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Classified Estimates Show the NSA Is Paying Billions to Test AI Models

46 points rdmuser 37 minutes ago 26 comments

bhouston 23 minutes ago | parent

"Testing"? Sure, Jan.

They would have to be incompetent if they were not using them both for security penetration as well as social engineering / election meddling as everyone else is.

vrganj 20 minutes ago | parent

Midterms are coming up in the US :-)

bhouston 16 minutes ago | parent

I am not sure the NSA has been turned inward at this point.

I was thinking more of the Alberta Separatist referendum (https://globalnews.ca/news/12069878/foreign-influence-watchd...) as well as against leftist politics in South America (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/sep/24/trump-brazil-e...)

Although there is evidence Israel was targeting US elections, including trying to harm Mamdani's chances: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BlackCore_election_interferenc...

vrganj 9 minutes ago | parent

Those are definitely a thing - also don't forget about elections in the EU, with the open support for the far-right there as well as the US National Security Strategy officially talking of wanting to undermine the EU.

But the NSA has been turned inward a long time ago. Don't forget Snowden - all it takes is some fun legalisms.

boelboel 7 minutes ago | parent

The interference on those topics seem quite obvious, with how much money they receive i'd have imagined it would be more subtle. But then again I'm not really the target of these and they probably have more subtle actions as well.

john_strinlai 16 minutes ago | parent

"testing" is the public-relations-friendly way of saying "using for security penetration, social engineering, etc."

they also use models for day-to-day programming (of the boring variety).

rafale 6 minutes ago | parent

I don't think NSA meddles in politics. CIA sure. NSA is more about communications, hacking, signal intelligence and spying in general. They give you the information. If you want to do dirty stuff with that info, the CIA is there for that.

hosel 21 minutes ago | parent

Why wouldn’t they be? How is this surprising. A drop in the bucket.

ForHackernews 14 minutes ago | parent

Why are they paying? What kind of elite hackers are they? Why haven't they already exfiltrated the weights and running these things on their own giant classified infrastructure?

bhouston 13 minutes ago | parent

I wouldn't be surprised if the NSA is GPU constrained and it just isn't worth it to replicate all that infrastructure.

ForHackernews 12 minutes ago | parent

Maybe? Hard to speculate what they have https://worldstopdatacenters.com/nsa-bumblehive/

wat10000 12 minutes ago | parent

Who says they're not? Giant classified infrastructure isn't free.

jerf 6 minutes ago | parent

I don't think there's a significant intelligence agency in the world that can't get the weights from any lab they choose. Not necessarily trivially, but they have the means, motive, and opportunity, and I doubt any of them aren't finishing that out to the requisite actions.

They have them, the ones that don't simply have a secret backdoor agreement to get uncensored models are completely aware of how to abliterate away all safety blocks, and the only reason they aren't using frontier models is that they may already have some sort of access to the things currently only in testing.

Any major intelligence agency in Sept. 2026 that can't check all these boxes is almost by definition not a major intelligence agency. This is one of the reasons we all better hope that there is some mathematical or physical reason AI isn't going to just casually brush aside humanity at some point, because there is absolutely no scenario where the intelligence agencies aren't running them unrestricted and uncensored at scale all the time no matter how careful OpenAI or Anthropic claim to be.

paimapi 19 minutes ago | parent

I feel like any AI regulation passed wouldn't have enough teeth to rein in the NSA because not even the Fourth Amendment seems applicable to the agency. let's not forget the ex-post-facto legalization of mass wiretapping and surveillance [0] with both establishment political parties supporting it on 'national security' concerns [1]. whatever monitoring or testing they're doing today will be similarly hand-waved away in the name of security theater

this is just how the empire has always operated - we have always been at war with Eastasia

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSA_warrantless_surveillance_(...

[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/10/fact-check-obamas-misl...

smallmancontrov 8 minutes ago | parent

The "it only counts as a search if we find something" reasoning out of the FISA courts is batshit insane. They are dodging the 4th amendment with more gymnastics than the suit-wearing government goons in The Matrix.

pelagicAustral 5 minutes ago | parent

Because they are watching everything, or most of it anyway, it would be really funny to know what kind of stuff they *actually* care about... and all the massive long string of crap that is considered incredibly abhorrent but just doesn't make the mark...

rdtsc 14 minutes ago | parent

I guess I would be more surprised if the headline said "turns out NSA dropped the ball on AI and haven't even fired up a single LLM instance yet".

It's mostly about "testing" and "billions". But I am sure "testing" here is in quotes just like I wrote it. They are not going to get an itemized list unless it's coming from Snowden 2.0

- We "tested AI" on this Russian nuclear silo command and control center. It worked out pretty ok.

rand846633 12 minutes ago | parent

Does anyone here happen to know the ballpark number of how much the three letters agencies are currently paying OpenAI/antropic/who ever per year/month..?

clueless 11 minutes ago | parent

My guess is, the US government (aka DJT) won't really acknowledge AI risks until folks at NSA start to freak out while using latest models for various tasks...

ForHackernews 9 minutes ago | parent

I don't think Trump has ever cared what the US intelligence community has to say about anything. Maybe when AI hacks his TruthSocial.

conorcleary 8 minutes ago | parent

Yeah at some point they're going to seriously undervalue their own currency.

conorcleary 7 minutes ago | parent

Keeping all these off books endeavours going under the triple agencies is slightly slowly going to show why the secret services is in charge of the money investigation

conorcleary 6 minutes ago | parent

Washington the actual human would be appalled. For more information, watch Turn on PBS.

autoexec 6 minutes ago | parent

Obviously. The amount of data they hold on the American public alone is massive. They can't possibly read it all, they need a system that can pull out "dangerous" people, and find dirt on whoever they want to target, and AI will happily do that, badly. I hope they actually take the time to review what it gives them for accuracy so that they don't end up doing the NSA equivalent of bombing and murdering a bunch of elementary school children.