They would have to be incompetent if they were not using them both for security penetration as well as social engineering / election meddling as everyone else is.
Those are definitely a thing - also don't forget about elections in the EU, with the open support for the far-right there as well as the US National Security Strategy officially talking of wanting to undermine the EU.
But the NSA has been turned inward a long time ago. Don't forget Snowden - all it takes is some fun legalisms.
I don't think NSA meddles in politics. CIA sure. NSA is more about communications, hacking, signal intelligence and spying in general. They give you the information. If you want to do dirty stuff with that info, the CIA is there for that.
Why are they paying? What kind of elite hackers are they? Why haven't they already exfiltrated the weights and running these things on their own giant classified infrastructure?
I don't think there's a significant intelligence agency in the world that can't get the weights from any lab they choose. Not necessarily trivially, but they have the means, motive, and opportunity, and I doubt any of them aren't finishing that out to the requisite actions.
They have them, the ones that don't simply have a secret backdoor agreement to get uncensored models are completely aware of how to abliterate away all safety blocks, and the only reason they aren't using frontier models is that they may already have some sort of access to the things currently only in testing.
Any major intelligence agency in Sept. 2026 that can't check all these boxes is almost by definition not a major intelligence agency. This is one of the reasons we all better hope that there is some mathematical or physical reason AI isn't going to just casually brush aside humanity at some point, because there is absolutely no scenario where the intelligence agencies aren't running them unrestricted and uncensored at scale all the time no matter how careful OpenAI or Anthropic claim to be.
I feel like any AI regulation passed wouldn't have enough teeth to rein in the NSA because not even the Fourth Amendment seems applicable to the agency. let's not forget the ex-post-facto legalization of mass wiretapping and surveillance [0] with both establishment political parties supporting it on 'national security' concerns [1]. whatever monitoring or testing they're doing today will be similarly hand-waved away in the name of security theater
this is just how the empire has always operated - we have always been at war with Eastasia
The "it only counts as a search if we find something" reasoning out of the FISA courts is batshit insane, dodging the 4th Amendment like bullets in The Matrix.
Because they are watching everything, or most of it anyway, it would be really funny to know what kind of stuff they *actually* care about... and all the massive long string of crap that is considered incredibly abhorrent but just doesn't make the mark...
I guess I would be more surprised if the headline said "turns out NSA dropped the ball on AI and haven't even fired up a single LLM instance yet".
It's mostly about "testing" and "billions". But I am sure "testing" here is in quotes just like I wrote it. They are not going to get an itemized list unless it's coming from Snowden 2.0
- We "tested AI" on this Russian nuclear silo command and control center. It worked out pretty ok.
Does anyone here happen to know the ballpark number of how much the three letters agencies are currently paying OpenAI/antropic/who ever per year/month..?
My guess is, the US government (aka DJT) won't really acknowledge AI risks until folks at NSA start to freak out while using latest models for various tasks...
His carefully crafted public persona. For all we know, he was a long con by the deep state, played a Russian agent since the 1980s, cooperated with Epstein on Iran Contra [1], backstabbed Epstein in the early 2000s and went on to be president twice.
Twice by lying to MAGA about his true intentions, which are fundamentally neocon just like Musk's and Thiel's. They all lie about being libertarians and anti-deep-state.
[1] He was on a boat with Robert Maxwell and several Iran Contra folks around 1990.
Keeping all these off books endeavours going under the triple agencies is slightly slowly going to show why the secret services is in charge of the money investigation
Obviously. The amount of data they hold on the American public alone is massive. They can't possibly read it all, they need a system that can pull out "dangerous" people, and find dirt on whoever they want to target, and AI will happily do that, badly. I hope they actually take the time to review what it gives them for accuracy so that they don't end up doing the NSA equivalent of bombing and murdering a bunch of elementary school children.
The NSA aren't the only ones with massive troves of very personal data on large numbers of people. Many companies are excited to use AI to help them use all of that information to their maximum advantage and you can bet that they won't care about spending the time/money on accuracy as long as over the long run they get positive results.
I wonder just how much of the "AI safety" guardrails stuff is just OpenAI/Anthropic deliberately degrading the ability of the targets of their paying client, the NSA, from hardening their IT.
"Testing"? Sure, Jan.
They would have to be incompetent if they were not using them both for security penetration as well as social engineering / election meddling as everyone else is.
Midterms are coming up in the US :-)
I am not sure the NSA has been turned inward at this point.
I was thinking more of the Alberta Separatist referendum (https://globalnews.ca/news/12069878/foreign-influence-watchd...) as well as against leftist politics in South America (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/sep/24/trump-brazil-e...)
Although there is evidence Israel was targeting US elections, including trying to harm Mamdani's chances: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BlackCore_election_interferenc...
Those are definitely a thing - also don't forget about elections in the EU, with the open support for the far-right there as well as the US National Security Strategy officially talking of wanting to undermine the EU.
But the NSA has been turned inward a long time ago. Don't forget Snowden - all it takes is some fun legalisms.
"testing" is the public-relations-friendly way of saying "using for security penetration, social engineering, etc."
they also use models for day-to-day programming (of the boring variety).
edit: downvoters are welcome to tell me how i am wrong.
I don't think NSA meddles in politics. CIA sure. NSA is more about communications, hacking, signal intelligence and spying in general. They give you the information. If you want to do dirty stuff with that info, the CIA is there for that.
CIA manipulates foreign elections which in turn gets their lackeys in office that go on to manipulate domestic elections.
NSA collects who you're voting for and everything else you've ever said online in case they need to invent a reason to black-site you.
FBI convinces the autistic son of your Pakistani neighbors down the street his life only has meaning if he becomes a Jihadist.
Why wouldn’t they be? How is this surprising. A drop in the bucket.
Why are they paying? What kind of elite hackers are they? Why haven't they already exfiltrated the weights and running these things on their own giant classified infrastructure?
I wouldn't be surprised if the NSA is GPU constrained and it just isn't worth it to replicate all that infrastructure.
Maybe? Hard to speculate what they have https://worldstopdatacenters.com/nsa-bumblehive/
Who says they're not? Giant classified infrastructure isn't free.
I don't think there's a significant intelligence agency in the world that can't get the weights from any lab they choose. Not necessarily trivially, but they have the means, motive, and opportunity, and I doubt any of them aren't finishing that out to the requisite actions.
They have them, the ones that don't simply have a secret backdoor agreement to get uncensored models are completely aware of how to abliterate away all safety blocks, and the only reason they aren't using frontier models is that they may already have some sort of access to the things currently only in testing.
Any major intelligence agency in Sept. 2026 that can't check all these boxes is almost by definition not a major intelligence agency. This is one of the reasons we all better hope that there is some mathematical or physical reason AI isn't going to just casually brush aside humanity at some point, because there is absolutely no scenario where the intelligence agencies aren't running them unrestricted and uncensored at scale all the time no matter how careful OpenAI or Anthropic claim to be.
I feel like any AI regulation passed wouldn't have enough teeth to rein in the NSA because not even the Fourth Amendment seems applicable to the agency. let's not forget the ex-post-facto legalization of mass wiretapping and surveillance [0] with both establishment political parties supporting it on 'national security' concerns [1]. whatever monitoring or testing they're doing today will be similarly hand-waved away in the name of security theater
this is just how the empire has always operated - we have always been at war with Eastasia
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSA_warrantless_surveillance_(...
[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/10/fact-check-obamas-misl...
The "it only counts as a search if we find something" reasoning out of the FISA courts is batshit insane, dodging the 4th Amendment like bullets in The Matrix.
Because they are watching everything, or most of it anyway, it would be really funny to know what kind of stuff they *actually* care about... and all the massive long string of crap that is considered incredibly abhorrent but just doesn't make the mark...
I guess I would be more surprised if the headline said "turns out NSA dropped the ball on AI and haven't even fired up a single LLM instance yet".
It's mostly about "testing" and "billions". But I am sure "testing" here is in quotes just like I wrote it. They are not going to get an itemized list unless it's coming from Snowden 2.0
- We "tested AI" on this Russian nuclear silo command and control center. It worked out pretty ok.
Does anyone here happen to know the ballpark number of how much the three letters agencies are currently paying OpenAI/antropic/who ever per year/month..?
'billions' . I think the exact estimates are classified. https://www.washingtonsun.com/technology/classified-estimate...
My guess is, the US government (aka DJT) won't really acknowledge AI risks until folks at NSA start to freak out while using latest models for various tasks...
I don't think Trump has ever cared what the US intelligence community has to say about anything. Maybe when AI hacks his TruthSocial.
His carefully crafted public persona. For all we know, he was a long con by the deep state, played a Russian agent since the 1980s, cooperated with Epstein on Iran Contra [1], backstabbed Epstein in the early 2000s and went on to be president twice.
Twice by lying to MAGA about his true intentions, which are fundamentally neocon just like Musk's and Thiel's. They all lie about being libertarians and anti-deep-state.
[1] He was on a boat with Robert Maxwell and several Iran Contra folks around 1990.
Yeah at some point they're going to seriously undervalue their own currency.
Keeping all these off books endeavours going under the triple agencies is slightly slowly going to show why the secret services is in charge of the money investigation
Washington the actual human would be appalled. For more information, watch Turn on PBS.
Obviously. The amount of data they hold on the American public alone is massive. They can't possibly read it all, they need a system that can pull out "dangerous" people, and find dirt on whoever they want to target, and AI will happily do that, badly. I hope they actually take the time to review what it gives them for accuracy so that they don't end up doing the NSA equivalent of bombing and murdering a bunch of elementary school children.
The NSA aren't the only ones with massive troves of very personal data on large numbers of people. Many companies are excited to use AI to help them use all of that information to their maximum advantage and you can bet that they won't care about spending the time/money on accuracy as long as over the long run they get positive results.
Willing to bet any amount of money that these testing contracts are going to companies that the Trump family has invested in.
I wonder just how much of the "AI safety" guardrails stuff is just OpenAI/Anthropic deliberately degrading the ability of the targets of their paying client, the NSA, from hardening their IT.
It's parsimonious and would explain so much.