Unison_x

🚨🇺🇸 FEDERAL JUDGE BLOCKS PENTAGON ORDER BRANDING ANTHROPIC A NATIONAL SECURITY RISK A major win for the AI lab. Judge Rita Lin ruled the Pentagon likely violated the law and retaliated against Anthropic for speaking publicly about how it wanted its technology used. The dispute: Defense officials wanted Anthropic to allow Claude for "any lawful purpose." Anthropic refused to permit mass domestic surveillance or fully autonomous weapons. The Pentagon responded by labeling them a "supply chain risk" alongside foreign adversaries. Judge Lin: "Nothing in the governing statute supports the Orwellian notion that an American company may be branded a potential adversary and saboteur of the U.S. for expressing disagreement with the government." The military has been using Claude throughout Operation Epic Fury for intelligence assessments, target identification, and battle simulations. They designated the company a threat while actively relying on their technology... Source: Washington Post

Software horror: litellm PyPI supply chain attack. Simple `pip install litellm` was enough to exfiltrate SSH keys, AWS/GCP/Azure creds, Kubernetes configs, git credentials, env vars (all your API keys), shell history, crypto wallets, SSL private keys, CI/CD secrets, database passwords. LiteLLM itself has 97 million downloads per month which is already terrible, but much worse, the contagion spreads to any project that depends on litellm. For example, if you did `pip install dspy` (which depended on litellm>=1.64.0), you'd also be pwnd. Same for any other large project that depended on litellm. Afaict the poisoned version was up for only less than ~1 hour. The attack had a bug which led to its discovery - Callum McMahon was using an MCP plugin inside Cursor that pulled in litellm as a transitive dependency. When litellm 1.82.8 installed, their machine ran out of RAM and crashed. So if the attacker didn't vibe code this attack it could have been undetected for many days or weeks. Supply chain attacks like this are basically the scariest thing imaginable in modern software. Every time you install any depedency you could be pulling in a poisoned package anywhere deep inside its entire depedency tree. This is especially risky with large projects that might have lots and lots of dependencies. The credentials that do get stolen in each attack can then be used to take over more accounts and compromise more packages. Classical software engineering would have you believe that dependencies are good (we're building pyramids from bricks), but imo this has to be re-evaluated, and it's why I've been so growingly averse to them, preferring to use LLMs to "yoink" functionality when it's simple enough and possible.