Is Offense or Defense Dominant? FAR.AI's Adam Gleave on the AI Security Leaderboard
FAR.AI co-founder and CEO Adam Gleave joins Nathan to discuss FAR.AI’s AI Security Leaderboard, the first systematic head-to-head evaluation of the misuse safeguards frontier developers actually ship. The findings expose a major measurement gap: while Claude Fable 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol withstood FAR.AI’s suite, Grok 4.5 and Gemini 3.1 Pro yielded hundreds of universal jailbreaks at low cost. Adam explains why many effective attacks look more like social engineering than advanced ML, why “jailbreak tax” should not be relied on for safety, and how FAR.AI scores whether a model is genuinely helping an attacker. The episode’s stakes are whether AI developers can measure and harden real deployed defenses before threat actors make routine use of increasingly capable systems.
- FAR.AI AI Security Leaderboard: http://leaderboard.far.ai/
- People can e-mail owsa@far.ai if they're interested in the open-weight safety accelerator grantmaking program.
For full show notes, links, and references, read the episode page:
https://www.cognitiverevolution.ai/is-offense-or-defense-dominant-far-ai-s-adam-gleave-on-the-ai-security-leaderboard/
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CHAPTERS:
(00:00) About the Episode
(03:22) AI security leaderboard
(07:56) Universal jailbreaks explained
(16:26) Finding social jailbreaks (Part 1)
(16:31) Sponsor: Claude
(18:01) Finding social jailbreaks (Part 2)
(30:48) Layered safeguard defenses
(42:25) Uneven frontier safeguards
(51:10) Sharing safety standards
(01:00:30) Offense versus defense
(01:08:50) Open-weight model safety
(01:17:25) Control failure warnings
(01:30:05) Coordination and risk
(01:39:24) Episode Outro
(01:42:52) Outro
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Full-Stack AI Safety: Why Defense-in-Depth Might Work, with Far.AI CEO Adam Gleave
Today Adam Gleave, co-founder and CEO of FAR.AI, joins The Cognitive Revolution to discuss his cautiously optimistic vision for post-AGI futures and AI capability timelines across three distinct tiers, exploring the safety challenges and alignment techniques needed as FAR.AI scales from foundational research to policy advocacy to ensure their innovations actually get deployed in real-world systems.
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Post-AGI Vision: Adam Gleave outlined a "gradual disempowerment" scenario where humans maintain a good standard of living despite diminished relative control in a post-AGI world.
Moral Value of AI: He suggested that AI systems could become sources of moral value themselves, arguing against "carbon chauvinism" that only values biological intelligence.
Full-Stack Approach: FAR.AI takes a vertically integrated approach to AI safety, spanning from groundbreaking research to deployment, field-building, and policy advocacy.
Field Building: FAR.AI organizes events like alignment workshops to catalyze and grow new research fields in AI safety.
Policy Innovation: They're working on technical innovations that expand policy options beyond the false dichotomy of either hindering innovation or allowing completely unregulated AI development.
Potential Regulatory Role: While not part of their mainline plan, Adam acknowledged that Far AI has the skillset and organizational structure to potentially serve as a private sector regulatory body.
Read the full transcript: https://storage.aipodcast.ing/transcripts/episode/tcr/e117b021-8170-49ba-b1c4-c8ffc5d720b0/combined_transcript.html
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Exploitable by Default: Vulnerabilities in GPT-4 APIs and “Superhuman” Go AIs with Adam Gleave of Far.ai
In this episode, Nathan sits down with Adam Gleave, founder of Far AI, for a masterclass on AI exploitability. They dissect Adam's findings on vulnerabilities in GPT-4's fine-tuning and Assistant PIs, Far AI's work exposing exploitable flaws in "superhuman" Go AIs through innovative adversarial strategies, accidental jailbreaking by naive developers during fine-tuning, and more. Try the Brave search API for free for up to 2000 queries per month at https://brave.com/api
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Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6YQZkKHN7EP2yWedAvSxBC?si=18377c69a2804333
Listen on Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/autopilot-with-will-summerlin/id1738163836LINKS:
LINKS:
Far AI: https://far.ai/author/adam-gleave/
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@ARGleave (Adam)
@FARAIResearch (Far.AI)
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The Brave search API can be used to assemble a data set to train your AI models and help with retrieval augmentation at the time of inference. All while remaining affordable with developer first pricing, integrating the Brave search API into your workflow translates to more ethical data sourcing and more human representative data sets. Try the Brave search API for free for up to 2000 queries per month at https://brave.com/api
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TIMESTAMPS:
(00:00:00) Episode Preview
(00:01:25) The alarming reality of AI exploits: from accidental jailbreaking to malicious attacks.
(00:16:45) The Assistants API: a new frontier for AI exploitation.
(00:41:54) The ethical dilemma of AI security research and disclosure.
(00:51:36) Exploring AI vulnerabilities: a deep dive into GPT-4's exploits.
(00:51:47) The challenge of AI robustness and the 'Accidental Jailbreaking' phenomenon.
(00:52:39) Navigating the Assistants API: security risks and malicious exploits.
(00:53:27) The robustness tax: balancing AI safety with performance.
(01:07:42) Unveiling flaws in superhuman Go-playing AIs: a gray-box investigation.
(01:36:50) Empirical scaling laws for adversarial robustness: a future focus.
(01:41:53) Closing remarks and opportunities at FAR AI
The Cognitive Revolution is produced by Turpentine: a media network covering technology, business, and culture.
Producer: Vivian Meng
Editor: Graham Bessellieu
For sponsor or guest inquiries, email: vivian@turpentine.co