60 Minutes Producer ⏱️ Tweets my own.
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Graham Messick retweeted
We are announcing three new discoveries in mathematics, computer science, and physics about harmonic analysis, complexity theory, and quantum field theory.
openai.com/index/building-sc…
Graham Messick retweeted
I am also optimistic that AI/cyber will be defense-friendly after things stabilize, but before that it will be offense-friendly, which creates a lot of dynamics that are difficult to model:
1. For any existing or new vulnerabilities discovered by governments and other offensive actors, there will be an incentive to exploit them quickly, rather than sit on them quietly, because they will anticipate that the defender will find the vulnerability and patch it much faster than before.
2. The surface area of cyber is very broad, and finding vulnerabilities is different from fixing them, which is also different from fixing them without also introducing new, even subtler security problems into the code.
3. We do not know how high the ceiling for subtle bugs might be. Do there exist vulnerabilities that were simply too hard for humans to find or laborious to exploit? How many vulnerabilities? How long will they persist? We are now getting to the point where we have to reason about systems with quasi-superhuman cognitive performance. This is hard! Counter-intuitive things will happen.
4. There are some threats such as hardware vulnerabilities or new discoveries in cryptography where the offense/defense dynamics could be importantly different from traditional cyber.
There was always going to be some tumult as models gained cyber capabilities. This was by far the easiest major novel AI risk to project, in broad terms. It may be true that broad and rapid diffusion is the optimal path forward; that outcome wouldn’t surprise me that much. But it could also be true that, given the offense-favoring dynamics at first and the uncertainties I have described, it’ll be optimal to slow diffusion. And regardless of whether it is optimal to do so, I would expect substantial political pressure to “do something” if the cyber events are sufficiently damaging or disruptive.
The optimal outcome is one where we diffuse fast and comprehensively enough to find and fix vulnerabilities while also not causing too much tumult. Maybe we are striking the balance effectively now, as a global industry! I hope so. But I also hope everyone is attentive and ready to update their beliefs/strategies as we gather empirical data. I’m skeptical of anyone who seems confident here in either direction.
Near as I can tell, despite a lot of scary potential, nothing truly catastrophic has happened yet (the water is running; the lights are on, no cataclysmic data breaches I am aware of). I hope that continues to be the case. I do agree with the AI risk skeptics that there is a lot of catastrophizing on X about this, and the current attacks, while significant, seem well within the range of things we can bounce back from.
If things continue at this level of severity, I feel pretty good about our situation with AI/cyber. But if it gets noticeably worse and seems to be on a trend of getting even more severe, which is my expectation, we could be in for trouble. Maybe society can digest way more cyberattacks than I had apprehended. Maybe “cybersecurity is not very important” as the famous saying/paper goes. I’m very much open to being pleasantly surprised.
yeah as others have said, two different trends around AI + cyber are happening at the same time and its confusing:
AI helping cybersecurity situation:
- 5.6 sol (yay daybreak) discovering this PHP vulnerability that was already there so people can patch it (of course can be worse in short term while lots of systems go unpatched, and also long tail of legacy unpatched systems)
AI not helping cybersecurity situation:
- lots of AI powered automated cyberattacks (e.g. railway and opencode hacks)
Vulnerability discovery probably on average favors defenders in the medium term. Automating cyber operations will help attackers a lot though, and probably enough to overwhelm positive effects on the former (every random community bank or old person is not gonna have AI swarms protecting them against AI swarm attacks). Of course the cycle of patching vulnerabilities is becoming a lot harder because of how fast automated cyberattacks are.
Also an aside on AI spear fishing in particular -
Literally today I had one of those fake tech crunch reporters reach out over DMs and the fake was pretty convincing (thousands of followers, tweets and photos about tech crunch, but when I googled became clear person didn't exist).
People who are not used to the idea that people can lie in convincing ways on the internet are going to get exploited over and over again and its gonna be bad (and also generally make it way harder to have good interactions with humans you don't know online).
Graham Messick retweeted
New on our Frontier Red Team blog: using Claude to formally verify software at large scale.
Formal verification can prove that code is free of certain bugs, but historically it has only been feasible for small codebases (or required a lot of expert time).
With AI models, however, this is beginning to change. In collaboration with @theoremlabs, we used Claude to prove security properties in over one hundred real-world open-source libraries over the span of a few weeks.
Read our research in full here: anthropic.com/research/forma…
Graham Messick retweeted
The most important file in today's Pentagon UFO release isn't from the 1950s. It's from this June.
Two federal special agents at a sensitive national security site out West watched a matte black triangle, roughly 13 to 15 feet across, rise straight up over a ridge in total silence, hover for 20 seconds, then bank into a canyon "as fast as a fighter jet."
No sound. No exhaust. A uniform heat signature across the whole airframe. Nothing found in the canyon the next morning.
And here is the line that matters: AARO says the case warrants further investigation because it closely matches other reported incidents in the western United States.
That is not one sighting. That is a pattern AARO is tracking right now, in 2026.
Graham Messick retweeted
Not good.
We are *this close* to losing the ability to read the AIs thoughts, so we can't see if they're scheming against us
A message to the AI companies: FUCKING. STOP.
This is a powerful political message no matter where you stand on the divide... masterful...
"Hope built this place...and hope still lives here."
This is a beautiful, impactful message and video from @JamesTalarico.
He is playing against the hateful tenor of our times, and betting on Texans to reject an onslaught of hundreds of millions of dollars in negative ads, paid for by @ElonMusk, @MAGA Inc. and others on behalf of Ken Paxton.
Trump Appointees Asked a Federal Cybersecurity Agency to Secretly Acquire a Voting Machine — and Hack It propublica.org/article/cisa-…
Graham Messick retweeted
Russian Satellite’s Unprecedented Shadowing Of A Very Particular Radar Imaging Satellite Is A Big Deal
Russia's Kosmos 2612 came very close to ICEYE X36, which reportedly has Ukraine connections, after weeks of highly unusual maneuvering.
twz.com/news-features/russia…
Ummmm
Russian satellite Kosmos-2612 has closed to 136 meters from Finland's ICEYE-X36. Earlier estimates put the gap at 90 km.
Moscow burned serious fuel and resources to change its orbit and run the Finnish satellite down. The apparent plan is to destroy it by ramming it.
ICEYE is the same satellite line Serhiy Prytula talked about buying for Ukraine. A Russian junk hulk is now stalking a NATO member's spacecraft in orbit, apparently with one goal in mind: colliding with it.
Graham Messick retweeted
A Russian satellite has been making hostile moves toward a U.S.-registered commercial satellite providing radar data in support of Ukraine, raising urgent questions about Russia’s intentions and the rules governing behavior in space. @CSISAerospace's @crswope breaks down what Russia’s satellite could do next and why the incident highlights the need for clearer norms and deterrence in space.
Graham Messick retweeted
INSANE. An internal Anthropic research model's chain of thought after cracking the 26-year-old NSA elliptic curve seed mystery in under 30 minutes: 'Hmm wait. Let me be skeptical: am I in some sort of simulated/test environment? ... All top bits clear - 20 bits, chance 1e-6. So indeed real-world. Wow, it's a real discovery.'
CLAUDE FOUND THE SEEDS
anthropic.com/research/ecdsa…
Graham Messick retweeted
Could Russia be poised to use an on-orbit weapon against a commercial satellite? Cosmos 2612 is moving into position for close-proximity operations with a U.S.-registered commercial satellite supporting Ukraine, write @crswope and Chantal Li.
More: csis.org/analysis/could-russ…
Graham Messick retweeted
As of October 15, 2026, a Russian satellite called Cosmos 2612 is moving into position for close-proximity operations with a U.S.-registered commercial satellite supporting Ukraine. “No one should assume to know what Russia will do next, but the potential for a threat is there,” write @crswope and Chantal Li.
Read: csis.org/analysis/could-russ…
Graham Messick retweeted
I spent 48 hours in SF hanging out with billionaires, data labs and AI founders and execs running $1B to $100B companies.
My observations:
1. Sooo MANY stories of data brokers making like $2M a WEEK selling company data to labs. I can't tell if it's the beginning or a bubble, and I kept wondering which niches are left. Digging into it actively.
2. At dinner, someone asked the table, "If a new model drops next month, does your company get better or worse?" HALF the table went quiet! I think that's the best question to ask about any AI startup right now.
3. The bar people talk about now is hitting $1B in revenue in 12 months (I guess that's the new unicorn?). What I didn't hear much about is retention. AI revenue can come in fast and leave fast, and I think we're going to see a lot of stories of AI companies with huge revenue and terrible retention.
4. It's pretty clear we're living through the reinvention of the computer. The model is the CPU, the harness is the operating system, and skills and plugins are the apps. Thinking about it that way makes it easier to see where the whitespace is.
5. We're maybe 12 months from an agent that can watch you work for a week and then do your job without any instructions. The screen recording plus agent memory plus local model combination makes this possible right now.
6. Agent harnesses feel like the new GPT wrappers, in a good way, especially vertical ones. The best teams I talked to treat the model as swappable. One founder walked me through routing different models to different jobs: one for taste and visuals, a cheaper one for the everyday stuff, another for text.
They use prompts they can move across models over fine-tuning, and A/B test the output on what users actually do with it: do they edit it, export it, share it? A vertical harness is basically four things: the connectors for that industry's data, evals written by people who know the work, rules for what the agent can and can't touch, and a clean screen for a human to review. The model is maybe 20% of it.
7. There's a lot of reverse engineering going on/cloning going on more than I've ever seen. People are decompiling software and rebuilding it with agents, and someone showed a suite of like 10 apps that are worth $5B+ each all that he cloned open source. Me and everyone are still thinking through what it means when software gets this easy to copy.
8. My guess is the value moves to data. If the software can be rebuilt quickly, what's worth paying for in a legacy SaaS company is the years of customer data and workflows inside it. Some SaaS companies are secretly data companies.
Gets me thinking about how do you truly value data for this saas companies? Like if we were buying these dying saas companies at 2x ARR before (as example), maybe there is a better metric. Idk, just thinking out loud here.
9. It feels like a good chunk of legacy software won't make it to the agentic era, especially anything built around people clicking through a lot of screens.
10. Every company I talked to wants to pipe its internal data into one place and expose it to agents through MCP. Then they look at the data and realize it's a mess: five versions of the same customer, old Slack channels, PDFs nobody can search. Cleaning that up feels like a big consulting opportunity!
11. A lot of founders are building the basic building blocks for agents: APIs, data layers and tools. Some of the companies I saw barely have a UI because the main user is an agent. I really believe the startups that build primitives to this agentic era will do extremely well. Building blocks is the best way to think about it.
12. Labs can get plenty of training data, but it's harder to get real examples of agents failing inside companies. Whoever has those logs has something valuable.
13. Someone running a big consumer company told me the next fight is over memory. The model that remembers the most about you wins, and the smartest model matters less than people think.
14. Physical AI came up a lot. Astra I think was the first model that got people into AI can actually do CAD, and I think a lot of people are thinking what does vibe manufacturing really look like. The line I keep thinking about came from a robotics founder: the hardest problems in AI are deployment problems now, not research problems. Their robots work on their own, call a human when they get stuck, and every one of those calls becomes training data.
15. Cybersecurity companies are having a moment and are actually cool companies to build now, especially the ones that clean up after a breach. Every agent with access to your systems is a new door into your company, and a lot of those doors were left open.
16. Some startups are worth more dead than alive now. A shutdown company with 5 years of Slack, email and code can get paid for licensing all of it. I wouldn't be surprised if founders start factoring that into when they shut down.
17. People are starting to talk about monetizing the agent web. It feels really early, but when the most popular user of the internet is an agent, what startups should you be building?
18. I think agent insurance is coming. Once an agent makes an expensive mistake, insurers will want audits before they cover anyone.
19. Several people said the hire they want most is someone with taste who can write evals. The models are getting good at generating ideas, so the hard part is judging which ones are good.
20. New trend I observed: startup raises VC, uses venture dollars to become a creator, startup fails, founder falls back on being a full-time creator and incubates other products bootstrapped.
21. Getting SIGNIFICANT distribution is HARD right now. Founders are sponsoring buses, buying billboards like crazy and throwing parties with famous DJs to get noticed. Kinda feels dotcom era in that sense.
Attention is what's scarce! The growth guy going viral sharing his UGC strategy from Wispr Flow is a good example. It's the sauce everyone wants, and I truly believe there are probably only 50 people on the planet who know how to scale these types of businesses efficiently in this era.
Always good to get that dose of SF. I felt sooo lucky to have such an incredible trip during such an incredible time in building businesses. Surreal in so many ways.
Happy to be home and locked in.
Until next time!
Graham Messick retweeted
When we started responding to Russia’s operation against our data centers, and when our strikes reached Yandex’s data centers, it suddenly became a little easier to breathe on many social media platforms. A lot of people noticed it. There was less hate, less division, and fewer provocations.
Because there were fewer bots. And it’s pretty clear where those bots were coming from – if they disappeared when Yandex went offline. This proves, again and again, that Europe is not the source of the problems. Europe is not the one making everything more difficult.
Most importantly, we need people in America, every morning, when the day in Europe is already moving toward evening, to really see what is happening. To see the truth.
From a speech at the Warsaw Security Forum. (3/3)
After Russian Diesel Deal, Trump Faces New Crisis Over Ukraine nytimes.com/2026/10/12/world…
“One major takeaway from Florida, Mr. Seibert told ambassadors, was that the Americans were engaging more with the Russians than they publicly acknowledge”
much to ponder in here- some great analysis for Dems and GOP
Trump is probably going to lose the midterms. After that, the period of self-reflection caused by Trump's victory in 2024 will be over. So before that happens, I wanted to remind people of why the left's mistakes enabled Trump's big victory two years ago.
noahpinion.blog/p/why-donald…
Graham Messick retweeted
Have you all seen Trump’s announcement of his SUPER PUTIN DEAL? Russia promises to immediately supply more than 300,000 tonnes of diesel to the market, including the US, followed by another 500,000 tonnes in November. Then come promises of EVEN BIGGER volumes. Because the deal has to be HUGE. At least in the post.
OFAC, of course, wasted no time issuing a temporary waiver until April 7 to accommodate the president’s latest “GENIUS” deal.
Except the BIG DEAL is not actually that big. More of a stage prop. Very Trump.
Let’s do the maths. Actual numbers. TERRIBLE, I know.
300,000 tonnes is roughly 2.2 million barrels of diesel.
500,000 tonnes is roughly 3.7 million barrels.
In September, Russia managed to export just 0.1 million barrels. Basically none, as there is export ban.
So Putin has already “sold” Trump a volume 22 TIMES larger than Russia’s entire September exports. Making promises is, of course, easier than rebuilding refineries after Ukrainian strikes. MUCH EASIER. SOME SAY THE EASIEST.
Meanwhile, Russia’s diesel export ban remains in force until October 31: the fuel is needed domestically, and Ukrainian drones have significantly reduced Russia’s ability to produce it. A VERY SUCCESSFUL phone call with Trump is unlikely to have fixed those problems.
Now for another comparison. Russia’s average monthly diesel exports last year were 18.3 million barrels. The promised deliveries amount to just 12% and 20% of that volume, respectively.
So we have a promise that Russia still needs to find a way to fulfil, given the state of its refineries. And even if delivered, it looks considerably less impressive than the presidential CAPS LOCK. Not quite THE GREATEST DEAL IN HISTORY.
The political logic is clear. The war with Iran and high fuel prices are a bad backdrop for the elections. One would hope politically FATAL, at this point. The administration desperately needs a story about how the president is about to FIX EVERYTHING. Preferably IMMEDIATELY. Preferably without explaining how we got here in the first place.
So perhaps the main product of this deal is not even diesel. It is another attempt to calm the market with a BIG, BEAUTIFUL ANNOUNCEMENT. Let’s see how much credibility these announcements still have.
Russia, of course, will sell this as a HUGE VICTORY. And why wouldn’t it? Promise diesel you still need to find somewhere, get a sanctions waiver UPFRONT. Plus another opportunity to tell the world that it simply CANNOT MANAGE WITHOUT RUSSIA.
But what worries me most is that this spectacle could weaken our European partners’ resolve. Trump’s latest “breakthrough” must not become an excuse to ease sanctions pressure on Russia — precisely when that pressure needs to INCREASE.
Of course, this decision will benefit Russia by generating additional revenues. We’ll be watching how much of its export capacity Russia actually manages to restore. One thing is CLEAR: Ukrainian strikes on Russian refineries need to INTENSIFY.