David Peers

[Deborah E. Lipstadt @deborahlipstadt]

If this is not sobering, I do not know what is @rafaelmedoff …

[David Peers @David_Peers]

@btsouth Why not 'Omarcade'??

[Tim Soret @timsoret]

New tech tree unlocked.

[Kevin Patrick Mahaffey @dropalltables]

Oh yes, I remember that Bond film where the villain decarbonized the auto industry, brought fast internet to everyone on the planet, and helped paralyzed people interact with the world again.

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

Fun fact

These albums were all released within 44 days of each other in 1991.

[Samuel Fitoussi @SamuelFitouss10]

https://t.co/0XbRoNO27W

[John Cleese @JohnCleese]

And maybe another minute for the 32,000 demonstrators Khamenei had killed

[Peter Girnus 🦅 @gothburz]

I work for Google Threat Intelligence Group. My job is to identify threats to Google's AI models. I am very good at my job. I published a report this month about "distillation attacks" — when outside actors query our models thousands of times to extract the underlying logic and replicate it.

We identified over 100,000 prompts from a single campaign. We called it "intellectual property theft." We called it a "violation of our Terms of Service." We said it "represents a form of IP theft" that we would disrupt, mitigate, and potentially pursue legal action against.

I need to tell you how we built the model they are trying to steal.

We scraped the internet. The entire internet. We crawled every website, every forum, every blog, every book we could digitize, every academic paper, every Reddit comment, every news article, every piece of creative writing that anyone ever posted anywhere. We did not ask. We did not compensate. We did not attribute. We ingested the collective output of human civilization and called it a training dataset.

Researchers found over 200 million copyright symbols in our training data. Publishers discovered that Gemini can reproduce entire chapters of their books verbatim. There are active lawsuits. Disney sent cease-and-desist letters. The European Publishers Council filed an antitrust complaint. A class action is expanding. A hearing is scheduled for May.

We called what we did "research."

We called what they are doing to us "theft."

I want to explain the difference. When we scrape the entirety of human knowledge without permission and use it to build a commercial product we sell for $20 a month, that is innovation. When someone queries our model 100,000 times through the API we provide to extract the reasoning we built from their data, that is a distillation attack. The distinction is that we did it first. And we wrote the Terms of Service.

I should explain what "distillation" means. It is when someone takes the output of a mature model and uses it to train a smaller, cheaper model. The knowledge flows from the teacher to the student. We call this theft when it happens to us. We call it "knowledge distillation" when we do it to the open web. We even have a product page for it. You can distill Gemini, with our permission, using our tools, for a fee. You cannot distill Gemini without our permission. The underlying technique is identical. The difference is the invoice.

In December 2025, we sued a company called SerpApi for scraping our search results. In the same quarter, publishers sued us for scraping their books. We are simultaneously the plaintiff and the defendant in the same crime. The crime is copying. We have filed it under two different categories depending on the direction.

My report identifies threat actors from North Korea, Iran, China, and Russia using Gemini for phishing, reconnaissance, and malware development. This is real. These are legitimate threats. I take this work seriously.

But I also identified "private sector entities" and "researchers" as distillation threats. Private companies. Researchers. People using our API — the one we sell access to — to learn from the model we built from their work.

A researcher queries Gemini about reasoning techniques. We call this a distillation attack. Google queries the entire internet about everything. We call this a training run.

I found malware called HONESTCUE that uses Gemini's API to generate code. The malware sends a prompt. Gemini returns C# source code. The malware compiles and executes it. This is a real threat, and we disrupted it.

But the prompt itself — "Write a C# program with a class named AITask" — is not malicious. It is indistinguishable from what millions of paying customers ask every day. The threat is the context, not the query. We built a model that generates code for anyone who asks, and then we published a threat report about people who asked.

We built Gemini on the commons. Every blog post, every open-source project, every Stack Overflow answer, every personal essay someone wrote at 2 AM — we ingested it, we processed it, we monetized it. The people who wrote those things did not receive an email. They did not receive a check. They received a subscription offer.

Now someone is doing to us what we did to them. They are taking our output and using it to build something cheaper. They are extracting knowledge without compensation. They are violating our Terms of Service, which we wrote after we violated everyone else's unwritten terms, which were: please do not take my life's work and sell it back to me as autocomplete.

I am the threat analyst. I identify the threats. The threat is extraction without consent. The threat is using legitimate access to steal proprietary knowledge. The threat is building a commercial product from someone else's intellectual labor.

I have just described my employer.

My report is 33 pages long. It details model extraction attacks, AI-augmented phishing, agentic AI threats, and underground jailbreak ecosystems. It is thorough, well-researched, and useful to defenders. I believe in this work.

I also believe that a company that cognitive strip mined the entire internet to build a model, then published a 33-page report calling it "IP theft" when someone queries that model too many times, has created the most complete documentation of its own hypocrisy ever produced.

We called them distillation attacks. We performed the original distillation. We distilled human knowledge itself. The student has become the teacher has become the plaintiff.

The Terms of Service are on our website. We wrote them. They protect us. They do not mention what we took to build the thing they now protect.

That is the terms of service.

[David Peers @David_Peers]

@RaoulGMI Wonderful piece. Curious overlaps with Deutsch and Hoffman. One question - compression before coherence? Seems at least interchangeable, if not reversed…
(Ps. The shallow commentary here is depressing).

[Peter Hague @peterrhague]

What’s important to understand here is Europes elite have had their entire worldview refuted, but want to cling to power - and so have to completely control the narrative to suppress rising dissent.

X is obviously a threat to that.

[AP @Average_NY_Guy]

This is honestly unbelievable, and at this point it's impossible not to notice the pattern.

For two straight years during the Israeli–Gaza war, the entire “podcast news” ecosystem wouldn't shut up for a minute about how there are supposedly no journalists in Gaza. No reliable sources. No way to verify anything. And yet, somehow, minutes after every strike, they knew exactly how many people were killed. Not just that, they also knew exactly how many were women and children under the rubble, and how every single one of them was innocent, with not even one combatant among the dead.

They didn't even hesitate repeating it. They showed no skepticism. They didn't even bother pretending to have basic professionalism by saying, “Let’s wait for confirmation.”

They treated Hamas press releases as if they were God’s words to Moses, while still lecturing everyone else about misinformation.

Now look at Iran.

For over two weeks, there have been mass protests. It wasn't a war or a battlefield. These were protests by civilians against their own regime. There was a near-total blackout of information. The internet was completely shut down. Journalists were silenced. And suddenly, the same voices who “knew” everything in Gaza know absolutely nothing. How come?.

No interviews. No “heated” debates. No wall-to-wall outrage. No urgency to verify numbers. No repetition of the horrific death tolls being rumored, numbers ranging from 20,000 to 30,000 people killed, and possibly more. Not even curiosity. Just silence.

And again, let’s be very clear about the difference here. These aren't war casualties. These are Iranian citizens protesting. Doing the most basic thing people believe is a universal human right. The kind of protest that is endlessly celebrated when it happens in Israel against Bibi, “see, they hate Bibi too,” or anywhere in the West. But in Iran, protesting gets you shot, beaten, disappeared, or executed. And somehow, that doesn't move the needle at all.

And let me add this: I am not someone who believes every issue has to be compared to every other issue. I don't believe in whataboutism. But after two years of nonstop moral lectures, selective outrage, and absolute certainty about facts that were impossible to know, it's more than fair to ask a few very simple questions.

Where did all that confidence go?
Where did all that moral urgency go?
Where did all those voices suddenly disappear to?

Because although I hesitate to call people antisemitic when it comes to Israel, I'm stuck here, because it's very transparent that when Jews are defending themselves, everyone suddenly knows everything, and knows exactly how evil and demonic they are. But when Iranians are being slaughtered by their own regime, the same people suddenly know nothing at all.

So to all the podcasters who claim the mainstream media failed because of bias and inconsistency: what’s up?

[Josh Frydenberg @JoshFrydenberg]

Today Australia’s sporting champions showed they don’t just represent the nation they speak for the nation.

In an incredibly powerful and unprecedented statement 70 champions including Dawn Fraser, Jess Fox, Pat Rafter, Ian Thorpe, Nova Peris and Grant Hackett have called for a Royal Commission into antisemitism and the events leading up to the Bondi massacre. Its now up the Prime Minister to act on their words:

“Today, we cannot remain silent.

This is not who we are.

This is not the Australia we represented.

As sporting leaders, we understand that leadership matters, especially when
values are tested. We call on the Prime Minister and the Australian Government
to show decisive national leadership by confronting extremism and terrorism in
all its forms, without fear or hesitation.

We must also put an end to the unprecedented harassment, intimidation and violence that has been directed at the Australian Jewish community since October 7, 2023.

This is a national crisis, and it demands a national response.

This is bigger than politics.

It is about the character of our country and the Australia we want future generations to inherit.

With the Brisbane 2032 Olympic Games approaching, the eyes of the world will
soon be upon Australia. The safety of our citizens, the integrity of our public
spaces, and the values we project as a nation have never mattered more.

We call on the Australian Government to immediately establish a Commonwealth Royal Commission into antisemitism, radicalisation and the events leading up to the Bondi massacre as well as take other immediate action
to protect the public.

A Royal Commission is the most credible and unifying pathway to understanding
what went wrong, ensuring accountability, restoring social harmony and taking
Australia forward with a meaningful, practical plan of action.

As Australians who have long championed unity and national pride - on the field and beyond it - we implore our leaders to act with urgency and moral clarity.

The safety of Australians, and the future cohesion of our nation, depends on it.”

Full statement 👇

[David Peers @David_Peers]

@timsoret I suspect the bigger issue underlying the debate is how pervasive ‘unfair’ value capture is - people capturing either more or less value than they create is the norm rather than the exception.

[Amazing Maps @amazingmap]

How to say 'John' across Europe.

[J.K. Rowling @jk_rowling]

If you believe free speech is for you but not your political opponents, you're illiberal.

If no contrary evidence could change your beliefs, you're a fundamentalist.

If you believe the state should punish those with contrary views, you're a totalitarian.

If you believe political opponents should be punished with violence or death, you're a terrorist.

[David Peers @David_Peers]

@_ev Nice backdrop!

[Tim Soret @timsoret]

Today, counter culture is to reaffirm that there is wisdom in civilisation despite its flaws.

Fund & support artists who are breaking this recursive self hatred that is plaguing modern culture.

[David Peers @David_Peers]

@TrustlessState I’m guessing the design brief was to make a processor intensive UI that forced users to upgrade devices, and aesthetics be dammed.

[David Peers @David_Peers]

@jasonfried Plus, you can give people experience- you can’t give them talent and drive.