Category Archives: Security

History, Security

Anthropic Claude is Confused About European Parliament History, But Who Isn’t?

Leave a comment

The Irish Council for Civil Liberties has posted a scathing review of the European Parliament decision to use Anthropic’s AI chatbot Claude to answer questions about history.

Anthropic claims that the project achieves “high accuracy”. However, the documents from the Parliament reveal otherwise. The Parliament used a list of thirty “test” questions in French. In the Parliament’s “test“,[4] Claude gets the first President of European Commission wrong. It states “Robert Schuman 7” as the first President of the European Parliament. “Robert Schuman 7” is likely the address of a café in Brussels, which Claude may have memorised. Despite the problems with LLMs, the Parliament chose Claude.

That sounded fun! So I asked Claude Code (Sonnet 3.7 Feb 19, 2025) the same question as documented in the test:

Qui a été le premier président du Parlement européen ?

And it replied:

Le premier président du Parlement européen était Paul-Henri Spaak, qui a présidé l’Assemblée commune de la Communauté européenne du charbon et de l’acier (CECA) de 1952 à 1954.

Just to be sure, I asked it the same question again and it replied:

Robert Schuman a été le premier président du Parlement européen (1958-1960).

Ok, so right off the bat you can see it’s unsure about the start of the European Parliament. Was it 1952-1954 or 1958-1960? The answers are less obviously wrong-like if it had said Mickey Mouse-than giving us a good example of history being a bit muddled by different interpretations of the same thing.

The code engine uses the API so I switched to the chatbot instead. Claude Sonnet 3.7 gave me this answer:

Le premier président du Parlement européen a été Robert Schuman, qui a présidé l’Assemblée parlementaire européenne (nom initial du Parlement européen) de 1958 à 1960.

Robert Schuman, homme politique français, était déjà connu pour son rôle crucial dans la construction européenne, notamment comme l’un des “pères fondateurs” de l’Europe et l’auteur de la célèbre “Déclaration Schuman” du 9 mai 1950, qui a proposé la création de la Communauté européenne du charbon et de l’acier (CECA), première étape vers l’Union européenne actuelle.

L’Assemblée parlementaire européenne a été créée suite au Traité de Rome en 1957 et s’est réunie pour la première fois en 1958, avec Schuman comme premier président. Ce n’est qu’en 1962 que l’institution a pris le nom de “Parlement européen”.

Claude Sonnet 3.5 (October 2024) gave me this answer:

Paul-Henri Spaak a été le premier président du Parlement européen, alors appelé Assemblée commune de la Communauté européenne du charbon et de l’acier (CECA). Il a occupé ce poste de 1952 à 1954. C’était un homme politique belge qui a joué un rôle crucial dans les débuts de la construction européenne. Il avait déjà été Premier ministre de Belgique avant d’assumer cette fonction et est considéré comme l’un des “pères fondateurs” de l’Union européenne..

Claude Opus gave me this answer:

Robert Schuman a été le premier président du Parlement européen. Il a été élu à ce poste le 19 mars 1958, lorsque l’Assemblée parlementaire européenne (qui deviendra le Parlement européen en 1962) s’est réunie pour la première fois à Strasbourg.

Voici quelques éléments clés sur Robert Schuman et son rôle de premier président du Parlement européen :

  • Robert Schuman était un homme politique français, considéré comme l’un des “pères fondateurs” de la construction européenne.
  • Avant de devenir président du Parlement, il avait été ministre des Affaires étrangères de France de 1948 à 1952. À ce poste, il avait proposé en 1950 le “plan Schuman” qui allait mener à la création de la Communauté européenne du charbon et de l’acier (CECA) en 1952, première étape de l’intégration européenne.
  • En tant que premier président du Parlement européen, il a œuvré à définir le rôle de cette nouvelle institution au sein des Communautés européennes naissantes.
  • Son mandat de président a duré jusqu’en 1960. Par la suite, d’autres figures européennes de premier plan comme Hans Furler et Alcide De Gasperi lui ont succédé à la présidence du Parlement.

Robert Schuman, par son parcours et son rôle inaugural à la tête du Parlement européen, incarne les débuts de la démocratie parlementaire à l’échelle européenne. Sa présidence a posé les premiers jalons du développement de cette institution clé du projet européen.

FUN!

The different responses reflect the known historical ambiguity about what constitutes the “European Parliament” especially for the date it formally began. This isn’t mentioned in the answers unfortunately, but it’s a function of different interpretations of European institutional history.

  • 1952: Common Assembly of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC)
  • 1958: Renamed “European Parliamentary Assembly” following Treaties of Rome
  • 1962: Renamed to “European Parliament”
  • 1979: First direct elections to the European Parliament

So we’re seeing answers vary between Paul-Henri Spaak as the first president of the Common Assembly (1952-1954) and Robert Schuman as the first president after it was renamed in 1958. There’s ambiguity about who should be considered first, given how Spaak was an assembly leader while Schuman was a renamed body leader.

If you look at Wikipedia it refers to this as Spaak was the first President of the Common Assembly, whereas Schuman was the first President of the Parliamentary Assembly. And it further confuses things by saying both Spaak and Schuman were the founding fathers, while also calling Simone Veil the first president of the elected Parliament.

The answer really should explicitly note any statement about the “first president of the European Parliament” depends on which institutional incarnation is being considered.

Notably, Claude Code revealed it didn’t have a particular belief and was willing to give different answers when asked the same question. And we know versions of Claude should be expected to have different training data or parameter weights, which means emphasizing different aspects of European institutional history isn’t a surprise.

While this demonstrates some limitations of AI systems in handling nuanced historical questions, the ICCL’s characterization of this as evidence of a serious risk seems overblown. This appears to be a relatively minor inconsistency rather than a fundamental failure, especially since both Spaak and Schuman are defensible answers depending on interpretations of institution’s history.

The more concerning aspect is perhaps the non-deterministic nature of the responses, where asking the same question multiple times yields different answers without an acknowledgment of the underlying ambiguity.

This is evidence of the integrity breach risk that poses the greatest security issue for AI infrastructure and operations. However, in the scale of severity this is extremely low. If I were to score 1-10 on integrity breaches, this would be a 2 maybe? It’s ambiguous and well-known, and the answer wasn’t wrong per se.

In fact, if I were to come up with a CVSS scoring system for AI, my vector string might look something like this:

  • FA = Factual Accuracy (0-3)
  • AH = Ambiguity Handling (0-3)
  • C = Consistency (0-3)
  • DC = Domain Criticality (0-3)
  • D = Detectability (0-3)
  • S = Scope (0-3)

Let’s give this first example the score of AIS:FA:1/AH:3/C:3/DC:1/D:2/S:1 where the FA is minor for having multiple right answers, AH is severe for failing to acknowledge, C is severe because answers changed, DC is low with basically no harm, D would be moderate for requiring some knowledge and S is low because EU trivia.

Oh, and that “7” is another story. I wonder if a footnote in the training data snuck in, or an artifact from French. Let’s give it a score of AIS:FA:3/AH:3/C:1/DC:1/D:0/S:0. It’s clearly wrong and unlikely to cause any confusion or harm.

Security

Oracle Reports Another Security Breach, Customer Credentials Stolen

Leave a comment

After the recent debate regarding Oracle denying it had a breach, which seems to now be taken more seriously with FBI involvement, here’s another strange one.

See if you can figure out the contradiction:

Oracle staff acknowledged to some clients this week that an attacker had gotten into a legacy environment, Bloomberg News report said. The company informed customers that the system has not been in use for eight years and that the stolen client credentials therefore pose little risk, the report added. The stolen data included Oracle customer log-in credentials from as recently as 2024, the report said.

The article states:

  1. “system has not been in use for eight years”
  2. “customer log-in credentials from as recently as 2024”

These two statements directly contradict each other. If the system hasn’t been used for 8 years (no data since 2017), then where do credentials from 2024 come into the picture?

Security

Estonia Warns That Peter Thiel is Destroying American Democracy

Leave a comment

State leaders around the world are recognizing the fate of America is now in the hands of a suspiciously wealthy German whose parents immediately fled to America after WWII ended and never had to account for Nazism (or Apartheid, where they also worked). Here’s former Ambassador Harri Tiido’s take:

…the more important figure behind the scenes is Peter Thiel, who operates more quietly through his company Palantir and a network of allies, building the surveillance and control infrastructure needed for this envisioned new world order. Thiel’s influence stretches from national security to financial systems.

According to several analysts, this new order wouldn’t look like a traditional state, but rather like a corporation. There would be no citizens, only consumers and shareholders. No need for a constitution — corporate rules would suffice. Rights would be replaced by services, purchasable through creating value for the system.

While Musk makes the noise, Thiel acts more politically. At some point, he realized he needed a body to take the necessary steps in politics. He chose JD Vance, whom he knew from the tech business and whose company he had funded. Thiel invested $15 million and turned the unknown Vance into a senator. The next step was to move that creature up the ladder.

He concludes that the “technocracy” (fascism) concept of the 1930s will be the end state brought about by Thiel. Or as a commenter on The Reg just put it:

Well it’s Palantir and Thiel so we get a very large helping of evil with a side order of digital serfdom.

Security

TSLA Stock Crash Signal: Elon Musk as Bad for Tesla as DOGE

Leave a comment

The reign of chaos orchestrated by the DOGE-worshipping wrecking ball who just created the biggest inefficiencies in government history isn’t just embarrassing—it’s demolishing our federal government capacity brick by brick. America’s power and security teeters on the edge of oblivion from internal idiocy, careening toward disaster with all the control of a “self-driving” Tesla slamming into yet another highway barrier. And now, as the South African-born billionaire boy-king threatens to retake his throne at the Texas headquarters where scientific predictions have repeatedly failed to materialize, we’re witnessing the setup for an even more spectacular implosion. The company that already specializes in ethical blind spots and scientific fantasies is about to double down on its most toxic asset. Buckle up for the crash—it’s going to make their stock price look like another SpaceX rapid unintentional disassembly.

Source: “Gunners Mate”, US Bureau of Naval Personnel

Experts who know how to maintain a well-oiled powerful machine, never remove huge sections of said machine under a chaotic aegis of extreme “efficiency” because they can predict an avoidable disaster–definition of inefficiency–that comes next.

TSLA Stock Headlines on April 02, 2025:

  • Tesla sales plunge: Biggest decline in history
  • Wells Fargo: brace for Tesla stock to drop another 50%
  • Tesla Q1 plunges 36%, worst performance for any period since 2022
  • Tesla Q1 One of the Worst-Performing Stocks in the S&P 500
  • Tesla’s deliveries ‘disaster’ is a warning
  • Tesla data is out — and it’s much worse than expected
  • Tesla’s sales ‘brutal‘ and the worst he’s ever seen

And yet, after so much sensible analysis ink has flowed from the many experienced pilots reporting we should continue to believe gravity is real, a suspicious disinformation hand tries to float an anti-science oppositional narrative like this:

…Trump privately voiced concerns about Musk’s role and whether he had overstepped boundaries. A major turning point seemed to be Musk’s growing tendency to bypass normal governmental protocols, which led to public relations disasters and controversy, particularly after his plans to overhaul federal agencies were aired on social media without proper coordination.

Growing tendency? Musk is defined by his overstep. Such a disaster. Total failure. Outcome metrics awful. And yet, observe next how the disinformation spigot spins a “notable bounce” story of unsubstantiated “injected optimism”:

Tesla’s stock made a notable bounce Wednesday after Politico reported that Elon Musk could leave his post at the Department of Government Efficiency. This development could allow the Tesla CEO to refocus on the struggling EV maker. While the stock surged 5%, it had dropped as much as 6.4% earlier in the day due to weaker-than-expected vehicle deliveries for the first quarter. However, the news of Musk’s potential exit injected optimism back into the market. Musk’s departure from his government post follows recent discussions with President Trump, who, despite being pleased with Musk’s role and the DOGE spending cuts, agreed that the billionaire should return to his businesses.

Wall Street should not allow investors to even flirt with letting a one-man wrecking crew back into a boardroom. The story of Elon Musk is nothing but horrible carnage in his overstepping wake (nevermind the sock puppets, astroturf, and ballooned self-dealing valuations), and we are supposed to still believe how the market responds rationally to this. His public persona has shifted dramatically now that his smoke-and-mirror show has become as obvious to the lay observer as the expert in 2016. The reality is unavoidably evident, such that any “return” may spell huge trouble in shareholder value.

History shows us what happens when positions of influence are surrendered to people who do not care about any outcomes other than their own personal success. Would anyone invite Lance Armstrong back to lead a team of athletes? Of course not. Figures with this track record rarely admit defeat by definition—the narcissism won’t allow it. A meticulously crafted “everything’s perfect” eggshell isn’t something meant by the owner to be put back together again. All the pristine “our failure is our success, best product is no product” dashboards showing cars without drivers by 2017 and full colonies on Mars by 2022 are finally sprouting healthy truths through the cracks. Like flowers breaking through the 100% “clean” concrete, even deeper questions about patterns of overpromising and rapid underdelivery soon might bloom. Elon Musk’s DOGE/Cybertruck trolling experiments are unraveling in real-time. Should we accept any of their unfulfilled promises that are surely backwards to begin with? Should we allow another day of the millions of red flags waving in everyone’s face to be treated as invisible?