How Worried Should We Be About AI? — with Alex Stamos
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What triggered the recent wave of AI alarm and why did an Anthropic researcher resign?
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Episode 413. 413 is the area code serving Western Massachusetts. In 2013, the Wolf of Wall Street hit theaters, setting a new record for the use of the F word 503 times, which was broken last Friday during move-in day at UVA, where someone's father was trying to assemble a loft from Ikea. Those fucking Swedes are the ones that are coming for us.
I like that.
Go, go, go!
Welcome to the 413th episode of The Prop Chief Pod. What's happening in today's episode, we speak with Alex Stamos, cybersecurity expert, former chief security officer at Meta and Yahoo, and the current chief product officer at the AI Security Startup Corridor. I can't think of anyone better to speak to in this moment. We discuss what's been a pretty busy week in the world of AI. Specifically, a top anthropic researcher posted about his resignation warning about existential threats to humanity. I think he said it's about a 10% likelihood of extinction, meaning an expected death of about 80 million people. Gee, he sounds like fun, doesn't he? Doesn't he sound like, gosh, what a great kid? What a great kid.
And now Dario Amode, his boss, Sam Altman, the head of OpenAI and Elon Musk, I think he has a car company or something, are all agreeing on some version of a slowdown. So fucking ridiculous. Elon Musk just wants everyone to slow down. Like he gives a shit about humanity. Hey, let me cut off your HIV medication. Anyways, a little dark, a little dark. Anyways, Alex helps break down why cybersecurity has become the most urgent piece in the AI safety debate. What actually happened when open AI's models broke out of a test and hacked another company and how worried the rest of us should be. So with that, we hope you enjoy our conversation with Alex Stamos.
Alex, where does this podcast find you?
I am at our office in downtown San Francisco.
There you go. So I can't even imagine how in demand you might be. I would love, rather than me giving the context here, I would love you to actually set the table around what's happened in the last week in the world of what I'll call AI, existential panic, and then provide insight into what you think is real, overhyped, or if we're focused on the wrong thing here.
Sure. So you want you want to mostly talk about the existential stuff,
not all the security stuff over the summer?
Well, why don't why don't we build a timeline? Because my sense is this all kind of kicked off earlier in the summer that sort of set the table for us to talk about the hugging face breakout or jailbreak or what you want to call it. Give us your assessment of what happened there and what the media or experts may have gotten right or wrong.
Yes. This summer has been incredibly impactful for anybody who cares about AI safety. It started with Hugging Face announcing that they had been attacked by what they believed to be advanced AI models. At first, they did not know who it was. And then they announced that OpenAI had admitted it was them. And there was a coordinated discussion by OpenAI and Hugging Face and analysis by the two of them to come out and say that this had been OpenAI, an unreleased model, first they said singular model, that had broken out and done this. And after that, there was a series of companies, including Anthropic, including Meta, saying that they had had a number of models that had been escaped evaluation networks.
That while these models were being evaluated or trained, that they had broken out and gone to the internet, which is generally not supposed to be something new.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What triggered the recent wave of AI alarm and why did an Anthropic researcher resign?
0:00–8:43
2
How did the Hugging Face and OpenAI model jailbreaks expose security gaps in AI systems?
8:43–16:23
3
Why are leading AI CEOs calling for a coordinated slowdown of AI development?
16:23–23:32
4
What does Alex Stamos identify as the most urgent, yet overlooked, AI safety issue?
23:32–32:03
5
How could open‑weight models become the next big cyber‑security threat?
32:03–39:16
6
What are the economic and regulatory challenges of defending against AI‑powered ransomware?
39:16–46:29
7
How might a bilateral AI safety agreement between the U.S. and China be structured?
46:29–54:15
8
What practical steps can companies take today to mitigate AI‑related cyber risks?
54:15–1:00:56
Speakers
3 identifiedMore from The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway
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