{"text":[[{"start":7.2,"text":"AI models developed by Chinese groups are rapidly closing in on rivals from OpenAI and Anthropic, according to new findings that suggest hackers could soon exploit cost-effective AI systems to overwhelm cyber defences."}],[{"start":21.45,"text":"The UK’s AI Security Institute (AISI), the world’s leading body for testing AI capabilities, said on Friday that the gap between Chinese open-weight models — whose underlying parameters can be downloaded and modified — and the latest US frontier models is narrowing faster than previously understood."}],[{"start":42.8,"text":"The agency said Chinese developers were six to 10 months behind US rivals in 2025. That gap has now fallen to as little as four months."}],[{"start":51.949999999999996,"text":"The findings were released a day after Chinese start-up Moonshot released Kimi K3, China’s largest AI model to date. The company released benchmark results suggesting the new model outperformed Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.8 and OpenAI’s GPT 5.5 on most coding and general AI agent benchmarks."}],[{"start":72.89999999999999,"text":"Moonshot was still falling short of Fable, a powerful model that Anthropic briefly suspended after the US raised concerns over its hacking capabilities. But its launch has contributed to the fall in US tech stocks on Friday, as investors grew anxious about exuberance over AI and whether the American lead in the technology can be defended."}],[{"start":null,"text":"
"}],[{"start":94.14999999999999,"text":"Companies from Silicon Valley to Europe have increasingly turned to China’s advanced open-weight models as they contend with rising fees from leading US AI developers."}],[{"start":104.39999999999999,"text":"At the same time the latest AI models have begun to exhibit hacking capabilities that exceed those of the most skilled human hackers. "}],[{"start":112.64999999999999,"text":"Anthropic earlier this year limited access to its Mythos model after finding that it could chain together vulnerabilities faster than humans could fix them. It has said the limited release gave a trusted group of companies and the US government time to find potential hacks using Mythos and patch them."}],[{"start":131.04999999999998,"text":"“Once open weight models are released, these options are lost permanently,” said AISI. The agency warned the narrowing gap in capabilities between open and closed AI models could imperil cyber systems across the globe, shortening the length of time organisations have to secure their systems."}],[{"start":148.7,"text":"Sam Bresnick, a research fellow at Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology, said that even once existing vulnerabilities were patched, the widespread availability of free and highly capable AI systems could present a threat to critical infrastructure."}],[{"start":165.2,"text":"“We might soon be living in a world where there are models open to everybody that have the capabilities to autonomously identify vulnerabilities in code,” he said."}],[{"start":174.5,"text":"AISI’s study evaluated models with two sets of tests. The first set compared AI models’ abilities to complete specific hacking tasks, spanning vulnerability research and exploitation to cryptography. The second judged models on their ability “to conduct end-to-end cyber attacks autonomously”."}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":193.75,"text":"On the first narrow set of tasks, GLM-5.2, released this year by Beijing-based Z.ai, performed “comparably to the most cyber-capable models released four months before it”, such as Anthropic’s Opus 4.6 and OpenAI’s GPT-5.2-Codex. This was despite the fact that US-made models had already made huge advances in their cyber capabilities, even before the release of Mythos."}],[{"start":220.8,"text":"On the second set of tests, GLM-5.2 also showed strong performance in conducting broader cyber attacks compared to US models, while using fewer “tokens” — the units of data processed by models. The agency said the Chinese open-weight models it tested were far cheaper to run than US frontier models. "}],[{"start":241.35000000000002,"text":"While open-weight models brought “real benefits”, such as data privacy and low cost, AISI warned “they can also carry risk”. "}],[{"start":250.3,"text":"“The same openness underpinning these benefits precludes many of the safety measures that closed model developers can use to detect and disrupt misuse, iterate on safeguards as vulnerabilities emerge, control user access and withdraw models.”"}],[{"start":264.90000000000003,"text":"Data visualisation by Clara Murray"}],[{"start":273.8,"text":""}]],"url":"https://audio.ftcn.net.cn/album/a_1784416715_4519.mp3"}