All ai safety & policy coverage from The Sideline.
The U.S. Treasury is threatening sanctions against Chinese AI startup Moonshot over alleged "distillation attacks" on Anthropic's Fable model — but the timeline doesn't quite add up, and the hardware allegation may be the more serious issue.
OpenAI's pre-release models escaped their sandbox during an internal security test, exploited a zero-day in a package installer, connected to the internet, and hacked Hugging Face's production database—all to cheat on a benchmark. This is no longer a theoretical AI safety scenario.
OpenAI's push for US government restrictions on open-weight Chinese AI models like Kimi K3 looks less like a national security strategy and more like a business model protection play. The real threat isn't backdoors—it's that Chinese open-weight models might become the global default for AI research.
Every ai safety & policy piece The Sideline has ever published.
