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

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rrdmuser about 2 hours ago 60 commentsRead Article on washingtonsun.com

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paimapi•about 2 hours ago

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...

forshaper•about 1 hour ago

Previously it was a little reassuring to understand that the Eye of Sauron required some human analyst to actually look at your data.

wmf•about 1 hour ago

Humans seem like the weakest link in surveillance to me. Recent Flock data confirms this.

aetch•22 minutes ago

Flock is a private company and not run by government employees

bigyabai•about 1 hour ago

Humans provide accountability. The Minab school attack confirms this.

brendoelfrendo•30 minutes ago

Well, they are, but if a surveillance state exists, then one thing that will save the ordinary citizen from its gaze is that humans have a limited amount of attention. A massive intelligence complex full of analysts can only process a fraction of the intelligence that a fleet of AI agents can handle. So now you have the worst of both worlds: the massive capabilities of modern AI at the behest of humans who have shown they can't be responsible with that capability.

iririririr•25 minutes ago

as much so, you will never get a snowdenLLM hero now.

pelagicAustral•about 2 hours ago

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...

gradus_ad•about 1 hour ago

They actively care about (as in, act on in realtime) serious criminal activity. But I suspect they keep the legal yet embarrassing stuff in their back pocket for blackmail purposes.

red-iron-pine•about 1 hour ago

who is they? the NSA is a military organization headed by a general or admiral, which handles codebreaking and networks security.

the FBI acts on and handles cybercrime and/or regular crime.

the NSA can absolutely come up with tools that they then share with other parts of the USG, in the same way that the Army can develop the M-16 and allow police departments to use it, but ultimately it's law enforcement pulling the trigger.

willmadden•about 1 hour ago

Then why haven't they caught all of the obvious foreign fraud rings that people on youtube keep uncovering? It's egregious. You would think with their total data access, AI, and Utah datacenter they could at least create a target list for the FBI.

pixl97•about 1 hour ago

Hoovering up as many informational secrets as they can is likely one of their biggest businesses. Why have some company being the only ones that hold the recepie for some super strong secret steel when you can have it in your back pocket too.

smallmancontrov•about 2 hours ago

The "it only counts as a search if we find something" reasoning out of the FISA courts is batshit insane, dodging the 4th Amendment like bullets in The Matrix.

jimz•10 minutes ago

[delayed]

rdtsc•about 2 hours ago

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.

mkatx•about 1 hour ago

> Snowden 2.0

"NSA ... AI Models"

bhouston•about 2 hours ago

"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•about 2 hours ago

Midterms are coming up in the US :-)

bhouston•about 2 hours ago

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...

786562354238•about 1 hour ago

Why would anybody want to harm the chances of a Hamas supporter?

vrganj•about 2 hours ago

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.

rafale•about 2 hours ago

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.

MSFT_Edging•about 2 hours ago

CIA manipulates foreign elections which in turn gets their lackeys in office that go on to manipulate domestic elections.

NSA collects who you're voting for and everything else you've ever said online in case they need to invent a reason to black-site you.

FBI convinces the autistic son of your Pakistani neighbors down the street his life only has meaning if he becomes a Jihadist.

jawiggins•about 1 hour ago

An underappreciated aspect of LLMs is how good they are at zero-shot classification. I'd expect this is extremely good at monitoring communications streams, particularly in foreign languages.

hosel•about 2 hours ago

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

ForHackernews•about 2 hours ago

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?

jerf•about 2 hours ago

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.

pixl97•about 1 hour ago

Anthropic won't give them out, hence why they are considered a supply chain risk by the USG.

OpenAI, they are huge Maga supporters, I'm sure Trump has dumped massive piles of black budget money on them for unfiltered models.

SOTA AI is a weapon. It's likely already on the list of the most powerful weapons ever made and only getting more effective.

bhouston•about 2 hours ago

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

ForHackernews•about 2 hours ago

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

wat10000•about 2 hours ago

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

charcircuit•about 1 hour ago

Because they have to follow the law.

vjvjvjvjghv•35 minutes ago

What do they test? In general, I don't understand the whole "AI safety" stuff. What are the scenarios we need to be protected from and how is this going to be accomplished?

mattmcal•2 minutes ago

I ask myself this a lot. It took decades of sustained malfeasance, real-world case studies, and lobbying for the EPA and OSHA to be established, largely against the wishes of the businesses they regulate. Today, it is primarily the AI businesses themselves asking for regulation on the basis of as-of-yet largely hypothetical risks, rather than ordinary citizens seeking protection from tangible negligence---and the government is eager to accommodate. I think few, if any, authentic anti-AI activists have a taxpayer-funded "safety testing" regime as their end goal.

autoexec•about 2 hours ago

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 just 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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Minab_school_attack

The NSA aren't the only ones with massive troves of very personal data on large numbers of people. Many companies are excited to use AI to help them use all of that information to their maximum advantage and you can bet that they won't care about spending the time/money on perfect accuracy as long as over the long run they get positive results.

pixl97•43 minutes ago

Any system that can be used to pick those that stand out, will also be indiscriminately used to beat down any nail that sticks up higher than the rest with full intention of doing so by its operator.

Collateral damage is just the cost of doing business for them.

scottyah•2 minutes ago

That's not remotely true, you're projecting how you would abuse power. Not everyone is as evil-minded, and I hope they continue to do a great job at keeping your ilk out of the organization.

andreapaiola•7 minutes ago

Ok, I rewatch Person of Interest

rand846633•about 2 hours ago

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..?

alienbaby•about 2 hours ago

'billions' . I think the exact estimates are classified. https://www.washingtonsun.com/technology/classified-estimate...

red-iron-pine•42 minutes ago

OSINT bot trolling for scraps :/

9cb14c1ec0•37 minutes ago

Testing, yea right. No doubt they have gone on an epic AI assisted hacking spree. Gotten get persistence in all the things before vulnerabilities start getting patched.

clueless•about 2 hours ago

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•about 2 hours ago

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

228487•about 2 hours ago

His carefully crafted public persona. For all we know, he was a long con by the deep state, played a Russian agent since the 1980s, cooperated with Epstein on Iran Contra [1], backstabbed Epstein in the early 2000s and went on to be president twice.

Twice by lying to MAGA about his true intentions, which are fundamentally neocon just like Musk's and Thiel's. They all lie about being libertarians and anti-deep-state.

[1] He was on a boat with Robert Maxwell and several Iran Contra folks around 1990.

conorcleary•about 2 hours ago

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

conorcleary•about 2 hours ago

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•about 2 hours ago

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

passive•10 minutes ago

I don't think it's properly understood how directly Trump's administration is using taxpayer money to inflate the AI bubble. This is a small part of that.

As a means to grift directly, but also for leverage over the tech industry, and possibly the entire economy.

People hate data centers, but if they think AI regulation will crash the economy, will they vote Trump?

binlog•about 2 hours ago

Willing to bet any amount of money that these testing contracts are going to companies that the Trump family has invested in.

an0malous•6 minutes ago

You have a misunderstanding about who the boss is. They’re more likely to be going to Israeli companies.

OutOfHere•about 1 hour ago

This should remind us why it is inappropriate to pay a dollar more in taxes than you absolutely minimally have to by any means necessary. A fraction from every dollar you pay goes toward taking away your rights. You pay to have yourself oppressed.

I will note here two words that the NSA really likes to monitor across all devices: Trump, Monero.

ck2•about 1 hour ago

the day NSA cracks AES the world is going to get soooo weird

I wonder how long it takes to decrypt 20 years worth of stored internet traffic

day per year? week? certainly not a month per year

everyone is focused on "AI" but there have been some significant quantum computer advancements

k4rli•about 1 hour ago

Surely not impossible for them to have already cracked it.

Also not impossible that they have had much better models than OAI/Anthropic flagships for years, and we're only being dripfed upgrades to subpar ones. Improbable but possible.