A.I. Safety Is So Back + Mythos Mayhem with Nikesh Arora + Hot Mess Express
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casey newton
Casey, will you record my audiobook for me? Yes. I would love to, actually.
kevin roose
OK. Thanks. Yeah, because I got the briefing yesterday on what this would entail for me. They want 36 hours in the studio to record this audiobook.
casey newton
That’s — wait, hold on — 8, 16, 24. That’s over four days’ worth — that’s four and a half days of recording. That’s almost a full week.
kevin roose
I know.
casey newton
Oh my god.
kevin roose
I know. But apparently, people have a connection to us because of our voices. So they didn’t want me using, like, an AI clone to do it.
casey newton
You know what? I really think that there would be a case that I should do this, because it would force me to read your book. You know what I mean? Then I really can’t get out of it. Like, I’m on the hook to read this thing for real. And so that might be the best way to do it.
kevin roose
You can insert your little snotty wisecracks if you want, like “Mystery Science Theater” it.
casey newton
Yeah, a little extra commentary on the side, like oh, I see we’re using that transition again. Hmm. Oh, boy. He really ended this whole thing with “Time will tell.” I would have suggested a different direction. Was this book edited?
kevin roose
(LAUGHS): No, wait. Now I kind of actually want you to do it.
(quirky, futuristic music)
I’m Kevin Roose, a tech columnist at The New York Times.
casey newton
I’m Casey Newton from Platformer.
kevin roose
And this is “Hard Fork.”
casey newton
This week — is AI safety back? The Trump administration seems to be changing its tune. Then Palo Alto Networks CEO Nikesh Arora joins us to discuss what’s real and what’s hype in the freakout over Claude Mythos. And finally, the train has returned to the station. It’s the Hot Mess Express.
kevin roose
Buckle up.
casey newton
People don’t typically buckle a seat belt on a train.
kevin roose
This is a very safe train.
casey newton
All right.
(quirky, futuristic music)kevin roose
Well, the big news this week is that President Trump headed to China with a cohort of American business executives to have a series of meetings about Chinese trade policy and AI and other things with Xi Jinping and other leading Chinese officials.
casey newton
Now, is it true, when they walked off the plane, a bunch of H100s fell out of the leg of Jensen Huang’s pants?
kevin roose
(LAUGHS): I haven’t heard that confirmed, but I’ll look into it.
casey newton
Thank you.
kevin roose
I want to talk about this, but less through the lens of President Trump and United States trade policy than through this sort of larger shift that I think we’ve both observed over the past week or so, which is that after several years of dismissing AI safety and doomer fearmongering about AI, the Trump administration — or at least, parts of the Trump administration — seem to be getting quite scared about what’s happening.
casey newton
Yes. And while this is something that I think was honestly inevitable, it still has been jarring to see it happen, because it seems like this administration has really turned on a dime when it comes to this subject.
kevin roose
Yeah. So let’s talk about what’s been going on and some of the data points that support the idea that the Trump administration is changing its AI posture or at least has several different AI postures that it’s considering. But first, let’s do our AI disclosures. I work for The New York Times which is suing OpenAI, Microsoft, and Perplexity.
casey newton
And my fiance works at Anthropic.
kevin roose
So, first, there was this executive order — or rumored executive order — that my colleagues at The New York Times reported on last week. This would be a new executive order to create an AI working group that would bring together tech executives and government officials to potentially come up with new ways of overseeing or regulating AI. One of the potential plans being discussed is a formal government review process for new AI models before they are released. So this is still ongoing. We still don’t exactly what the executive order will or won’t include, but we are expecting more news on that.
casey newton
Yes. And the reason that is notable, Kevin, is that on President Trump’s first day in office in his second term, he canceled President Biden’s executive order on AI, which, among other things, included a very similar kind of review process for new frontier AI models, right? Like, the Biden people were very confident that we would one day get models that could be used to commit great harm. And so they wanted to get a handle on that before those models were released. And when Biden did that, many Republicans were saying, this is anti-innovation. You’re going to make us lose to China. Well, well, well, now the shoe is on the other foot. And they’re saying, hey, slow down, don’t release those things quite so fast.
kevin roose
It’s so remarkable how fast the Overton window has shifted on this idea. I mean, as you just said, during the Biden administration, during the SB 1047 fight here in California over this proposed AI bill, people in tech and on the tech right and among the more libertarian crowd were incensed about the idea that the government might ask them to do pre-release testing of their models that they then submit the results of to the government.
They called this communist. They were sort of implying this would be the end of free enterprise as it. And now, just a couple of years later, they are reportedly considering doing something similar. So what do you think happened here?
casey newton
Well, I think that basically, to use a phrase you sometimes like to use, the Trump administration’s view of AI just did not survive contact with reality and that, in a word, what has changed here is Mythos, the model that Anthropic now has released in a preview to a very small group that includes now many federal agencies. This model is very good, apparently, at finding novel vulnerabilities in code that can be used to create exploits. And that appears to be true across many, many, many programs.
And so the administration, I think, took a look at this. And the serious people over there said, look, whatever your views may be about free trade and the threat of losing to China, we have a model right now that, if it were just unleashed on the public, could just create vast amounts of harm. And I think, to their credit, the Trump administration said, OK, then what would be a policy to prevent harm from happening?
kevin roose
Yes, Mythos is the proximate cause here for a lot of this, but I think it’s also worth talking about the various factions within the Trump administration that appear to be battling over control of this new AI regulatory push. There appears to be a turf war breaking out between the Center for AI Standards and Innovation, or CAISI —
casey newton
Shoutout to CAISI.
kevin roose
— which is formerly known as the US AI Safety Institute. This was a group within the Commerce Department that was set up under the Biden administration. The Trump administration came in, and basically, they didn’t like that this was what they considered a bunch of doomers. So they made some changes, including to the name. But this is a group of AI researchers and safety experts who work in the Commerce Department who want to be involved in vetting new models.
casey newton
And there is just something so funny about these people coming in and saying, AI safety is such a stupid idea that we have to remove safety from the name of this Institute, and then one year later, be like, um, well, AI safety is really going to be a focus for us from now on.
kevin roose
Yeah. So there are some people who believe that the vetting of frontier models should take place in the intelligence community among the NSA and various other organizations. So there’s some turf war there. There’s also just this interesting kind of posture war over whether the of let-it-rip approach to AI development or, as former AI czar David Sacks put it, the let-them-cook philosophy of laissez-faire regulation and this more hawkish, safety-oriented faction within the Republican Party that does see these models as a big threat and wants to take steps to reel them in.
casey newton
Right. So do we know, at this point, who seems to be winning that battle? And do you think it matters to the average person which side gains the upper hand?
kevin roose
I do. I think there’s obviously going to be some back and forth. We’ll see when this executive order comes out, like what they do about the testing requirements and where they locate that, if it’s like, we’re going to let the NSA do this, or we’re going to let CAISI do this. I think that all might matter a little bit. But I think the general posture of the administration changing from “AI safety is ridiculous, and these doomers are using hyped-up fears to enact regulatory capture” is very different from what we’re seeing now, which is, “oh, wait, these models are very powerful, and we don’t want our adversaries to get access to them.”
But we should also say, it is entirely confused and incoherent right now at the level of the federal government. Because on one level, you have President Trump inviting Jensen Huang of NVIDIA onto Air Force One to fly with him to China to try to make a deal to presumably open up the export of NVIDIA’s most powerful AI chips to China, while at the same time, you have other high-ranking government officials saying, we need to institute some kind of safety regime because these models are potentially very dangerous.
casey newton
Yes. And nowhere is that schism more apparent than in the Pentagon, Kevin, where, on one hand, the Pentagon has designated Anthropic as a supply-chain risk because it refused to amend its contract to enable any, quote, “lawful use of its technology,” as we talked about on the show for a few months, that designation the Pentagon is still arguing for in court. But at the same time, we learned that this week, during the period where the Pentagon is supposed to be unwinding all of Anthropic’s technology from the Pentagon, the Pentagon is also implementing Mythos and using it to try to scan for vulnerabilities.
kevin roose
It’s truly wild.
casey newton
I want to be in the meeting where the person who has to remove Anthropic from the Pentagon sits down with the person who’s installing Anthropic into the Pentagon and just hear what those talks are like.
kevin roose
Yeah. So aside from the obvious incoherence and maybe hypocrisy of these conflicting positions, which side do you think is going to come out on top here?
casey newton
Well, obviously, I’m always going to side with CAISI. CAISI is a great agency, great people over there. And I mean, honestly, they were just set up to do this exact thing, right? Like, when it was established under President Biden, the idea was, these models are getting better. Pretty soon, they’re going to be dangerous. We need to have a way of evaluating them before they are released. And, frankly, they’ve just hired a lot of people who I think ordinarily might not work in a Trump administration but felt like this is so important that I’m going to swallow hard and go over there and try to serve my country by protecting us from the worst things that AI can do.
And so to me, that seems like they would be very well set up to do this kind of work. Where I think we still just have an obvious gap, though, Kevin is it’s not entirely clear to me what is supposed to happen in the case when a company like Anthropic comes up with a model that is too dangerous to release in the view of something like CAISI but wants to release it anyway. And I assume we are just going to get there. Like, sometime within the next six months, one of these companies is going to say, yeah, it’s risky, but we think it’s sort of fine to put out there. We have business imperatives. We’re going to talk ourselves into it. And then what happens?
kevin roose
Yeah. I mean, it’s also just so clearly unfortunate that the issue of AI safety has become polarized in the way that it did over the past couple of years, that caring about safety, talking about safety became vaguely woke coded, and people in the Trump administration thought it was a bunch of hysterical liberals using fears of AI to get heavy-handed regulation into place. I don’t think that was ever true, but I think it has become especially untrue now, when you have very senior people in the Republican Party talking about how we need to restrain these systems.
So it’s frustrating because I think you and I both saw, like, this technology is real. It’s going to get even more powerful than it is. And at that point, it’s not going to matter whether you’re a Republican or a Democrat. You do not want this stuff falling into the hands of our adversaries.
casey newton
True, but I think the Trump administration was always out on a limb here in a really weird way. We have talked a lot recently about what the surveys show when it comes to the public opinion of AI in America. Republicans and Democrats are largely aligned in being deeply skeptical of it and even outright hating it. And that’s why you see so many Republican state legislators trying to pass laws to rein in AI. You did not have to convince Republican state legislatures that AI was dangerous and needed to be regulated. They were racing to do it.
And the Trump administration has had to put a lot of energy into trying to pass a moratorium so that it can preserve its “all gas, no brakes” approach to AI. So what I think happened here was that there was basically a minority of Republicans that happen to be running the country that said, let the labs do whatever they want. And then Mythos comes out, and the bill comes due. And they have sort of have their pants down, and they have to change their tune, just to throw a lot of metaphors in there.
kevin roose
(LAUGHS): Pants, tunes.
casey newton
Yeah.
(laughs)
Oh, I’ll come up with more. Don’t worry.
kevin roose
We’re getting there. One other thing here is that you are starting to see the issue of catastrophic or existential risk floating up and percolating on the right. This is something that people like Bernie Sanders have now been talking about on the left for a couple of months. But on Tuesday of this week, Ted Cruz was talking about catastrophic risk and the need to protect against it. So I just think that the improvement of these models and the fact that they are so clearly useful for dangerous things, like cyber attacks, is going to scramble some of the usual partisan allegiances here.
casey newton
Yeah. I mean, look, the idea that a large language model might eventually get so good that it could break into your computer and wreak havoc — that was not a liberal view. That was just a view grounded in an observation of the rate of improvement in the model. In truth, I am glad that they are reversing course on this, and they’re doing it before we’ve had a massive catastrophe — maybe an asterisk there though, which is, I truly feel like every single day for the past week, I’ve seen news of a major cyber attack. And increasingly we’re getting word that these may have had AI systems involved in identifying these vulnerabilities.
kevin roose
Yeah. So there may be a catastrophe unfolding under our noses. We just don’t know about it yet.
casey newton
Yeah. Stay tuned for next week’s episode.
kevin roose
I want to talk a little bit about this China trip and what, if anything, we think that has to do with AI regulations. So there was some reporting in the Wall Street Journal last week that both the US and China have been considering a series of official discussions around AI. We know that AI is on the agenda for President Trump’s meetings with Xi and China this week. And we also that China has been looking to get access to Mythos. There was a great story recently in The Times that talked about the fact that a representative from a Chinese think tank approached Anthropic officials at a meeting in Singapore last month to basically lobby them to open this model up to China.
casey newton
And we want to give them the “Hard Fork” chutzpah award for shooting your shot. If you work at a Chinese think tank and you think Dario Amodei was about to hand you Mythos, that is truly — I aspire to your level of self-confidence.
kevin roose
Listen, you miss 100 percent of the shots you don’t take.
casey newton
It’s true.
kevin roose
So along with Jensen Huang, who finagled a last-minute invite on Air Force One after there were news reports that he was not going to be going on this trip, Elon Musk, Tim Cook, and Dina Powell McCormick from Meta are also on the trip with Trump. What’s going on here, and how would you characterize the blunt rotation among those tech executives?
casey newton
This is a group of executives that are aligned with the Trump administration. And they have all found, in various ways, that the more time you spend flattering President Trump, the more tax breaks and other forms of relief your company gets. So this is exactly what we talked about expecting Tim Cook to do once he announced that he would be stepping down as CEO, is you’re just kind of like a Trump whisperer, and you follow him around. And you say, go, President Trump, and also, please give Apple what we want. So Meta, Apple, and NVIDIA have all had huge success with this administration. And now, as their reward, they get to be photographed with the president, flying around China.
kevin roose
Yeah. I am just very unsure where all of this settles out. Because I can imagine Trump wanting to go to China and make a bunch of deals. And obviously, Jensen Huang and NVIDIA want to be able to sell their chips in China. And so I can see them, on one hand, giving some kind of expanded access to Chinese AI companies to get these American chips. But then I can also see them not wanting China to get access to models like Mythos.
So I don’t know how that resolves. And I see it as basically inherently contradictory that you want to give China or sell China the means to make its own Mythos-caliber models while, at the same time, trying to block them from getting access to the one that we have today.
casey newton
This is where it would be helpful to have a coherent strategy, but we don’t. It’s like, the same administration that is installing and uninstalling Anthropic at the same time is having a similar level of confusion over in China, where it seems like the administration is just like highly susceptible to blowing wherever the wind is today.
kevin roose
Yeah. I mean, I am generally not all that optimistic about the government’s ability to regulate technology in a way that is timely and relevant. And I hope I’m wrong here, but I think that we will see this sort of incoherence and contradiction until there is some big event that kind of forces everyone to sit up straight.
casey newton
My question is, will this be a case of the same AI safety-minded people who were dismissed for the past couple of years by the Trump administration be proven right again in the future, when it turns out that China did use access to American technology to build Mythos or better level models? And will there be any regrets that we sort of paved the way for them to do that? I don’t think it’s unlikely.
kevin roose
Yeah. It’s interesting, though. I had a conversation with a federal official recently, in the last couple of weeks, where this person was basically telling me that AI is just a normal technology, sort of taking the line that we’ve heard again and again from the people who don’t want to regulate this stuff, saying, this is just the internet. This is just the PC. It’s not some special technology that requires special rules.
And that position has just become so untenable — to me, at least — when you have models that are out there, finding zero-day exploits. Clearly, our military, our intelligence agencies, they don’t think this is a normal technology. They think it’s more like a step change that requires them to act in different ways. So I am very curious what happens to the “AI is normal technology” camp inside the Trump administration as the technology continues to grow. They may change their arguments, or they may not like. That’s the thing. You just don’t how committed these people are to their view.
casey newton
You don’t.
kevin roose
We should also talk about some of the international reaction to Mythos, because it’s not just China who wants into this thing. Germany’s digital affairs and cybersecurity agency are out this week with a proposal for establishing their own version of something like the US CAISI. They are also demanding access to state of the art models like Mythos. So it just seems like this model has sort of forced conversations around the world about who should have access to which models when. Should the public have access? Should governments have access? Which governments should have access? It just seems like we are in a new era of AI brinksmanship.
casey newton
For sure. And what I hope that we will see in the coming months is more and more cooperation. Like, the whole reason that we had that series of AI action summits over the past few years was to try to get more cooperation among the Western powers with this stuff. And then last year, the US sort of came in and said, that’s over. The US is winning the AI race. And you can like it or learn to live with it, basically. And so it’s no wonder to me that these other Western powers are seeking access to these models. And I think there’s probably, honestly, a good case that they should get access to these models. Because when it comes to fixing every vulnerability on the internet, I think we could probably use all the help we can get.
kevin roose
Yeah. And I remember that AI Action Summit. I didn’t go to the most recent one in India. But the one in Paris before that, I remember it was just like, oh, we’re just not going to talk about any of this. Like, we’re just not going to talk about the dangers that this technology might create because we’re so invested in this accelerationist posture. So how far we’ve come, and yet, we are still in the very early innings of this.
casey newton
Does it make you wonder what would have happened if the Trump administration had just been listening to “Hard Fork” a year ago? Could they have saved themselves some trouble here?
kevin roose
It’s possible. So, Casey, the politics of AI and AI regulation are obviously shifting very quickly. We may learn more this week after these meetings in China. But what is your take on what this latest burst of news signals about AI or AI regulation?
casey newton
My take is this is a rare bit of good news when it comes to AI regulation. I am somebody who’s been worried about AI safety for a long time. And one of the main reasons I’ve been worried about it is that our government has seemed to have this feeling of, like, let’s just see what happens, whereas to me, it seemed pretty obvious, what was going to happen. Now we have arrived at that point. We have a super powerful model. And to their credit, the Trump administration is saying, OK, it seems like we were wrong about how capable these models were going to be. Let’s make some changes.
kevin roose
And do you think there’s any way that this turns out to backfire? I’m just remembering people wanting social media to be regulated, and then when the Trump administration started doing things in the realm of social media, it amounted to what you and I would consider censorship or at least wanting to strong-arm the social media companies into doing their bidding. So do you think it’s possible that something similar happens with AI, where it’s like, we get the regulation, but it’s just the wrong kind, or this pre-release testing is testing for the wrong kind of thing?
casey newton
Yes. I am very sympathetic to those who believe that this could amount to a kind of prior restraint on free speech and that there is the risk that there are — members of the Trump administration will effectively say, you can’t release that model, not because it’s actually dangerous, but just because it seems woke and gay. And I think that we need to keep an eye out for that. And potentially, someone is going to need to sue over it. But when I look at how I want to balance those things, for the moment, I would rather have an administration saying, the crazy cyber model, don’t give that to everyone.
kevin roose
Yeah. I think I’m landing at a pretty similar place, where I’m a little worried that this regulatory push from the right is going to be confused and maybe too sudden, and there’s going to be some sort of overreaction that ends up with something more like the sort of censorship that you mentioned. But I am glad that after many years of denying that this technology was important, that it would become as good as the people at the lab said, that our government at least appears open to the idea that maybe they need to step in and do something here. I’ll take the little wins where I can get them.
casey newton
That’s what I’m saying. When’s the last time we talked about a win on this show?
(FUTURISTIC MUSIC)
kevin roose
When we come back, what is Claude Mythos doing to the world of cybersecurity? We’ll talk to Palo Alto Networks CEO Nikesh Arora.
(FUTURISTIC MUSIC)
casey newton
Well, Kevin, is it just me, or every time you look at the tech news, do you see some new cyber attack that seems to have befallen some company or another?
kevin roose
Yes. This is my experience of social media over the past two weeks. I log in. I see three posts from companies about how they’ve discovered more bugs in a 24-hour window than in the previous 80 years of their company’s history. And then everyone’s reposting that with just, like, “it begins,” or “it is over,” or “hide your kids.”
casey newton
Yes. Just to name a few of those, Mozilla was one of those companies, saying that it had pushed 423 security bug fixes in April alone compared to an average of about 22 per month throughout 2025. Google announced on Monday that for the first time ever, its threat intelligence group had identified an attacker using a zero-day exploit that the group believes was developed with AI. So that’s kind of a grim milestone.
And then if you’re a student, perhaps you noticed the cyber attack on the learning platform Canvas last week, which forced the site down for several hours. And the company behind Canvas, which is called Instructure, had to negotiate a deal with hackers for the return and destruction of the stolen data. So on one hand, there are cyber attacks going on all the time, but it does seem like some new inflection point has been reached. And, of course, a reason that people think we might be seeing more of these is AI.
kevin roose
Yes. So we have talked about Claude Mythos Preview, the model that Anthropic did not release widely but released to a select group of companies and open-source maintainers. And today, we’re actually going to talk to someone who has used Mythos and who has been on the front lines of this frantic sprint to secure the infrastructure of modern life.
casey newton
Yes. Our guest today is Nikesh Arora. Nikesh is the CEO and chairman of Palo Alto Networks, the largest cybersecurity firm in the world, which supports more than 70,000 customers, including the vast majority of the Fortune 100. And as you mentioned, Kevin, Palo Alto was among the organizations given early access to Claude Mythos as well as GPT-5.5 Cyber.
kevin roose
Yes. And Nikesh is one of the people, I think, who is best positioned to see the effects that these models are having on cybersecurity, because they do work so broadly across industries. They’re also a big government contractor. So I’m just really interested in what he thinks is different about this new class of models.
casey newton
Yes. And something I appreciate about Nikesh is that in an industry where there is a lot of hype — because, of course, the more scared that a cybersecurity executive can make you, the more likely you might be to buy their software — Nikesh is somebody who I think tries to maintain an even-keeled approach here and not to ring alarm bells where none are needed. But that said, I do think that he is quite concerned about some of the things that he’s seeing.
kevin roose
Well, let’s bring him in.
(FUTURISTIC MUSIC)
Nikesh Aurora, welcome to “Hard Fork.”
nikesh arora
Well, thank you for having me.
kevin roose
I want to just start with your account of what it feels like to run a major cybersecurity company right now. Casey and I have talked with people at these companies for many years, usually because something terrible has happened. And I feel like the vibe we get is like, this is the worst, most dangerous time ever in cybersecurity. What is your subjective experience, as someone who’s been in this field for a long time?
nikesh arora
I’m a little more, perhaps, relaxed than what you’re trying to ascribe, that people come here, tell us it’s the worst moment. Historically, what’s happened is, in the last seven years, you’ve seen the time from somebody breaching an organization and being able to extract, we’ll say, crown jewels, has been measured in days. Unfortunately, with the emergence of AI, the arrival of advanced technologies, that time frame has shrunk down to minutes. And when that happens in minutes, your defense systems have to be able to be activated and defend yourselves in minutes.
And fundamentally, the cybersecurity infrastructure was designed for days. Some parts of it are making it to seconds, the good parts, where you know how to stop them. But we have to go basically overhaul the backend infrastructure to make sure it’s AI ready so we can fight AI with AI. So you’re seeing that. You’re seeing AIs out there. You’re seeing people like Anthropic launch models like Mythos. You’re see an OpenAI do that with 5.5 Cyber. They’re showing you the art of the possible from a bad actor perspective. So we have to make sure we move as fast as them or faster, perhaps, to try and plug those holes, make the infrastructure better.
kevin roose
So your company recently put out a report on some patches that you all had made to —
nikesh arora
That’s right.
kevin roose
— your own systems. You disclosed 26 critical exploits covering 75 issues. And you said that’s against a typical baseline of under five.
casey newton
Meaning that they discovered, like, five times as many in a comparable period.
nikesh arora
Five to seven times, depending.
kevin roose
Yeah. So is that pretty standard for what kind of spike you all are seeing in exploits or discovered exploits as a result of Mythos and similar models?
nikesh arora
So, look, what we’ve discovered, some of the newer models that have come out in the last few weeks, perhaps a month or so, is AI models are getting really good at coding. Well, guess what? As the models start to understand what good code looks like, they also start developing an understanding of what bad code looks like. So if you point this model and say, OK, now look through all this code repository I have and find me bad code, it will. And unfortunately, humans have been writing bad code for a very long time. So on average, we’ll find about one-fifth or one-seventh of what was found in the last six weeks using these models. Now, of course, remember, we ran a concerted effort to see what the models were going to find. We had hundreds of engineers working on it to make sure we look under every rock, run every product through it. It’s almost like it’s a great cleansing. So it’s a great cleansing moment. We found seven times the volume that we would have normally found in a normal period. It’s not going to happen again, hopefully, because we have hopefully cleared out a whole bunch of the — let’s call it the tech debt or the vulnerability debt.
But I think a lot of organizations will have to go through this moment to understand how much of their code written in the past suffers from these vulnerabilities. They will have to do their own work. They’ll have to make sure that it’s fixed. I think the challenge we’re going to run into is, most companies use a large corpus of open source, and open source doesn’t get bashed or remediated as quickly as your own proprietary code can. The other thing we found, very interestingly, with Mythos and other models is, It’s really good at daisy-chaining vulnerabilities. And that’s what needs to be contended for.
casey newton
I’m trying to get a sense of the scale of this issue, because I feel like within the past few weeks, I’ve heard a lot of stories like the one you just described about your own company. Mozilla has been publishing blog posts about discovering —
nikesh arora
Yes, exactly.
casey newton
— hundreds of bugs over a period where, maybe previously, they only would have discovered a couple of dozen. My sense is that as more companies undertake this audit, they’re going to find that they have similar problems. So what is the time scale that we might expect these kinds of issues to be fixed? And is there enough time to fix, particularly, critical infrastructure before our adversaries gain access to similarly capable models?
nikesh arora
That’s a great question, Casey, I think, and that’s what should keep us up at night. Because not every organization has resources to fix code that could have been written 20 years ago. Now, the good news is that pretty much most of the cyber defenders have had access to the model. So they understand the scale and enormity of the problem to some degree. I think what we have been able to do is we’ve been able to enlist the support of many of the systems integrators in the world, like the IBMs, the Pricewaterhouse, the Deloittes, the Accentures, et cetera, who are all rallying to make sure they make resources available to many of these customers to be able to patch these things.
But I think we are in the midst of testing an interesting solve, where, once we know the vulnerabilities in an organization, we can write signatures into our perimeter defense firewalls to say, if you see somebody trying to go in this direction, we know there’s an unpatched piece of code behind it. Block them. So we can create a temporary scaffolding to let organizations have a little bit more time to go fix their vulnerabilities. But it has to be done.
And the risk, like you rightly articulated, is that open source or nation states or third parties can start building models that are similar to what Anthropic or OpenAI have built. And the risk is that they get there faster than the patches have been enabled in many enterprises.
casey newton
I want to understand a little bit more about the defense side of this now that you have access to this Mythos model. There’s been a lot written about it. It’s the subject of much debate at the highest levels of power. And I kind of just want to ask, what is it like to use it? Does it feel different than using Claude Code? Like, if you’ve used another Anthropic product, does it feel kind of the same. Or just what is it like to use Mythos?
nikesh arora
In the beginning, it was not that impactful because when you’re looking for bad code, it’s going to find everything. Remember, 30 percent of false positives, right? So it’s not always going to get the right thing. But unfortunately, we got to go test every one of them out to see which is real. But what became more and more fascinating — the more context we gave it, the better it became.
kevin roose
What do you mean?
nikesh arora
Well, it showed a piece of code. It doesn’t know what the code is trying to achieve. So you have to give it context, saying, well, this code —
kevin roose
So you’re not just pointing it and say, go test this firewall and tell me —
nikesh arora
No. No, no, no.
kevin roose
— what you find. You’re actually giving it some instructions beyond that.
nikesh arora
You have to give it context, in terms of what is the purpose of the code, what does it do, what is normal behavior supposed to look like. Then you have to give it more context, in terms of other threat research. The models don’t have all the threat research in the world. We sit on hordes of threat data, saying, this is how 10,000 attacks have been conducted in the past five years, which is data we store, we hold because we write machine-learning algorithms to protect against those instances.
So we say, oh, we’re arming you with all the past-known techniques that have been used. Can you see if some of those known techniques can be applied in this scenario? Effectively, you’re giving all the human training of the past to make sure that in the future, you can build defense against those techniques.
casey newton
You mentioned using both Mythos and GPT 5.5 Cyber. I’m curious, in your mind, how comparable those models are. Are they in the same class, or is one different than the other?
nikesh arora
The most fascinating part is that they both found different things, which tells you that based on their grounding, their training, whatever is being used to train that — one of them was better at certain things. The other one was better at some other things. But it just tells you that there is still a lot that’s going to get found.
kevin roose
One thing that stuck out to me, as I was reading some of your blog posts and your postmortems about your experiments with Mythos, is, if a cybersecurity company is finding five to seven times more vulnerabilities using this model, the average bank, the average insurance company —
casey newton
To say nothing of Kevin’s personal website.
kevin roose
— my personal website — I mean, we’re going to be looking at many multiples of that, right?
nikesh arora
Yes.
kevin roose
Or is it the case that everything is so centralized and runs through just a few platforms that the average institution is not as screwed as I think they are?
nikesh arora
I wouldn’t say the average is screwed. I think, look, there’s a lot of work that needs to be done. It’s not just good at finding vulnerabilities. The other thing we also found as part of our testing — it can even take a look at products you might be using, perhaps to power your website, which you may have misconfigured. That’s not a vulnerability. That’s human error in the way you’re using the product, where you’ve left the door open.
For example, many people will take products and say, ah, it’s easier if this control pane of this product was accessible from home or from the internet so I could just go access it from wherever I am and manage this thing. Well, you should not leave control panes of most products in your company exposed to the internet. Because if I can find it, other people can find it too.
kevin roose
Right. When Mythos was first announced, there were a lot of people who were very skeptical. They said, oh, this is just marketing hype, or Anthropic doesn’t have the compute to serve this model, which is why they’re only releasing it to a select group of companies. A month or so later, do you still hear that kind of thing from people in your industry, that maybe this isn’t the sort of apocalyptic moment that Anthropic and others have said?
nikesh arora
Yeah, I look at it slightly from a longer-term perspective. I think what the Mythos model showed is what the art of the possible is going to be in the future, once we are compute unconstrained or we have better models in the future which are trained better. So it sort of gave us a window into what’s coming, I think, which was very useful. I think that’s a bit of it’s a bit of a tough rap towards Mythos, that they did this on purpose.
Remember, these companies, whether it’s OpenAI or Anthropic, they’re sort of working their way, trying to understand how to do this. Both them and OpenAI want to do it right. They want to do it so that AI is not used in a bad way, at least in this instance. I think they were trying to do the right thing. I think there is no easy solve to this. I give them marks for trying to do the right thing. And I think they partly got most of it right. Some of it, they fumbled on the way there. But I give credit to both of them for trying to get it done right.
casey newton
Speaking of how we fix this — so, for decades, cybersecurity has operated using this sort of 90-day responsible disclosure window, where like, I find something. I find a bug. I sort of privately notify you. But in 90 days, you know I’m going to go public with this, so you better get your act together and fix it. And companies often do take 90 days or longer to implement those bug fixes.
So I read a blog post this week by a researcher named Himanshu Anand, who wrote that in his opinion, the 90-day responsible disclosure window is dead. I also saw that in your own company’s blog post last week, you guys said that within 25 minutes in an AI-assisted scenario, somebody could get initial access to a system and exfiltrate the data. So do you agree that this 90-day window is dead? And if so, what the heck do we do about it?
nikesh arora
Look, I think the principle of the 90-day window is to allow the owners of the product or the piece of software, a piece of code, to have enough time to investigate, to fix it, and make sure their customers are secure. I think the 90-day window is going to shrink, as you rightly articulated. How much does it shrink? Still up for debate. How long do we have?
Think about it for what we just did. We announced this morning that we’ve patched almost 30 critical vulnerabilities. We’ve known about these for two or three weeks. We’ve had the time to go test it. We’ve had time to build patches, pretty much deployed everything that’s available from a SaaS software perspective. So challenge is not the SaaS software, right? SaaS software, you can find. You can fix. You can deploy. It’s not a problem. The challenge is when there’s a laptop sitting in front of you, and I’ve got to go make sure you update your laptop because you’re required to do something with it.
casey newton
And I can tell you, he will go, like, six months without installing the mandatory updates. I’m not even kidding. Delay, delay, delay. I mean, I am starting to see more of those just in my products, and I’m getting more requests to update system software. Is that Mythos related? No, seriously. I’m wondering to myself every time I see it. I’m like, oh, what did Mythos find now? So are we starting to see, as consumers, evidence that some of these systems are needing to be patched more frequently?
nikesh arora
I think, as I said, there is going to be the cleansing of the vulnerability backlog that has been built over the years. So you will most likely experience, in the next three to six months, if you’re in enterprise, you’ll experience it in a lot more boxes that you buy. You buy servers. You buy switches. You buy routers. All those things, where they have code lying on them, will have to be looked at and will have to be patched and upgraded over time. So you’re going to see some of that cleansing happen, but hopefully you can power through it and get to the other side.
casey newton
But it sounds like it is just a good time to install those software updates when you get them.
nikesh arora
Yes. I highly recommend you do that.
kevin roose
One persistent question about these kind of models is whether they favor attackers or defenders. So I guess I’m just going to put that question to you. Is this technology better for people who want to break into systems or people who want to safeguard systems? And if you had attackers and defenders with an equal model, who would win?
nikesh arora
That’s a great question.
casey newton
The classic Batman versus Superman.
nikesh arora
Remember, it’s an unbalanced fight to start with. We have to be right 100 percent of the time, the bad guys right once. So it’s an uneven playing field from that perspective. So the model, if you can find your five vulnerabilities and you can exploit one of them, it’s a win for them and a loss for us. It doesn’t matter if you protect you on the other four. We don’t get 80 percent grade for protecting the other four. We get 0 because it was able to find something and breach it.
So for now, the bad actor is most likely able to use it much better than the good people. That’s not a model constraint or model fault. It’s because the model doesn’t protect. Remember, the sensors protect. The sensors we apply around the perimeter protect. The sensor has to be smart enough to understand what the model is going to find. And that’s why the fact that we got this window of four to six weeks to test them, to understand them — we’re busy building defense techniques to make sure that as this tsunami of AI-based attacks starts to arrive, we have enough defense capability, which is still powered by AI, to give us that real-time response that we need.
kevin roose
Is there a sector of the economy that you’re most worried about when it comes to cybersecurity and the new capabilities of AI systems?
nikesh arora
The challenge always is, the companies which use technology where their core business is 95 percent something else and the 5 percent part is technologies — and you can take that to mean small businesses. You can take that to mean core industrial manufacturing output type businesses, where they’re not spending as much time thinking about the technology. They’re busy digging for gold or building infrastructure for something else.
kevin roose
Or hospitals.
nikesh arora
Exactly. So those people —
kevin roose
They use technology. So you’re worried about the nontech businesses —
nikesh arora
Yes.
kevin roose
That may not have as many resources or as many engineers working for them.
nikesh arora
And I’m not worried about financial institutions. They have more engineers than I do. So they will go rally against it. They’ll put the resources to work. And they’ve been protecting themselves for a very long time. They understand the implications of these things. It’s like poor doctor’s offices — you remember that there was a breach that happened, I think almost a year ago now or slightly more, of Change Healthcare, which caused a whole bunch of the entire physician ecosystem to come to a halt. And the physicians didn’t what to do about it.
casey newton
Hmm. For the moment, do you sort of breathe a sigh of relief that these models are not generally available, or do you think they could be released and it wouldn’t be that big of a deal?
nikesh arora
Well, they have been released, right? Both Opus 4.7 Cyber and OpenAI’s 5.5 have both been released with cyber capabilities and guardrails.
kevin roose
But not Mythos.
casey newton
Not Mythos.
nikesh arora
But Mythos has another unique property, which it perhaps goes towards your conversation about constraints, is that Mythos runs in ultra mode. Ultra mode is a compute-consumptive mode, which allows the model to persist for much longer than the flash mode that most models are released in. So if you’re —
kevin roose
So you’re saying it can just work for a lot longer —
nikesh arora
That’s right.
kevin roose
— spend a lot more compute —
nikesh arora
That’s right. That’s right. That’s right.
kevin roose
— than other models.
nikesh arora
The compute cost is from the persistence, perhaps, not from the capability. And the persistence allows the daisy-chaining to happen much more effectively because it’s trying different techniques, trying to see which one’s most likely to work. So that’s what causes the daisy-chaining to happen in a more effective fashion. So that’s why.
casey newton
So is it a good thing that the average person doesn’t have access to that right now?
nikesh arora
I think so. I think every company should have a chance to be able to fix these things in the meantime. But again, I don’t know who the average person is in this case. Is every company out there an average person? Then they should have access to it because they have to fix their stuff. You mean the average bad person?
casey newton
Basically. I mean, I’m just thinking about all of these cyber attacks that we’ve seen just over the past couple of weeks, and I’m assuming that they do not have access to a Mythos-level model. And so I’m just asking myself, well, what if they did?
nikesh arora
Yeah. Well, if they did, they’ll find a way to attack companies much faster, right? I don’t think the nature of the attacks change. I don’t think the nature of the outcomes change. Most likely, they will be used to leverage ransomware or, perhaps, cause economic harm if you’re looking at it from a nation state perspective. I think the entire fundamentals of how the bad actor industry works is not going to change. What it does change is the pace and the volume, perhaps, of attacks that are going to be made possible because the availability of these models.
casey newton
I want to talk a little bit about what, if anything, an average person can do here. I myself am the subject of an ongoing phishing attack, where —
nikesh arora
Someone must like you.
casey newton
I mean, I hope so. But basically, almost every day, somebody tries to get me to reset my X password from an email address that has nothing to do with x.com. And because I’m looking at my emails on the desktop, that’s very easy for me to see, and I’m not fooled. Congratulations. But —
kevin roose
That’s me. I’ve been trying to steal your bitcoin.
casey newton
Kevin, how could you? But I also believe that, within six months or a year, one of those emails is going to come in, and it’s just going to look way more convincing. It’s just going to figure out a way to trick me. And one of my frustrations with talking about cybersecurity in general is it tends to leave people with the sense of, well, everything’s really bad. Sorry. Good luck to you. Usually, we give people advice like, create a strong password and use multifactor authentication.
nikesh arora
That’s right.
casey newton
Is that good enough, or do people need to update the playbook?
nikesh arora
Look, I think one of the things — my frustration has always been that, if you think about it, we have much better cybersecurity solutions in the enterprise world than we do for the consumers. For example, if you had a corporate email and all the phishing attacks are coming to your corporate email or spam was coming to your corporate email, it’d be pretty good at sussing these out. Because the X email address that you talk about that you’re getting, which is not actually X, we see it in one customer, we’ll block it everywhere else. Now, the problem is the consumer doesn’t have any such gatekeepers because we’re effectively the gatekeepers of enterprise. But consumer world doesn’t have gatekeepers. The consumer gatekeepers are the email providers. The consumer gatekeepers are the telecom networks that give us — If you were getting an attack on your corporate mobile device and we were sitting in front of it, it won’t happen. But on our personal devices, we can all get spam. We can all get phished. We can all get all this stuff happen to us. So I think part of the frustration I have is that there are some consumer companies that need to implement better cyber controls for all of us consumers, which they’re not.
casey newton
Well, any particular controls come to mind that you’d like to see out there?
nikesh arora
I mean, think about the email, right? Are you telling me that — is it hard for the email provider to figure out that this is not an X email address? Like, we should — These same guys are building AI, right? These guys are building AI, which is just going to anticipate what we want and do it for us. So somebody just needs to pay attention to it.
casey newton
For what it’s worth, so this is my paid Google Workspace for my work account. And you’re absolutely right. It seems like a very simple classifier that Google makes to just be like, hmm, this probably isn’t coming from x.com.
kevin roose
How are your engineers feeling about all this? I imagine they’re working a lot these days. Are they excited because there’s this new set of tools available to them? Are they stressed out because all of a sudden, their workload just got five times bigger? What is the mood?
nikesh arora
Yes.
kevin roose
All of it.
nikesh arora
Look, think about it. If you’re a technologist, this is a phenomenal time to be doing this, the amount of opportunity to learn, the amount of opportunity to understand. Some of the people are fearful, like, how is this thing going to work? And you can find — I think every emotion you can think of is probably in every engineering team out there. We have 9,000-plus technical people. I think it’s not just the tool in front of us. I think it’s the uncertainty of what this holds in the next two or three years.
People are seeing OpenClaw being deployed. Now, OpenClaw is a scary thing from a security perspective. It’s going to take all your permissions, all your credentials, do all kinds of stuff for you. But it’s cool. So the early adopters are doing cool shit. I had dinner with somebody, came to my house, like, I got OpenClaw on my phone. It’s doing everything. I’ve given it a name. It’s called Zara. And it’s doing all the things I’m asking it to do.
And the guy sitting next to me was like, holy shit, that’s a security nightmare. You’re worried about your X post to change your password? You don’t need to change your password. OpenClaw is going to tweet on your behalf because it’s had a moment last night.
casey newton
Totally.
kevin roose
Yeah. And for all of my objectionable tweets over the years, I would like to just formally say that was my OpenClaw acting autonomously.
nikesh arora
There we go.
kevin roose
So are you personally running any of these insecure — like, are you running OpenClaw? Are you experimenting with this stuff just from, like, a “I need to understand the landscape” perspective?
nikesh arora
On a segregated device which has no connection to many of my things, which makes it totally useless, by the way. You can’t even book a meeting on my schedule because it does not have access to my schedule. It can’t respond to an email on my behalf because it doesn’t have access to my email. So I’m still using it the old-fashioned way, which is I’m using Gemini in the enterprise. I did do that. I took my earnings script, sent it to Gemini, and said, What do you think? two quarters ago. It says, are you trying to hide something? You’re too enthusiastic. You used the word momentum and excited much more than you normally use. I’m like, holy shit, that’s not bad.
So I had to tone it down.
kevin roose
Yeah. That’s very funny. Is it changing your hiring plans at all.
nikesh arora
Yes.
kevin roose
You employ thousands of cybersecurity engineers and researchers. You may need fewer of those people in the future or —
nikesh arora
No. I need more. I think this is the fallacy out there. The fallacy is that organizations are going to get 30 percent, 40 percent, 50 percent, 60 percent more productive from a development perspective and a testing perspective, so we need less people. The problem is, every technologist that you talk to has a feature request list which is longer than their arm. And typically, people have product roadmaps that are 6 to 12 months out. Why is that? Because they don’t have enough people or they cannot serialize something because it takes a lot of effort to get it done.
So I think the first thing that’s going to happen is, as we create more capacity, we’re going to try and fill the technological backlog and try and make that work. I do understand there are people out there — I’ll call it reshaping their technical organizations by creating capacities. Everybody who’s out there saying, I’m reducing my headcount by 7 percent or 15 percent or 20 percent, which you’re beginning to see recently, I think they’re just creating capacity. They’re saying, that capacity allows me to hire more people and make room for people that I need who have the newer skill set.
kevin roose
Hmm. They’re not just spending that salary money on tokens instead?
nikesh arora
Look, I think that the interesting part is — I was saying this earlier. I was speaking somewhere else. The part we don’t realize is that we’re dealing with the tsunami of a desire to transform. I think we’re in a decade-long transformation of business ahead of us. Imagine, you have a new technology. My CFO would never come and say, I want to use AI to transform my team. He wants to transform his team and see if he can do it much more efficiently, but he wants AI. My head of HR wants AI because she wants to create an AI interviewer, an AI assessor, instead of having humans do it.
So every function wants more AI to deploy. Now, the question is, where’s the money going to come from? It’s probably going to come from efficiency in those teams, those functions. So that’s what’s going to pay for the tokens.
casey newton
I have to say, I don’t think anyone wants to be interviewed by the AI assessor. That’s not a good vibe, you know?
kevin roose
I don’t know.
casey newton
Would you want to be interviewed for a job by a AI?
nikesh arora
I think AI is most likely going to be better at assessing my domain skills than a human being.
casey newton
Really?
nikesh arora
Yes. If you’re trying to hire a good coder, if you’re trying to hire somebody who knows agentic AI well, sitting and talking to them is not going to get me a better answer. If they can sit and code and deploy OpenClaw in front of me — I literally have done that interview. It’s like a guy says, well, I’m really conversant with AI. I’m like, really? That’s cool. What have you done? He’s like, well, I built myself an agent. And I’m like, show me. It’s like, what do you mean? I’m like, you’re on Zoom. Show me. Then you see this bizarre, simplistic — like, oh, I got it make a shopping list from the recipe I saw. Like, dude —
kevin roose
It’s an AI girlfriend. It’s like, actually, I shouldn’t show you this.
nikesh arora
That could be true.
kevin roose
Yeah. So now we have an HR problem. Well, Nikesh, thanks so much for coming in. Really great to talk to you. And good luck out there.
casey newton
Fascinating.
nikesh arora
Thank you, Kevin.
kevin roose
Please tell Mythos to spare our families in the coming uprising.
(FUTURISTIC MUSIC)
casey newton
When we come back, it’s time for the Hot Mess Express.
(FUTURISTIC MUSIC)
kevin roose
Well, Casey, we’ve got a train to catch today. The Hot Mess Express is here.
(futuristic music)
Hot Mess Express.
(FUTURISTIC MUSIC)
casey newton
The Hot Mess Express is, of course, our segment where we take a look at the various calamities befalling people in and around the tech industry and, at the end of discussing them, decide, what kind of mess was this?
kevin roose
What’s pulling up to the station today?
casey newton
Well, let’s see what’s first here on the tracks. (TRAIN HORN)
kevin roose
You just love the sound effect.
casey newton
Our first story today comes from The Verge. Oh, and this is truly the end of an era. Venmo is starting to test a big redesign of its app. And as part of the changes, Kevin, it will be implementing a major new privacy feature. The onboarding process for new users will set their posts to only be viewable by their friends by default, instead of being public. And this is very sad for me, because for years now, every time I’ve opened up Venmo to pay a friend, I’ve seen a recent transaction from someone I hooked up with once in 2016. And the thought that other people aren’t going to have that experience makes me really sad.
kevin roose
So as a nosy person who loves to gossip, I am sad about this story because it was always fun to see which of your random phone contacts had been paying their fractional share of the rent or back for dinner. People put various jokey things on their transactions — illicit drug deal, foreign arms trade, et cetera. And it’s just sad that we won’t get to experience that.
casey newton
Yeah. Also, the public-by-default Venmo transactions gave us many great stories over the years, including Joe Biden’s secret Venmo, which was a BuzzFeed story. JD Vance had a public Venmo that Wired reported on. Matt Gaetz’s Venmo payments were part of a federal inquiry into his payments to women, according to The New York Times. So I guess all of us investigative reporters are going to have to find a new, easy way of writing a story, Kevin.
kevin roose
Yeah. Now the only baffling security breach from these apps is that Telegram still does notify you when one of your phone contacts joins. And I always love to screenshot that and send it to people and be like, crypto or drugs? What is it this week?
casey newton
The only two possible answers. So what kind of mess is this Venmo mess?
kevin roose
This is unfortunately a cleanup, not a mess. This used to be a very hot mess. And now, belatedly, it is getting cleaned up.
casey newton
Fair enough. RIP.
(TRAIN HORN) Let’s see what else is coming down the tracks. Oh. Well, this was interesting, Kevin and ties in closely to something that you’ve written about recently. Amazon has started to widely deploy its in-house MeshClaw product in recent weeks, which allows employees to create AI agents that can connect to workplace software and carry out tasks on a user’s behalf. But some employees are saying that colleagues are using the software to automate additional, unnecessary AI activity to increase their consumption of tokens, which will then, of course, make them look better to their bosses. So did we see that one coming or what?
kevin roose
Yes. I believe you invoked Goodhart’s Law about what happens when a target becomes a measure — or a measure becomes a target.
casey newton
When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to become a good measure — is, of course, Goodhart’s Law.
kevin roose
Thank you so much for that. Yes. And I imagine that at the famously frugal Amazon, they are loving this era of people just spending a bunch of random tokens to move up the leaderboard.
casey newton
Here’s the thing. I’ve talked to a lot of Amazon employees over the years. Tokens are the only thing at that company that is free. You want a Diet Coke from the vending machine? Get out your wallet, OK? So these guys finally find something free, and now they’re getting in trouble.
kevin roose
Yeah. The good news is they have unlimited tokens. The bad news is they can only use them on MeshClaw.
casey newton
Yeah. I’m going to say that this is actually a “hot mesh.” That’s what kind of mess this is.
kevin roose
Very good.
casey newton
All right,
(TRAIN HORN)
Next up, Kevin, this comes to us from 404 Media. And boy, did I see this clip in about 14 different places over the past week. Students boo commencement speaker after she calls AI, quote, “the next Industrial Revolution.” You see this one?
kevin roose
Yes.
casey newton
Yeah. So May 8, commencement speaker Gloria Caulfield, who’s the vice president of strategic alliances at Tavistock group, told graduates of the University of Central Florida’s College of Arts and Humanities and Nicholson School of Communication that AI is the next Industrial Revolution. She was met with thousands of booing graduates. And someone in the crowd, Kevin, yelled, AI sucks. So what did you make of this commencement moment?
kevin roose
Here’s my thing. Students are allowed to feel however they want about AI. But if you boo the commencement speaker for suggesting that AI is a big deal, I want to see your ChatGPT history. If you have used AI to write your exams, to help you with your problem sets, in any way for your academic work, you are not allowed to boo it at commencement. That is my rule.
casey newton
I don’t know. I think these students were fine to boo. Ms. Caulfield was, after all, addressing the College of the Arts and Humanities, who, I’m guessing, is probably not the group of students at the university that are most excited to see AI come into their lives.
kevin roose
So here’s the thing that I’ll say that is sincere. I think people are radically underestimating how mobilized young people are against AI right now. I see this every time I go to a college to talk to students. There’s a small group of them who are running OpenClaws and very excited. And, like, 80 percent of them are like, I hate this.
casey newton
Yeah. So, look, if you have to give a commencement speech within the next few months, a highly relatable situation that many of our listeners will be in, now you know, careful how you talk about AI.
(TRAIN HORN)
OK. Kevin, our next story comes to us from the good folks at Variety. Dua Lipa has filed a $15-million lawsuit against Samsung for using her face to sell TVs. And this one is honestly pretty incredible. Samsung has apparently used Dua Lipa’s image on the cardboard packaging of its TVs starting last year. When Ms. Lipa became aware of it, she demanded that the company stop using her image and apparently could not get through to anyone at Samsung.
So — Samsung finally responds on Monday and said this was all the fault of some third-party content partner. And Samsung said, “We have great respect for Ms. Lipa and the intellectual property of all artists,” and they are actively seeking and remain open to a constructive resolution with Ms. Lipa’s team. Well, it sounds like a constructive resolution could be taking her face off the packaging and paying her $15 million. And I understand her concern, because the thing that people always forget about Samsung products is that they do explode when you least expect them. There was, of course, the famous series of explosions related to their phones. So if I see my face on a Samsung TV, I’m thinking, I do not want to be the literal face of an exploding piece of hardware.
kevin roose
Yeah. What kind of mess is this?
casey newton
This is a true hot mess because the TV could have exploded.
(TRAIN HORN)
Now — here, you want to read one?
kevin roose
OK.
All right. This next one comes to us from our colleagues at The New York Times. eBay rejects GameStop’s $55-billion takeover bid. Last week, GameStop offered $55 billion to eBay in an unsolicited takeover attempt. According to some interviews, they appeared not to have $55 billion, which would put a damper on their plans. This week, eBay officially said no to the GameStop offer, calling it, quote, “neither credible nor attractive,” which is also what our last iTunes review of this podcast said.
casey newton
And there you have it. This one is an interesting story from the world of what I like to call “companies that I can’t believe still exist.” I don’t know what’s happening on eBay. I don’t what’s happening at GameStop. But what I don’t know is these companies probably don’t belong together, Kevin.
kevin roose
Yeah. I find this fascinating because it is just like, the internet-brained CEO of GameStop. He’s this guy, Ryan Cohen, who sort of rose to prominence during the meme stock mania of 2020 and 2021. And now you can just do whatever you want. If you’re the CEO of a company, you can just say, we’re going to buy a company that’s five times bigger than us. How? Shame on you for asking.
casey newton
Is it unreasonable, given their history, to expect that they could have announced this, and GameStop’s stock could have gone through the roof, and all of a sudden, they have had $55 billion to buy eBay?
kevin roose
Yeah.
casey newton
But that didn’t happen.
kevin roose
Well, if they had done this deal in typical GameStop fashion, they would have offered about half of what the market value for eBay was because it’s used and probably doesn’t even work on your console anymore.
casey newton
I like jokes that you’ll only get if you have returned a video game to GameStop. It’s kind of a —
kevin roose
(LAUGHS): Listen, for our younger listeners, there used to be a time when you could walk into GameStop with a box of old video games that you wanted to get rid of, and they would offer you between $0.50 and $1 for each video game.
casey newton
All right. This is the sort of mess where we’re explaining the joke.
(TRAIN HORN) OK. So we’ve got a few more items, Kevin. So Shein and Temu are fighting it out in UK courts, Kevin, as Shein has accused Temu of, quote, “astonishing levels of copyright infringement.” And Temu accused Shein of waging, quote, “an aggressive and relentless battle using copyright allegations to undermine competition.” This comes to us from Bloomberg. And the whole trial revolves around thousands of photographs that Shein says are from its website. According to Shein’s lawyers. Temu sold identical clothing items using the same images and is seeking to piggyback off Shein’s own investment in building up its supply chain and training and upskilling suppliers. What do you make of this fight?
kevin roose
The fast fashion brands are fighting.
casey newton
They’re fighting.
kevin roose
There’s no one I’m rooting for in this fight. I’ve never bought an item of clothing from either of them. But it is very funny that two of the brands who have made their entire existence ripping off the clothing from more established purveyors are now fighting each other about which one’s ripping off the other one.
casey newton
Yeah. Truly a situation where — is there a way they both could lose and learn a hard lesson about intellectual property?
kevin roose
Yes.
casey newton
We’re rooting for them. (TRAIN HORN)
Next up. Oh, favorite story of the week, Kevin, and I imagine you heard about this one. People are seriously pissed that Grindr outed them with its latest Madonna advert. Did this happen to you?
kevin roose
No.
casey newton
OK. So this issue stems from the fact that Madonna has been doing this big campaign inside of Grindr to promote her upcoming album, “Confessions on a Dance Floor II,” which is a concept album about a 68-year-old woman who still wants to be at a nightclub after midnight. And she’s advertising on Grindr. And apparently, over the past week, when you opened up Grindr, even if you had your phone volume turned off, you would hear a sound of Madonna saying loudly, “Hi, Grindr. It’s mother.”
kevin roose
No.
casey newton
Which, first of all, it’s grandmother. Sorry. Second of all, apparently, people who are not out to their families were opening Grindr at the dinner table, which — you’re already putting yourself in harm’s way there, maybe. But the last thing they expected was to have Madonna being like, hey, look at this guy. He’s on Grindr right now — so truly one of the most misconceived ad campaigns in recent history.
kevin roose
Wow. That’s so wild. It’s like if they put U2’s “Songs of Innocence” on your phone, but it just outed you to your family.
casey newton
Yeah. The song was “You’re Gay.” That was the song. Here’s the thing. This is a dangerous mess. It is not always safe for people to be outed to people in their immediate surroundings. So shame on Grindr. They really should have known better.
kevin roose
Yes. Push notifications should be illegal. (TRAIN HORN)
casey newton
All right. And one more car coming down the train tracks here, Kevin. This is from the Elon OpenAI trial this week. Sam Altman was on the witness stand Tuesday and testified that at one point, Elon thought he should run OpenAI. Sam asked him, hey, what do you think would happen to the company if you died? And according to Sam, Elon replied, I haven’t thought about it a ton, but maybe control should pass to my children?
kevin roose
Question mark, question mark.
casey newton
Question mark, question mark. So what do you think — well, let me just ask it this way. Do you think we would be better off if OpenAI was a hereditary monarchy controlled by the Musk clan?
kevin roose
I do. I think that really is the — you know, we always talk about, what is the ideal governance structure for AGI? I think we can all agree that it would be best if Elon’s 27 children were involved somehow.
casey newton
Yeah. Or I don’t know. They pick one at random. One is probably, I don’t know, 11 years old and rides a skateboard around town. They’re like, all right, kid. You run AGI now. Best of luck. So yeah, that continues to be a legal mess.
kevin roose
Yeah. The whole trial has just been fascinating to me, less because I care about the actual legal issue on trial, and more because it has just produced all these amazing and incriminating files from the early days of OpenAI, including all of their texts and emails and messy dramas. I live for it.
casey newton
Yeah. Look, it’s very hard to run a successful company without a lot of executives saying a bunch of really stupid things and writing them down. We just see it over and over again. Yeah. So let that be a lesson to us.
kevin roose
Yep. Hot Mess.
(TRAIN HORN)
And that is it for the Hot Mess Express. Thank you to all of this week’s passengers, and best of luck with your messes.
casey newton
Try to stay on the right side of the tracks.
(FUTURISTIC MUSIC)
Hey, before we go — one request. We want to hear what it’s like for people who are undergoing major career changes in response to AI. So, for example, if you have recently left a computer or desk job to do something more manual, like HVAC installation or tree trimming, we would love to hear how it’s going. So anything in that realm, please send us an email. We would love for you to share your story with our audience. Our email, again, of course, is hardfork@nytimes.com. Tell us about your career shift and why you’re making the change.
“Hard Fork” is produced by Whitney Jones and Rachel Cohn. We’re edited by Vjeran Pavic. We’re fact checked by Caitlin Love. Today’s show was engineered by Chris Wood. Original music by Elisheba Ittoop, Rowan Niemisto, and Dan Powell. Video production by Jake Nichol and Chris Schott. You can watch this whole episode on YouTube at youtube.com/hardfork. Special thanks to Paula Szuchman, Pui-Wing Tam, and Dahlia Haddad. You can email us at hardfork@nytimes.com with what you would do with Mythos if you could.
(quirky, futuristic music)