Thomas Rid

Author of ACTIVE MEASURES, RISE OF THE MACHINES, CYBER WAR WILL NOT TAKE PLACE, "Attributing Cyber Attacks," more. Johns Hopkins, Alperovitch Institute.

[Thomas Rid @RidT]

Excellent, no-nonsense analysis of Germany’s automotive sector in existential crisis, “ The End of Car Nation Germany” https://t.co/hfM4SHEB4q

[Oleg Shakirov @shakirov2036]

Davis Center's abandoned domain for the Working Group on the Future of U.S.-Russia Relations is now a "Russian dating site." Sweet that the new owner still pays homage to the original project & keeps US-Russia Future in the head

[Thomas Rid @RidT]

Interesting and exciting

[Brendan McMorrow @brendanbc2]

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[Thomas Rid @RidT]

Big evolution of tradecraft here: a Russian active measures contractor is executing false flag operations by recruiting operatives *under false flag* — so they are unaware who paid them covertly, and indeed believe to be working for activists from third countries. Very Cold War.

[Thomas Rid @RidT]

This is a very important story on a recent evolution in tradecraft in Russian active measures, by @Martinlaineolen and team. I have also seen the full original leak, a few additional observations later today https://t.co/awiqQRp6fN

[Thomas Rid @RidT]

SDA planning docs and after action reports also mention OPSEC quite a lot, especially to enable infiltration. Temporary OPSEC before and during an operation matters; not so much after an operation.

[Thomas Rid @RidT]

@halvarflake Theory or evidence?

[Thomas Rid @RidT]

Periodic reminder: the Shadow Brokers, masterful curators of one of the most devastating technical intelligence leaks ever, will turn ten years in August — and we still don't know who they were.

[J. A. Guerrero-Saade @juanandres_gs]

@vkamluk The original intent of the research was to play out the thesis that obscure malware could be used as hard evals for frontier mode capabilities. @vkamluk and @Gabeincognito ran an RE harness with access to tools, first autonomously, then w expert guidance.

[Andy Greenberg (@agreenberg at the other places) @a_greenberg]

A newly decoded piece of sabotage malware called Fast16, created before Stuxnet, was made to silently tamper with calculations in research and engineering software. Likely created by the US or an ally, and possibly used against Iran's nuclear program. https://t.co/jE045ejq6u

[Claude @claudeai]

1 million context window: Now generally available for Claude Opus 4.6 and Claude Sonnet 4.6.

[Thomas Rid @RidT]

Dutch intelligence MIVD and AIVD attribute Signal support scams to Russian government — note legit *Signal support will never send you text messages,* and it would probably help for Signal to include an explicit default notice or pop-up to remind all users https://t.co/5XhnJXolPo

[Thomas Rid @RidT]

Anthropic v Pentagon has the framing wrong: looks like Palantir, perhaps Karp, had a key role in getting Anthropic booted out of DoD/DoW. This is about libertarianism versus trust-and-safety, yet again—the defining rift runs right through Silicon Valley https://t.co/VXSdusoOwD

[Jawwwn @jawwwn_]

.@USWREMichael says the Maduro raid was the trigger point for the DoW’s conflict with Anthropic:

“Palantir’s the prime contractor. [Anthropic] is the sub.”

“One of [Anthropic’s] execs called Palantir and asked, ‘Was our software used in that raid?’”

“So— they’re trying to get classified information. And implying— if they were used in that raid, that it might violate their terms of service.”

“It raised enough alarm with Palantir, who has a trusted relationship with the Department, to tell me, and I’m like, ‘Holy shit— what if this software went down? Some guardrail kicked up? Some refusal happened for the next fight like this one and we left our people at risk?”

“I went to @SecWar @PeteHegseth and told him what happened.”

“That was like a ‘Woah’ moment for the whole leadership at the Pentagon that we’re potentially so dependent on a software provider without another alternative that has the right or ability to not only shut it off— maybe it’s a rogue developer who could poison the model to make it not do what you want, or trick you, or hallucinate purposefully.”

“That culminated in the Tuesday dramatic meeting with Secretary Hegseth and me and Dario with the Friday deadline that got blown.”

“I never really thought they wanted to make it.”

@DoWCTO @emilmichael on @theallinpod

[Thomas Rid @RidT]

Proud that my PhD student Martin @Dr_Machinavelli is putting out such eloquent and brilliant writing, here on Microsoft's LLM backdoor research, in one of Germany's largest papers, FAZ—easily beats most coverage in big-ticket US outlets https://t.co/pCRqZ4RqQ9

[Thomas Rid @RidT]

“Since the war began, Russia has passed Iran the locations of U.S. military assets, including warships and aircraft, said the three officials.”

“It does seem like it’s a pretty comprehensive effort.” https://t.co/9HGCWbOm1V

[Thomas Rid @RidT]

GPT 5.4 is out. Two noteworthy things here: both OpenAI's and Google's flagship models now outperform Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.6 on ARC AGI 2, and at a significantly cheaper cost per task (cost is log scale). Also: GPT 5.4 failed to catch up with Gemini 3.1 in score or cost

[Thomas Rid @RidT]

@speyserx Sure go ahead. Just my name.

[Thomas Rid @RidT]

M Street and Wisconsin in Georgetown taken over by a large crowd of celebrating Iranians, chanting USA USA … not what I was expecting during my run today.