The AI industry is dealing with the fallout of two security incidents this week, with customer data at Mercor and source code at Anthropic exposed.Anth.Pvt.).
Mercor was attacked through a supply chain attack related to an open-source project called LightLLM. As a result, the hacking group Lapsus$ said it gained access to Mercor’s customer data, TechCrunch reported.
Mercor uses experts from different fields to train relevant AI models. Its customers include OpenAI (OPA.PVT) and anthropological.
In a post on X, Gary Tan, Chairman and CEO of Y Combinator It said the hack put an “incredible amount of (cutting-edge) training data” worth billions of dollars from “every major laboratory” online, making it easily accessible to adversaries like China and posing a national security problem.
Anthropic CEO and co-founder Dario Amodei attends the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland on January 23, 2025. (AP Photo/Marcus Schreiber, File)
(associated Press)
Meanwhile, Anthropic’s own source code leak was related to human error, the company told the Wall Street Journal, meaning it was not the victim of a hack or other type of cybersecurity attack.
And while the event didn’t include the kind of data that powers Anthropic’s cloud, it did include information about how the company can talk to AI to perform certain tasks.
Anthropic has since issued multiple copyright takedown requests to remove the leaked data from the code-sharing site GitHub.
The problem for Anthropic is that once its code is on the Internet, it remains there forever, potentially giving malicious actors the means to attack AI in the future.
Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz, Wrote in his post on X These incidents mark the end of the AI industry’s “we’ll shut it down” approach to cybersecurity.
It’s inevitable that an AI company will face some sort of cybersecurity problem during its lifetime, but the fact that the Mercor attack and the Anthropic leak happened so rapidly only increases the drama for the tech industry.
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(Yahoo Finance)
Email Daniel Hawley at dhowley@yahoofinance.com. Follow him on Twitter @DanielHawley.
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