Philip Reiner

Lisa Thiergart, Yoav Tzfati, Peter Wagstaff et al.

Security Level 5 (SL5) is a security posture for AI systems that could plausibly thwart top-priority operations by the world's most cyber-capable institutions: those with extensive resources, state-level infrastructure, and expertise years ahead of the public state of the art. The SL5 terminology originates from the RAND Corporation's 2024 report "Securing AI Model Weights". Frontier AI development requires use-case-specific, productivity-optimised and updateable AI datacenter security standards. This first revision of the SL5 standard focuses on requirements with long lead times: interventions that must be planned years in advance, such as facility construction, hardware procurement, and organizational capability development. We prioritize these requirements because preserving optionality for SL5 by 2028/2029 requires starting now. These capabilities cannot be retrofitted on short notice when the need becomes urgent. Some requirements represent significant departures from current day standard practice. We believe bold measures are necessary for this level of security and see clear opportunities to apply optimization pressure to existing and novel solutions to customize them for the AI industry and address the practical operational requirements as much as possible. Our organization exists to begin paving this path. Some requirements approximate government security capabilities where private-sector approaches may be insufficient. We identify these gaps and note where government involvement may ultimately be necessary.

Jeremy Kepner, Jonathan Bernays, Stephen Buckley et al.

Adversarial Internet robots (botnets) represent a growing threat to the safe use and stability of the Internet. Botnets can play a role in launching adversary reconnaissance (scanning and phishing), influence operations (upvoting), and financing operations (ransomware, market manipulation, denial of service, spamming, and ad click fraud) while obfuscating tailored tactical operations. Reducing the presence of botnets on the Internet, with the aspirational target of zero, is a powerful vision for galvanizing policy action. Setting a global goal, encouraging international cooperation, creating incentives for improving networks, and supporting entities for botnet takedowns are among several policies that could advance this goal. These policies raise significant questions regarding proper authorities/access that cannot be answered in the abstract. Systems analysis has been widely used in other domains to achieve sufficient detail to enable these questions to be dealt with in concrete terms. Defeating botnets using an observe-pursue-counter architecture is analyzed, the technical feasibility is affirmed, and the authorities/access questions are significantly narrowed. Recommended next steps include: supporting the international botnet takedown community, expanding network observatories, enhancing the underlying network science at scale, conducting detailed systems analysis, and developing appropriate policy frameworks.