alt Hacker NewsMaybe this is naivety on my part, but how would they possibly be able to run this airgapped? This is a massive AI swarm, requiring huge amounts of compute to run. This compute is from data centers that are shared with other companies (this is by law as I understand). These machines must be accessed from afar. Unless someone can correct me?
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> ...how would they possibly be able to run this airgapped?
A logical airgap that the tool would have to reconfigure the DC's networking infrastructure to overcome [0] would be for the DC staff to put the machines running the tools under test on a VLAN that doesn't have access to anything other than computers on the VLAN. Try to cross over into some other subnet/VLAN or reach out to the Internet, your packets get dropped and/or rejected. It doesn't matter if you change your IP or MAC addresses because the infrastructure only cares about what VLAN your traffic comes from. If you attempt to tag your traffic to avoid this, the infrastructure drops it on the floor because it does the VLAN tagging.
As far as the possibility of physical airgaps, how do you imagine that AWS's Top Secret regions work?
The truth of the matter is that neither OpenAI nor Anthropic wanted to actually isolate this stuff. Their conduct doesn't look like what you'd expect from people who believe that they're working on something so dangerous that it could plausibly wipe out all of humanity.
[0] ...and if the workloads running on client hardware are in a position to be able to attempt to reconfigure the DC's networking infrastructure, someone done fucked up...
Management interfaces can exist without routing/forwarding to the internet. A machine being colocated doesn't mean it has to be on the same network.