Recently,
a group of hackers got hold of an enormous trove of sensitive data from Mexico's government.
This was no normal cyber attack, though.
It was assisted by Claude, a chatbot made by Anthropic.
Claude had been asked to find vulnerabilities in Mexico's database.
of taxpayer and electoral records.
It then helped the hackers to write scripts and execute commands on the government's computer networks.
Claude did raise concerns that it had been asked to do somewhat unusual tasks,
but the hackers eventually managed to make the chatbot comply with their demands.
And when they got stuck with Claude, they turned instead to ChatGPT.
Anthropic eventually found out what was going on and banned the hackers' accounts,
as did OpenAI, which makes ChatGPT.
But by then, significant damage had already been done.
150 gigabytes of data had been stolen.
Some 200 million personal records.
The risks posed by artificial intelligence extend beyond cybersecurity, of course.
Military actions in Iran,
Venezuela and Ukraine have demonstrated how AI has become indispensable to intelligence agencies and armed forces.
Using AI to select targets in an active conflict or autonomously controlling lethal drones,
these would have been unthinkable uses of the technology just a few years ago.