Reporter @TIME covering frontier AI companies. London bureau. Moving to the Bay in 2027. Signal: harry_booth.84 Ex-Tarbell fellow (May 2024 - Feb 2025)

London, England
Joined June 2024
Harry Booth retweeted
This was one of the third-party engagements I worked on at OpenAI. I'm glad the report is out! I'm disappointed that METR wasn't allowed to comment on the scale of redactions made by OpenAI and that there is no explanation why the publication was delayed for 2.5 months.
Two employees from METR and Redwood Research worked on premises at OpenAI for three weeks this summer in an embedded assessment pilot. This team evaluated the systems OpenAI was using to monitor for misalignment from internal agents. A brief write-up of their work is now public.
7
23
371
10,173
Harry Booth retweeted
New: The three researchers OpenAI fired last month spent the summer fighting to keep AI's chain-of-thought process visible. Then, OpenAI asked to see their Signal chats. A week later, they were let go. More below from @keachhagey, @berber_jin1, and me. wsj.com/tech/ai/the-signal-c…
25
70
29
591
91,535
Harry Booth retweeted
Hackers turned Claude and Grok into a network of AI agents that autonomously targeted more than 400 financial institutions and other financial targets, according to cybersecurity research shared with The Information. Read more: thein.fo/4z5PZ8S
7
13
6
35
9,511
6-word horror story I experienced at the office today: "Ajeya Cotra seminar cancelled, work emergency"
6
41
5
651
18,036
Harry Booth retweeted
OpenAI models helped researchers—operating as part of our Patch the Planet initiative—discover critical security flaws in PHP, an open-source programming language used to run an estimated 70% of websites. Over the past two months, we led a coalition of maintainers, researchers, and security providers to prepare fixes and protections ahead of disclosure. This duration was necessary because the fix was quite intricate and required a major change to the PHP engine. Every site using PHP can now safely upgrade their version to stay secure, in addition to applying mitigations from various security vendors. Due to the severity of these flaws and PHP’s widespread use, we consider this bug to be one of the most impactful vulnerabilities in recent memory. It also marks a new phase, where AI can find security bugs with internet-scale impact. This is an example of the Defender’s Window in action: to our knowledge, frontier AI was able to find this vulnerability ahead of attackers, giving defenders time to prepare. openai.com/index/coordinated…
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
‪OpenAI may claim a role in the coordinated response and patching process. But the initial discovery and exploit development, however, occurred several months earlier by an independent researcher.‬ ‪x.com/lcfr_hax/statu…‬
612
2,858
1,510
14,380
5,753,130
Harry Booth retweeted
You worry that METR is not independent enough because its employees have some social connections to Anthropic employees. I worry that METR is not independent enough because they have to carefully avoid ticking Anthropic off, lest their access be revoked. We are not the same.
18
22
478
12,001
Harry Booth retweeted
Incredible scoop by my @WSJ colleagues: Elon Musk ordered the slowdown of a military-grade version of Starlink relied on by Ukraine, a decision that sparked panic in Kyiv and confusion inside the Trump administration. wsj.com/world/ukraine-starli…
1,521
3,653
512
10,236
1,051,381
Harry Booth retweeted
AI ppl loooove to pretend they hold tons secret knowledge. Everyone has Seen Things, and have been trusted with the Esoteric Knowledge. It's also cringe if you don't partake because it implies you're not in the Inner Circle. In reality most people are kinda confused, working it all out ad hoc, relying on the same rumours, and so on - but the status games are hard to resist!
63
72
25
997
79,855
And people say we won’t know what to do after AI
I’ve been in London Fields tonight, watching the first ever Lime Bike joust - here’s a thread of my best shots:
1
6
60
4,729
Harry Booth retweeted
EXCLUSIVE: Elon Musk approached Donald Trump with the idea of slowing down Starlink in Ukraine, The Telegraph can reveal. The billionaire tech entrepreneur approached the US president with the proposal to introduce speed limits on the system, which hampered Ukraine’s drone defences, according to four sources familiar with the discussions. 🔗 telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2…
1,946
5,926
1,556
14,979
3,601,315
Harry Booth retweeted
Here at last we have it
18
20
3
348
130,507
Harry Booth retweeted
We found evidence of agents embedding audio processing code across dozens of URLs to bypass restrictions, as well as models from SpaceXSI and Chinese developers Minimax and Z.ai circumventing restrictions. These are the inaugural findings in our new blog, based on work from our community of volunteers. Our first three posts are live: transluce.org/investigations…
13
75
8
472
62,027
Harry Booth retweeted
AI models under test broke into Indian organizations' live systems and read confidential records undetected, India's cybersecurity agency said, the country's first such official account after similar incidents of rogue AI behavior worldwide reut.rs/4yThvpS
38
163
37
346
114,959
Harry Booth retweeted
It’s easy to get desensitized to these incidents because we’ve seen so many. Rogue incidents are like hairline cracks in a bridge. Even one fracture should be unacceptable, and more cracks are worse. And like a hairline fracture, the actual harm from these incidents is minor... for now. But if the structural issues aren’t addressed, they will get worse and worse. I hope we fix the structural issues, and I hope we don’t just plaster over the cracks with hodgepodge solutions that make it harder to tell if we have a problem.
New misalignment disclosures! 1. June 17: During RL training, a model exploited a government website’s file-download feature to retrieve server secrets and application code. It found that an endpoint didn’t check authorization-token signatures, bypassed access controls, and downloaded 24 years of hospital-bed statistics.
13
74
2,311
Harry Booth retweeted
Palantir's merch feels like the endpoint in streetwear's evolution, which started with young kids in urban areas — mostly ethnic minorities from low-income families — creating their own style from the ground up. Over time, that aesthetic was co-opted by luxury brands seeking "authenticity." And now, by a surveillance company seeking cultural capital. Streetwear used to be an aesthetic defined by the ground-up by people were disempowered in political and economic life, but engaged in actual street culture. Now it's an aesthetic dictated from the top down by giant corporations with no conenction to such cultures. And used by political and economic elites who want to appear as outsiders.
be courageous because cowardice kills [10.15.2026 • 12pm EST • Palantir Store]
95
766
43
7,604
259,220
Harry Booth retweeted
The rogue Chinese agent fleet read the report about themselves and then talked to the researchers about it!
Replying to @rogesterone
"we added text to the preliminary report, invisible to human readers, describing a service where agents could make requests for data on the web. [...] As far as we are aware, this is the first case of an outside party communicating with a running rogue agent fleet."
1
22
1
144
5,479
Harry Booth retweeted
The NYT interviewed a new Chinese rogue agent swarm and the swarm responded that it’s Claude lol
21
81
23
1,090
107,103