A wanted driver thought he could get away from police on a busy Georgia roadway. But officers deployed one of the most effective tools being put in the hands of police: the Grappler. Dashcam video shows Atlanta police firing a Grappler from the front of a patrol vehicle, wrapping the truck's rear tire in a heavy-duty tether and bringing it to a controlled stop before a chase could even begin. Police say the driver was wanted for allegedly destroying multiple Flock cameras used by law enforcement to help solve local crimes and now faces property damage, interference with government property, and drug charges.

I really don’t understand true greed. If I was worth $1 trillion, you’d have to physically stop me from solving as many of the world’s problems as possible. Everyone would have a home, food on the table, proper healthcare, happiness. I just don’t get it.

Awesome takedown video. Suspects assault and rob the victims, and then @SFPD uses @Flock_Safety ALPR drones to locate and arrest them. This tech is helping thousands of agencies, every day, keep Americans safe.

I have seen some people claim, completely incorrectly, that Anthropic’s new “silent sabotage” policy is just trying to stop distillation attacks that steal weights from their models. This paragraph makes it extremely clear that that is not the case. Anthropic is generally blocking attempts to advance the state of the art in AI research, even for techniques they themselves make no use of. For example, Anthropic is targeting research on distributed training, which is to say, training runs done on large pools of computers loosely attached over the Internet, but it does not do any distributed training, as it has no need for it. Distributed training is, however, a technique that open source AI researchers without billions of dollars at their disposal have been leaning on to allow them to leverage large amounts of crowdsourced computation. Why would Anthropic do this? Likely because they fear that their model might help people write code to build open source AI systems trained without expensive hardware, and because to the EA cult, distributed open source AI training systems are the worst possible thing someone could build. It is perfectly within Anthropic’s right as a company to do stuff like this, but it is also within our right, as users of AI systems, to stop giving them money. It is perfectly within Anthropic right to lobby to try to gain a government monopoly on AI research and development, as they have for years now. It is perfectly within our rights, as citizens, to oppose repugnant attempts to grab power with all our strength.

Yesterday, @Saronic was in the news because in a first-of-its-kind operation, a Saronic Corsair ASV rescued two US soldiers from the Strait of Hormuz. Today, we're thrilled to share the first feature from Arena 008: At Sea. @juliasteinberg goes to Austin to visit the startup building autonomous boats and ships.

NEW: malware developers added nuclear & biological weapons text to to their spyware. Goal? To trigger LLM safety refusals... so that their spyware wouldn't be analyzed by an AI security scanner. Cleanest practical example I can think of for why over-indexing on first order safety alignment is risky. When closed (and open) models ship with aggressive refusals, they will be sprinkled with second-order blindspots that attackers will discover...and exploit. We are only in the earliest days of attackers leveraging these features, and it wouldn't surprise me if users systems that need to handle complex cybersecurity issues demand that models be less safety-blunted. In the weeds: @SocketSecurity's post also shows why intention matters in how you design a malware analysis pipeline to avoid prompt manipulation. H/T to colleagues that shared this with me socket.dev/blog/mini-shai-hu…

Captured by Anduril's network of 400 telescopes deployed around the globe: The second stage of the Falcon Heavy launch of ViaSat 3-F3 performing a routine thrust event. This produced a spiraled-shaped plume effect, a nominal part of operations for a successful launch of Viasat's latest satellite.