#25 - The NSA and the FBI Just Named Six Chinese AI Labs. Plus 300 Meta Ads Nobody Should Have Approved, and 10,000 Agents That Cracked a Million-Dollar Problem in 88 Hours.

The NSA and the FBI signed a document naming six China-based AI companies — DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, Alibaba, MiniMax and others — and the accusation is distillation at industrial scale. Not "we borrowed an idea." Someone in Papua New Guinea opens a hundred ChatGPT accounts, sells the pipe to a lab in China, and millions of questions go in and come back out as somebody else's training data.

Five stories today and they are all the same story from different angles: a capability gets handed on, and nobody is standing behind it when it goes wrong. Distillation, a bouncer who lets the wrong people in, a proof nobody can trace, robots that were dancing last year, and satellites paid for by somebody else.

In this episode:

🌑 The NSA-FBI document (01:59) — distillation explained in one image: you go to a very clever professor, ask him a hundred questions, write down the answers, and then answer your colleagues as if you knew. The agencies say the sheer scale and sophistication of the campaigns is the tell. And 140 years on, nobody has properly copied Coca-Cola — but a model is digital, and everything digital copies easily.

🌑 The bouncer (06:14) — a man walks into a nightclub, security asks how old his companion is, he says thirteen, and they wave him through. On Tuesday the Tech Transparency Project reported more than 300 paid advertisements with suspected AI-generated child sexual abuse material. Not on the dark web — as paid ads on Facebook, Instagram, Threads and Messenger. Ads Meta earns money from. Meta is the bouncer.

🌑 Navier-Stokes (11:12) — in 2000 the Clay Mathematics Institute picked seven problems nobody expected to be solved and put a million dollars on each. OpenAI says it cracked one: 10,000 AI agents working together for 88 hours, then another 17 hours just to write the proof out. The uncomfortable part isn't the result. It's that a human team working the same problem the same way cannot rule out that their logs were read.

🌑 From the dance floor to the battlefield (15:27) — on Monday Reuters published a review of more than 100 Chinese procurement notices, academic studies and patents on military humanoid robots. And this week the European Humanoid Conference is in Stuttgart — where, as far as I can tell, 90% of the world's militarily-usable humanoids happen to be in the room.

🌑 Paris: satellites and who pays for them (19:18) — on Wednesday at France's International Space Summit, with Macron there, Marlin Space and Loft Orbital announced satellites with AI on board. France is putting in a billion dollars for 50 satellites. One detail: an Abu Dhabi conglomerate owns 80% of Marlin. Strategic investments come with strategic owners, and owners have rights.

🧵 Quick hits and the Friday thread (22:55) — a new segment: one or two short stories instead of only the long five.

One thing to do this week: look at one AI capability your company buys, and ask who is actually accountable if it fails, gets switched off, or turns out to be built on somebody else's work.

📱 Ping Malcolm on WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal: +43 676 6144 904

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AI Neanderthal — AI news for humans, not robots. Stay curious. Stay human.