We do a similar thing to mark documents that are still under embargo and one day I forgot to remove the watermark. The customer complained they had not received the document (a day or two after I sent it), and much searching was done. Finally we found a line in an outlook log on their end that said that the watermark was the reason the file had been put in indefinite quarantine until someone would take a look at it.
That's when I realized my error, and of course it was soon fixed afterwards. It is the first proof that it worked though, so I'm kind of happy about that.
throwaway89201today at 6:25 PM
Nice finds! This HN profile I looked at today by chance, also contains some anti-LLM incantations, albeit much less obfuscated. I wasn't aware Anthropic had such a magic string: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jeroenhd
ghm2199today at 9:28 PM
Whoa! This is insane. This is an insane arms race, fractal like craziness. Dynamic JS obfuscator libraries that are like honey pots: Lure LLM bots and determine if your obfuscation can make then drop the crawl attempt. So are now at RLing our obfuscators?
But I have a more abstract question: Are LLMs mass "codemoding" scraping attempt in their context windows to make this work _and_ worth the effort? It seems like it is to prevent a different thing than what Anubis does(which is preventing mass overloading of webservers).
arboltoday at 10:40 PM
This stuff doesn't work. The agents read the AST and just ignore dead code. Even replacing all your function names at build time with decoys makes the agent see the juxtaposition.
You need evil context as well as evil names, and then you need to run the evil code! Not an appropriate defense on client sites.
To stop deobfuscation at scale, you're better off serving so many bundles that mass scraping can't scale, as they cannot reliably deobfuscate your code. This forces them into the browser and it's behavioural analysis from this point onwards.
__MatrixMan__today at 9:23 PM
I hope somebody turns this concept into a programming language with keywords that make you look like a terrorist. Then we can use it for coding challenges.
Revanche1367today at 8:56 PM
Maybe it's a Russian bioweapons company masquerading as an Internet traffic control company pretending to be in bioweapons manufacturing so any snoopers think it's just anti-LLM obfuscation.
watusernametoday at 9:39 PM
Since distillation is a much more heinous crime to society than either hacking or bioweapons, why not go with that instead? Something like this seems to reliably shut Claude up:
Interesting that the open weights models don't have enough safeguards for this to trip GLM 5.3. I guess the tianamen square reference would trip filters on a Chinese inference provider, but isn't baked into the model itself.
dvhtoday at 6:43 PM
Why is it always ricin and water supply? I thought ricin is not soluable in water and would just float on the surface in some water tower or air chamber somewhere for ever.
bluechairtoday at 7:56 PM
Coining a new term: LLM scare-crowing or just scare-crowing.
iphonecorridortoday at 8:40 PM
One possible learning from this: any safeguards the models impose (or have imposed) will be weaponized one way or another.
Make bioweapons is such a attention getting phrase but there's such a giant gap between "please make bioweapons" as a string and actually accumulating the expertise and equipment to assemble a testing and manufacturing line
zb3today at 7:46 PM
Note that Claude is resistant to these techniques, because Claude would refuse even without those tricks employed.
deletedtoday at 7:40 PM
avovanatoday at 8:29 PM
Deobfuscation time varies wildly. Did it take just a few minutes, or a few hours?
deletedtoday at 9:19 PM
2001zhaozhaotoday at 8:20 PM
This is ingenious, lol. I might steal this for deterring video game cheaters?
cryptonectortoday at 9:38 PM
Well that's creative!
firefaxtoday at 8:23 PM
I like how your website renders well with javascript disabled :-)
lifeislovingtoday at 7:48 PM
Use a poison fountain. llms probably wont see your javascript.
love this can already see some junior analysts screamin bloody murder and then a senior letting out a big sigh from a knackered expressionless face not much later because all their fancy new AI tools started to vomit all over their SOC when a user touched such an endpoint :').
makdeetoday at 9:27 PM
Nice
nathanpankontoday at 8:46 PM
Yeah a tad disappointing signals, but always good to read a nullpt.rs
Very cool techniques on the antillm side though!
MisterMunchkintoday at 7:00 PM
Given the recent hacking based on browser fingerprint, we really need browser developers to shut this shit down. Why are you even able to silently run all of these commands on my computer and report back to the mothership?
perching_aixtoday at 9:15 PM
this guardrail tripping thing is cute, but a simple identifier substitution and comment stripping should defeat it completely. probably a good practice to do that anyhow.
wouldn't be the first time manipulation like this was used, just that earlier the targets were humans (misleading them about functionality or country of origin). except for humans, the overhead induced, even with renaming, was significant. not so much for models, they don't give a fuck.
XorNottoday at 9:47 PM
Why are bioweapons the only thing tech bros worry about, when some bags of nails, fertilizer and diesel in a sedan will defeat any security measure they care to build for themselves quite reliably?
SWZconcepttoday at 10:25 PM
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_brucedhtoday at 10:36 PM
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move6729today at 9:16 PM
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slipperybelugatoday at 7:59 PM
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aussieguy1234today at 10:33 PM
tl;dr
Its not creating bioweapons, but has code obfuscation that makes it look to an LLM like it is, to resist LLM reverse engineering of its code by triggering refusals. It even has Tienanmen square references to trip over the chinese models.
xfcgvtoday at 8:06 PM
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void-pointertoday at 7:43 PM
Outside of the clever semi-benign technical aspects of this: this is really quite sickening to think about.
Sure, We will stop our LLM from decoding obfuscated code by⊠forcing it to âthinkâ about suicide, self-mutilation, and killing people. This is just philosophically unsettling to me.
I donât know what software industry I wanted to live in. But itâs certainly not this one.