thecipherbrief.com

Iran’s Regime Is Weaker Than It Looks For five and a half years, I was a hostage of the Islamic Republic of Iran. During that time, I came to believe something about the regime that may seem improbable from the outside: It is far weaker than it looks. Today, I believe we are closer to its end than many Americans realize. As America approaches the November midterm elections, calls to turn inward w…

A warning about ‘model welfare’ Download a highlighted marked-up version of the Claude Constitution Download the taxonomy as a PDF This essay was originally published here and is republished with permission from the author. Introduction AIs are not conscious. They do not feel, experience, or suffer. They do not have innate preferences or underlying motivations. They are sequence completion engine…

Navigating a More Uncertain World: Lessons from CIA’s Red Cell Twenty-five years after 9/11, the United States is confronting yet another era of profound uncertainty and potential dangers. The pace and scale of change are creating unforeseen disruptions that impact our security, stability, and prosperity. Advancing technologies are being adopted and applied in unexpected ways, sparking debates ab…

When Threats Move Faster Than Institutions A major aspect of the national security story of the past year comes down to one gap. Our adversaries, and increasingly the machines they use, now operate at machine speed. The institutions we count on for defense, oversight, and trust still operate at human speed, and several are being reorganized even as the threats accelerate. When the community gathe…

AI Is Coming for the Chain of Command The voice belonged to Gen. Tareq Saleh. It was telling his men to fall back. Or so it seemed. “Advances and retreats are a normal part of war,” the recording reasoned. “Pull back toward Mocha.” It was mid-September. Houthi fighters were pressing Yemen's Red Sea coast from three directions. The comms moved through the phones of the National Resistance, a coali…

Putin Is Testing the West’s Resolve In the preface to volume one, “The Gathering Storm,” of his six-volume memoir of World War II, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill recalls a conversation with U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt, in which Roosevelt asked what the war should be called. Churchill responded instantly, “the unnecessary war,” noting that it was the easiest war to stop. The world …

The Nations That Don’t Appear on the Map The most influential media network operating inside a dozen allied countries today has no masthead, no headquarters and no country of incorporation. It has roughly 50 million members across more than 150 countries. It is the Chinese diaspora — and it is only one of several. Since the Montevideo Convention of 1933 , we have defined a state by four things: a…

The Military’s Race to Operationalize AI “I feel as though I was catapulted into a dystopian future in which the battlefield (or ‘kill zone’ as Ukrainians call it) is dominated by drones and sensors, and will increasingly be shaped by AI [Artificial Intelligence], too. It’s where those in command centers digest huge quantities of data to plan operations, allocate drones to target areas, and hunt …

The Authority We Cannot Keep Washington announced permanent control of Greenland on Friday. The two governments that must ratify it announced, in the same breath, that the text recognizes their sovereignty. Both cannot be the settled meaning of an agreement neither parliament has seen. The President’s post gave the United States “permanent control over security, and all other needs, in Greenland,…

Heads They Win, Tails They Win: The CMMC Trap and the Way Out Here is a prediction from inside the compliance trenches: the CMMC Reform Task Force closed its sixty-day review on September 11 and is now finalizing recommendations for the Department of War's Chief Information Officer, with a public report expected within weeks. When that report lands, read it knowing what its authors cannot quite s…