't stop them, a letter signed by a bunch of academics sure won't. More importantly, open-weight models capable of doing all the things that we're concerned about are already in the hands of bad actors around the world.

This letter is asking us to lock the front door of the house when the back wall is missing.

But isn’t that the problem? You can’t force a rogue user to do anything; or they wouldn’t be rogue. So why should they apply air gapping to their agents?

The ones in Russia definitely are. They don't have to be local models - you run them in the cloud like anyone else.

The idea that the frontier labs have LLMs with special capabilities that make them dramatically better than the top open-weight models is largely marketing.

The reality is that most systems are poorly secured, and LLMs make exploiting vulnerabilities fast, cheap, and easy. What would have taken a trained security researcher weeks before can be done by a much less skilled attacker with an LLM in a few hours.

You don't need something that power to do damage. And fuck the frontier model of 6 months ago and now are basically two entirely different things. In another six months?

Claude fable had a bunch of concerns on release and you don't think what evers out in the next year isnt going to beat it?

Getting a bunch of beat up Mac minis together and running something isn't that hard for a mid tier operation. They don't have to be fast. They just have to turn on.

You think scammers in Africa/India are capable of running a local open weight model equivalent to the performance of a cloud frontier model?

By local I presume you mean on a gaming computer. No one can do that.

You think scammers in Africa/India are capable of running a local open weight model equivalent to the performance of a cloud frontier model?

Yes this is absolutely possible.

Technology is famously hard for the law to keep up with, but I don't think that's what's going on here. We have laws for when a person uses a technical tool to obtain unauthorized access, exfiltrate data, or do other malicious things. These don't necessarily require any specific intent. If you've set up an AI tool and pointed it in the direction of hacking without proper airgapping, you've probably violated the CFAA if you're in the US when it's successful. Other countries generally have similar laws. Prosecutors don't need to try someone if it's really ambiguous or unclear what they actually did. Is this really unreasonable under the legal system?

To the extent there's a gap, it's the system around the law. Lawyers and judges aren't technical experts, and may not recognize "it wasn't me, it was the ai" as the same argument as "it wasn't me who shot him, it was my gun", in that it's usually foolish and unserious, but there can be a convoluted scenario in which it's a good argument.