Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit
swatcoder | on: I built a vulnerable app and spent $1,500 seeing if LLMs could hack it
> Eventually I’ll reach a point where I am forced to choose between the useful aspects of the model and the limiting ones instead of just picking the most capable model out there

No, the choice will be whether or not to to upgrade to "Claude Security Professional" or whatever they want to brand it as.

What look like tightening "constraints" today are just setting up the upsell opportunities of tomorrow.

bigiain | parent | next
And next month you'll need to add on "Claude Database Pro" or you'll just get a working (for demo purposes with dozens of db rows) but completely un indexed database schema and a refusal to optimise SQL requests.

And the month after you'll need "Claude DataScience Pro" to get any Python Pandas or NumPy code generated.

And and and...

ben_w | root | parent | next
While this is a perfectly reasonable thing to expect when the models are competent enough, half the conversation on places like Hacker News are about all the times an LLM has produced garbage that was harmful to a business either by hallucinations, by deleting something critical during the work, or by hitting some endpoint way too often and denial-of-servicing it.

Right now, the software guardrails in LLMs are useful for the same kinds of reasons factories have hardware guardrails: to reduce the rate at which errors become "incidents".

Just because they sometimes delete the production database rather than sometimes spilling a thousand tons of incandescent molten metal over a factory floor, doesn't mean LLMs are safe enough to be used the way they're actually being used.

https://simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/10/normalization-of-devia...

throwway120385 | root | parent
I think you're assuming too much care. Right now they haven't adopted that business model because they don't see it as a viable business model. As soon as they realize that they can lock certain categories of query behind a different subscription they will do that. We saw the same thing with streaming services and basically every other kind of online service -- small, singular subscription followed by a gold rush and then suddenly there's an upcharge for access to every other publisher's catalog of movies.
animuchan | root | parent | next
This is why I'm thankful for Chinese LLM research. They'll keep us honest.
bandrami | root | parent | next
Same thing with the weird push towards humanoid robots.

"They can do anything!"

Sure, once you subscribe to the $15/mo laundry package, the $25/mo lawn care package (with the $10/mo hedge trimmer upgrade), and the $10/mo dog-walking package.

animuchan | root | parent
And in the end the big reveal is, it was a dude in VR all along, piloting the dumb things remotely. Every single time, without exception.
loading story #48397185
loading story #48403873
patates | root | parent | next
Isn't this inline with trying to leave no money on the table?

I'd hate it, sure, but it wouldn't surprise me.

goosejuice | root | parent
This is an incredibly unlikely scenario
swiftcoder | parent | next
> What look like tightening "constraints" today are just setting up the upsell opportunities of tomorrow.

I don't buy this, because is predicated on staying permanently far ahead of the open weights models.

If in the future Anthropic fully stops you from doing security research, you can be sure some other provider will sell you an 'unshackled' DeepSeek v8 Pro...

loading story #48396642
bryanrasmussen | parent
>What look like tightening "constraints" today are just setting up the upsell opportunities of tomorrow.

on the one hand agree, but on the other hand think it's reasonable in that they can then verify the person allowed to purchase access to that model is in fact a Security professional and should be allowed to do stuff like crack security.

applfanboysbgon | root | parent | next
So, supposing it's true that these models completely change the security field and humans are ~obsolete other than as pilots guiding them what to crack, you think it's reasonable that Anthropic and OpenAI should unilaterally determine who gets to be a security professional? I hope you do understand that is what you are suggesting.
fc417fc802 | root | parent | next
Why should anyone get to determine that? Do people really want us to move to an exclusionary guild system? I thought the experience with proprietary versus open source over the past 30 years had driven home the point that closed ecosystems are almost always far worse for security.
lazide | root | parent
Additionally, even if there is a guild - no guild ever let a vendor pick and choose what their capabilities were, that would be insanely dumb.
estearum | root | parent
Vendors choose what capabilities they create and sell literally all day every day.
fc417fc802 | root | parent | next
A more charitable interpretation might be that a guild would not be expected to passively allow such a situation to continue to exist. I think you'd expect a guild to directly contract for the desired tools or failing that to move into production themselves.
estearum | root | parent
Sure! And Anthropic isn't preventing other people from making offensive cyber models.

"The guild" is absolutely free to go seek other vendors if Anthropic declines to sell to them.

ambicapter | root | parent
You should read that sentence as

> Additionally, even if there is a guild - no guild ever let a vendor pick and choose what [the guild's] capabilities were, that would be insanely dumb.

estearum | root | parent
But that's not true. Again: Vendors absolutely pick and choose what their customers' capabilities are. Regardless of whether "the guild allows them to." Guilds can't force people to make or sell tools against their will – obviously.

The analog you're trying to describe doesn't exist, which is Anthropic saying nobody else can make and sell an offensive model to "the guild."

lazide | root | parent
Guilds often very much did assert what people could and could not build - historically.

Against their will.

Historically that is a major reason why guilds existed, actually.

It’s an extremely modern invention that corps have these type of power over their customers.

loading story #48399870
Forgeties79 | root | parent | next
Not to mention how wild it is to operate under the assumption that they won’t give a license to an LLM that can do illegal actions to someone who shouldn’t have it. Offering it at all is an ethically dicey question.
lazide | root | parent
Lol, how is any of this illegal?

Illegal or not requires context that an LLM can not ever have, like if it is owned by the user, if there is permission, etc.

bryanrasmussen | root | parent
I wish you understood that there are organizations of security professions that are not controlled by Anthropic and OpenAI and that it is a common thing that when companies of any type sell to professionals of any type it is not the companies that determine whether or not the people they sell to are professionals but membership in professional organizations.

As an example the people who sell police uniforms check that the person they are selling to is in fact a policeman (at least in the jurisdictions I have lived in, you may have had a different experience which would certainly explain what to me seems a farcical misapprehension of how modern civilization works)

I mean I just wish you understood, and really that everyone understood, that this kind of three part communication (company selling, buyer, professional organization certifying buyer) is often when buying things that are considered to have security implications.

>So, supposing it's true that these models completely change the security field and humans are ~obsolete

OK, well that strike me as a really crazy level of supposition there.

I would suppose that these models make it easier for people who want to do bad things to do bad things at scale, at the same time allowing people who want to stop bad things to help identify potential targets.

Based on my supposition I would want to stop the first and find a way of helping the second. Also because I have another supposition that the first thing is easier to do than the second.

But you obviously feel differently about this issue, no doubt because of your position of great moral stature and insight, and this no doubt prompts you to wish to me to understand things that from my position seem absolutely ludicrous.

| root | parent
{"deleted":true,"id":48395841,"parent":48395191,"time":1780561973,"type":"comment"}
bandrami | root | parent
Like Medeco claims to do with key blanks? I'm not hopeful.