Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
The coming AI security crisis (and what to do about it) | Sander Schulhoff
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I found some major problems with the AI security industry. AI guardrails do not work. I'm gonna say that one more time. Guardrails do not work. If someone's determined enough to trick GPT-5, they're gonna deal with that guardrail. No problem. When these guardrails providers say we catch everything, that's a complete lie. I asked Alex Kamaroski, who's also really big in this topic, the way he put it, the only reason there hasn't been a massive attack yet is how early the adoption is, not because it's secure. You can patch a bug, but you can't patch a brain. If you find some bug in your software and you go and patch it, you can be maybe 99.99% sure that bug is solved. Try to do that in your AI system. You can be 99.99% sure that the problem is still there. It makes me think about just the alignment problem. You gotta keep this God in a box. Not only do you have a God in the box, but that God is angry and that God's malicious. That God wants to hurt you. Can we control that malicious AI and make it useful to us and make sure nothing bad happens? Today, my guest is Standard Shulhoff. This is a really important and serious conversation and you'll soon see why. Sanders is a leading researcher in the field of adversarial robustness, which is basically the art and science of getting AI systems to do things that they should not do, like telling you how to build a bomb, changing things in your company database or emailing bad guys all of your company's internal secrets. He runs what was the first and is now the biggest AI Red teaming competition. He works with the leading AI labs on their own model defenses. He teaches the leading course on AI Red teaming in AI security and through all of this has a really unique lens into the state of the art in AI. What Sanders shares in this conversation is likely to cause quite a stir. That essentially all the AI systems that we use day to day are open to being tricked to do things that they shouldn't do through prompt injection attacks and jail breaks and that there really isn't a solution to this problem
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