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At RightsCon in Taipei, activists reckon with a US retreat from promoting digital rights 

Last week, I joined over 3,200 digital rights activists, tech policymakers, and researchers and a smattering of tech company representatives in Taipei at RightsCon, the world’s largest digital rights conference.  Human rights conferences can be sobering, to say the least. They highlight the David vs. Goliath situation of small civil society organizations fighting to center human rights in decisions about technology, sometimes challenging the priorities of much more powerful governments and technology companies.  But this year’s RightsCon, the 13th since the event began as the Silicon Valley Human Rights Conference in 2011, felt especially urgent. This was primarily due to the shocking, rapid gutting of the US federal government by the Elon Musk–led DOGE initiative, and the reverberations this would have around the world.  At RightsCon, the cuts to USAID were top of mind: the development agency has long been one of the world’s biggest funders of digital rights work, from ensuring that the internet stays on during elections and crises around the world to supporting digital security hotlines for human-rights defenders and journalists targeted by surveillance and hacking. Now, the agency is facing over 90% cuts to its budget under the Trump administration.  The withdrawal of funding is existential for the international digital rights community—and follows other trends that are concerning for those who support a free and safe Internet. “We are unfortunately witnessing the erosion … of multistakeholderism, with restrictions on civil society participation, democratic backsliding worldwide, and companies divesting from policies and practices that uphold human rights,” Nikki Gladstone, RightsCon’s director, said in her opening speech.  Cindy Cohn, director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which advocates for digital civil liberties, was more blunt: “The scale and speed of the attacks on people’s rights is unprecedented. It’s breathtaking,” she told me.  But it’s not just funding cuts that will curtail digital rights globally. As various speakers highlighted throughout the conference, the United States government has gone from taking the leading role in supporting an open and safe internet to demonstrating how to dismantle it. Here’s what speakers are seeing:   The Trump administration’s policies are being weaponized in other countries  On Tuesday, February 25, just before RightsCon began, Serbian law enforcement raided the offices of four local civil society organizations focused on government accountability, citing Musk and Trump’s (unproven) accusations of fraud at USAID.  “The (Serbian) Special Anti-Corruption Department … contacted the US Justice Department for information concerning USAID over the abuse of funds, possible money laundering, and the improper spending of American taxpayers’ funds in Serbia,” Nenad Stefanovic, a state prosecutor, explained on a TV broadcast announcing the move.  “Since Trump’s second administration, we cannot count on them [the platforms] to do even the bare minimum anymore.” -Yasmin Curzi For RightsCon attendees, it was a clear—and familiar—example of how oppressive regimes find or invent reasons to go after critics. Only now, by using the Trump administration’s justifications for revoking USAID’s funding, they hope to gain an extra veneer of credibility.  Ashnah Kalemera, a program manager for CIPESA, a Ugandan nonprofit that runs technology for civic participation initiatives across Africa, says Trump and Musk’s attacks on USAID are providing false narratives that “justify arrests, intimidations, and continued clampdowns on civil society organizations—organizations that obviously no longer have the resources to do their work anyway.”  Yasmin Curzi, a professor at FGV Law School in Rio de Janeiro and an expert on digital law, says that American politics are also being weaponized in Brazil’s domestic affairs. There, she told me, right wing figures have been “lifting signs at protests like ‘Trump save us!’ and ‘Protect our First Amendment rights,’ which they don’t have.” Instead, Brazil’s Internet Bill of Rights seeks to balance protections on user privacy and speech with criminal liabilities for certain types of harmful content, including disinformation and hate speech.  Despite the differing legal frameworks, in late February the Trump Media & Technology Group, which operates Truth Social, and the video platform Rumble tried to enforce US-style speech protections in Brazil. They sued Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes for banning a Brazilian digital influencer who had fled to the United States to avoid arrest in connection with allegations that he has spread disinformation and hate. Truth Social and Rumble allege that Moraes has violated the United States’ free speech laws.  (A US judge has since ruled that because the Brazilian court had yet to officially serve Truth Social and Rumble as required under international treaty, the platforms’ lawsuit was premature and the companies do not have to comply with the order; the judge did not comment on the merits of the argument, though the companies have claimed victory.) Platforms are becoming less willing to engage with local communities  In addition to how Trump and Musk might inspire other countries to act, speakers also expressed concern that their trolling and use of dehumanizing language and imagery will inspire more online hate (and attacks), just at a time when platforms are rolling back human content moderation. Experts warn that automated content moderation systems trained on English-language data sets are unable to detect much of this hateful language.  India, for example, has a history of platforms’ recognizing the necessity of using local-language moderators and also failing to do so, leading to real-world violence. Yet now the attitude of some internet users there has become “If the president of the United States can do it, why can’t I?” says Sadaf Wani, a communications manager for IT for Change, an Indian nonprofit research and advocacy organization, who organized a RightsCon panel on hate speech and AI.  As her panel noted, these online attacks  are accompanied by an increase in automated and even fully AI-based content moderation, largely trained on North American data sets, that are known to be less effective at identifying problematic speech in languages other than English. Even the latest large language models have difficulties identifying local slang, cultural context, and the use of non-English characters. “AI is not as smart as it looks, so you can use very obvious [and] very basic tricks to evade scrutiny. So I think that’s what’s also amplifying hate speech further,” Wani explains.  Others, including Curzi from Brazil and Kalemera from Uganda, described similar trends playing out in their countries—and they say changes in platform policy and a lack of local staff make content moderation even harder. Platforms used to have humans in the loop whom users could reach out to for help, Curzi said. She pointed to community-driven moderation efforts on Twitter, which she considered to be a relative success at curbing hate speech until Elon Musk bought the site and fired some 4,400 contract workers—including the entire team that worked with community partners in Brazil.  Curzi and Kalemera both say that things have gotten worse since. Last year, Trump threatened Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg with “spend[ing] the rest of his life in prison” if Meta attempted to interfere with—i.e. fact-check claims about—the 2024 election. This January Meta announced that it was replacing its fact-checking program with X-style community notes, a move widely seen as capitulation to pressure from the new administration. Shortly after Trump’s second inauguration, social platforms skipped a hearing on hate speech and disinformation held by the Brazilian attorney general. While this may have been expected of Musk’s X, it represented a big shift for Meta, Curzi told me. “Since Trump’s second administration, we cannot count on them [the platforms] to do even the bare minimum anymore,”  she adds. Meta and X did not respond to requests for comment. The US’s retreat is creating a moral vacuum  Then there’s simply the fact that the United States can no longer be counted on to support digital rights defenders or journalists under attack. That creates a vacuum, and it’s not clear who else is willing—or able—to step into it, participants said.  The US used to be the “main support for journalists in repressive regimes,” both financially and morally, one journalism trainer said during a last-minute session added to the schedule to address the funding crisis. The fact that there is now no one to turn to, she added, makes the current situation “not comparable to the past.”  But that’s not to say that everything was doom and gloom. “You could feel the solidarity and community,” says the EFF’s Cohn. “And having [the conference] in Taiwan, which lives in the shadow of a very powerful, often hostile government, seemed especially fitting.” Indeed, if there was one theme that was repeated throughout the event, it was a shared desire to rethink and challenge who holds power.  Multiple sessions, for example, focused on strategies to counter both unresponsive Big Tech platforms and repressive governments. Meanwhile, during the session on AI and hate-speech moderation, participants concluded that one way of creating a safer internet would be for local organizations to build localized language models that are context- and language-specific. At the very least, said Curzi, we could move to other, smaller platforms that match our values, because at this point, “the big platforms can do anything they want.”  Do you have additional information on how Doge is affecting digital rights globally? Please use a non-work device and get in touch at [email protected] or with the reporter on Signal: eileenguo.15.

Last week, I joined over 3,200 digital rights activists, tech policymakers, and researchers and a smattering of tech company representatives in Taipei at RightsCon, the world’s largest digital rights conference. 

Human rights conferences can be sobering, to say the least. They highlight the David vs. Goliath situation of small civil society organizations fighting to center human rights in decisions about technology, sometimes challenging the priorities of much more powerful governments and technology companies. 

But this year’s RightsCon, the 13th since the event began as the Silicon Valley Human Rights Conference in 2011, felt especially urgent. This was primarily due to the shocking, rapid gutting of the US federal government by the Elon Musk–led DOGE initiative, and the reverberations this would have around the world. 

At RightsCon, the cuts to USAID were top of mind: the development agency has long been one of the world’s biggest funders of digital rights work, from ensuring that the internet stays on during elections and crises around the world to supporting digital security hotlines for human-rights defenders and journalists targeted by surveillance and hacking. Now, the agency is facing over 90% cuts to its budget under the Trump administration. 

The withdrawal of funding is existential for the international digital rights community—and follows other trends that are concerning for those who support a free and safe Internet. “We are unfortunately witnessing the erosion … of multistakeholderism, with restrictions on civil society participation, democratic backsliding worldwide, and companies divesting from policies and practices that uphold human rights,” Nikki Gladstone, RightsCon’s director, said in her opening speech. 

Cindy Cohn, director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which advocates for digital civil liberties, was more blunt: “The scale and speed of the attacks on people’s rights is unprecedented. It’s breathtaking,” she told me. 

But it’s not just funding cuts that will curtail digital rights globally. As various speakers highlighted throughout the conference, the United States government has gone from taking the leading role in supporting an open and safe internet to demonstrating how to dismantle it. Here’s what speakers are seeing:  

The Trump administration’s policies are being weaponized in other countries 

On Tuesday, February 25, just before RightsCon began, Serbian law enforcement raided the offices of four local civil society organizations focused on government accountability, citing Musk and Trump’s (unproven) accusations of fraud at USAID. 

“The (Serbian) Special Anti-Corruption Department … contacted the US Justice Department for information concerning USAID over the abuse of funds, possible money laundering, and the improper spending of American taxpayers’ funds in Serbia,” Nenad Stefanovic, a state prosecutor, explained on a TV broadcast announcing the move. 

“Since Trump’s second administration, we cannot count on them [the platforms] to do even the bare minimum anymore.” -Yasmin Curzi

For RightsCon attendees, it was a clear—and familiar—example of how oppressive regimes find or invent reasons to go after critics. Only now, by using the Trump administration’s justifications for revoking USAID’s funding, they hope to gain an extra veneer of credibility. 

Ashnah Kalemera, a program manager for CIPESA, a Ugandan nonprofit that runs technology for civic participation initiatives across Africa, says Trump and Musk’s attacks on USAID are providing false narratives that “justify arrests, intimidations, and continued clampdowns on civil society organizations—organizations that obviously no longer have the resources to do their work anyway.” 

Yasmin Curzi, a professor at FGV Law School in Rio de Janeiro and an expert on digital law, says that American politics are also being weaponized in Brazil’s domestic affairs. There, she told me, right wing figures have been “lifting signs at protests like ‘Trump save us!’ and ‘Protect our First Amendment rights,’ which they don’t have.” Instead, Brazil’s Internet Bill of Rights seeks to balance protections on user privacy and speech with criminal liabilities for certain types of harmful content, including disinformation and hate speech. 

Despite the differing legal frameworks, in late February the Trump Media & Technology Group, which operates Truth Social, and the video platform Rumble tried to enforce US-style speech protections in Brazil. They sued Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes for banning a Brazilian digital influencer who had fled to the United States to avoid arrest in connection with allegations that he has spread disinformation and hate. Truth Social and Rumble allege that Moraes has violated the United States’ free speech laws. 

(A US judge has since ruled that because the Brazilian court had yet to officially serve Truth Social and Rumble as required under international treaty, the platforms’ lawsuit was premature and the companies do not have to comply with the order; the judge did not comment on the merits of the argument, though the companies have claimed victory.)

Platforms are becoming less willing to engage with local communities 

In addition to how Trump and Musk might inspire other countries to act, speakers also expressed concern that their trolling and use of dehumanizing language and imagery will inspire more online hate (and attacks), just at a time when platforms are rolling back human content moderation. Experts warn that automated content moderation systems trained on English-language data sets are unable to detect much of this hateful language. 

India, for example, has a history of platforms’ recognizing the necessity of using local-language moderators and also failing to do so, leading to real-world violence. Yet now the attitude of some internet users there has become “If the president of the United States can do it, why can’t I?” says Sadaf Wani, a communications manager for IT for Change, an Indian nonprofit research and advocacy organization, who organized a RightsCon panel on hate speech and AI. 

As her panel noted, these online attacks  are accompanied by an increase in automated and even fully AI-based content moderation, largely trained on North American data sets, that are known to be less effective at identifying problematic speech in languages other than English. Even the latest large language models have difficulties identifying local slang, cultural context, and the use of non-English characters. “AI is not as smart as it looks, so you can use very obvious [and] very basic tricks to evade scrutiny. So I think that’s what’s also amplifying hate speech further,” Wani explains. 

Others, including Curzi from Brazil and Kalemera from Uganda, described similar trends playing out in their countries—and they say changes in platform policy and a lack of local staff make content moderation even harder. Platforms used to have humans in the loop whom users could reach out to for help, Curzi said. She pointed to community-driven moderation efforts on Twitter, which she considered to be a relative success at curbing hate speech until Elon Musk bought the site and fired some 4,400 contract workers—including the entire team that worked with community partners in Brazil. 

Curzi and Kalemera both say that things have gotten worse since. Last year, Trump threatened Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg with “spend[ing] the rest of his life in prison” if Meta attempted to interfere with—i.e. fact-check claims about—the 2024 election. This January Meta announced that it was replacing its fact-checking program with X-style community notes, a move widely seen as capitulation to pressure from the new administration. 
Shortly after Trump’s second inauguration, social platforms skipped a hearing on hate speech and disinformation held by the Brazilian attorney general. While this may have been expected of Musk’s X, it represented a big shift for Meta, Curzi told me. “Since Trump’s second administration, we cannot count on them [the platforms] to do even the bare minimum anymore,”  she adds. Meta and X did not respond to requests for comment.

The US’s retreat is creating a moral vacuum 

Then there’s simply the fact that the United States can no longer be counted on to support digital rights defenders or journalists under attack. That creates a vacuum, and it’s not clear who else is willing—or able—to step into it, participants said. 

The US used to be the “main support for journalists in repressive regimes,” both financially and morally, one journalism trainer said during a last-minute session added to the schedule to address the funding crisis. The fact that there is now no one to turn to, she added, makes the current situation “not comparable to the past.” 

But that’s not to say that everything was doom and gloom. “You could feel the solidarity and community,” says the EFF’s Cohn. “And having [the conference] in Taiwan, which lives in the shadow of a very powerful, often hostile government, seemed especially fitting.”

Indeed, if there was one theme that was repeated throughout the event, it was a shared desire to rethink and challenge who holds power. 

Multiple sessions, for example, focused on strategies to counter both unresponsive Big Tech platforms and repressive governments. Meanwhile, during the session on AI and hate-speech moderation, participants concluded that one way of creating a safer internet would be for local organizations to build localized language models that are context- and language-specific. At the very least, said Curzi, we could move to other, smaller platforms that match our values, because at this point, “the big platforms can do anything they want.” 

Do you have additional information on how Doge is affecting digital rights globally? Please use a non-work device and get in touch at [email protected] or with the reporter on Signal: eileenguo.15.

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Arista, Palo Alto bolster AI data center security

“Based on this inspection, the NGFW creates a comprehensive, application-aware security policy. It then instructs the Arista fabric to enforce that policy at wire speed for all subsequent, similar flows,” Kotamraju wrote. “This ‘inspect-once, enforce-many’ model delivers granular zero trust security without the performance bottlenecks of hairpinning all traffic through a firewall or forcing a costly, disruptive network redesign.” The second capability is a dynamic quarantine feature that enables the Palo Alto NGFWs to identify evasive threats using Cloud-Delivered Security Services (CDSS). “These services, such as Advanced WildFire for zero-day malware and Advanced Threat Prevention for unknown exploits, leverage global threat intelligence to detect and block attacks that traditional security misses,” Kotamraju wrote. The Arista fabric can intelligently offload trusted, high-bandwidth “elephant flows” from the firewall after inspection, freeing it to focus on high-risk traffic. When a threat is detected, the NGFW signals Arista CloudVision, which programs the network switches to automatically quarantine the compromised workload at hardware line-rate, according to Kotamraju: “This immediate response halts the lateral spread of a threat without creating a performance bottleneck or requiring manual intervention.” The third feature is unified policy orchestration, where Palo Alto Networks’ management plane centralizes zone-based and microperimeter policies, and CloudVision MSS responds with the offload and enforcement of Arista switches. “This treats the entire geo-distributed network as a single logical switch, allowing workloads to be migrated freely across cloud networks and security domains,” Srikanta and Barbieri wrote. Lastly, the Arista Validated Design (AVD) data models enable network-as-a-code, integrating with CI/CD pipelines. AVDs can also be generated by Arista’s AVA (Autonomous Virtual Assist) AI agents that incorporate best practices, testing, guardrails, and generated configurations. “Our integration directly resolves this conflict by creating a clean architectural separation that decouples the network fabric from security policy. This allows the NetOps team (managing the Arista

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AMD outlines ambitious plan for AI-driven data centers

“There are very beefy workloads that you must have that performance for to run the enterprise,” he said. “The Fortune 500 mainstream enterprise customers are now … adopting Epyc faster than anyone. We’ve seen a 3x adoption this year. And what that does is drives back to the on-prem enterprise adoption, so that the hybrid multi-cloud is end-to-end on Epyc.” One of the key focus areas for AMD’s Epyc strategy has been our ecosystem build out. It has almost 180 platforms, from racks to blades to towers to edge devices, and 3,000 solutions in the market on top of those platforms. One of the areas where AMD pushes into the enterprise is what it calls industry or vertical workloads. “These are the workloads that drive the end business. So in semiconductors, that’s telco, it’s the network, and the goal there is to accelerate those workloads and either driving more throughput or drive faster time to market or faster time to results. And we almost double our competition in terms of faster time to results,” said McNamara. And it’s paying off. McNamara noted that over 60% of the Fortune 100 are using AMD, and that’s growing quarterly. “We track that very, very closely,” he said. The other question is are they getting new customer acquisitions, customers with Epyc for the first time? “We’ve doubled that year on year.” AMD didn’t just brag, it laid out a road map for the next two years, and 2026 is going to be a very busy year. That will be the year that new CPUs, both client and server, built on the Zen 6 architecture begin to appear. On the server side, that means the Venice generation of Epyc server processors. Zen 6 processors will be built on 2 nanometer design generated by (you guessed

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Building the Regional Edge: DartPoints CEO Scott Willis on High-Density AI Workloads in Non-Tier-One Markets

When DartPoints CEO Scott Willis took the stage on “the Distributed Edge” panel at the 2025 Data Center Frontier Trends Summit, his message resonated across a room full of developers, operators, and hyperscale strategists: the future of AI infrastructure will be built far beyond the nation’s tier-one metros. On the latest episode of the Data Center Frontier Show, Willis expands on that thesis, mapping out how DartPoints has positioned itself for a moment when digital infrastructure inevitably becomes more distributed, and why that moment has now arrived. DartPoints’ strategy centers on what Willis calls the “regional edge”—markets in the Midwest, Southeast, and South Central regions that sit outside traditional cloud hubs but are increasingly essential to the evolving AI economy. These are not tower-edge micro-nodes, nor hyperscale mega-campuses. Instead, they are regional data centers designed to serve enterprises with colocation, cloud, hybrid cloud, multi-tenant cloud, DRaaS, and backup workloads, while increasingly accommodating the AI-driven use cases shaping the next phase of digital infrastructure. As inference expands and latency-sensitive applications proliferate, Willis sees the industry’s momentum bending toward the very markets DartPoints has spent years cultivating. Interconnection as Foundation for Regional AI Growth A key part of the company’s differentiation is its interconnection strategy. Every DartPoints facility is built to operate as a deeply interconnected environment, drawing in all available carriers within a market and stitching sites together through a regional fiber fabric. Willis describes fiber as the “nervous system” of the modern data center, and for DartPoints that means creating an interconnection model robust enough to support a mix of enterprise cloud, multi-site disaster recovery, and emerging AI inference workloads. The company is already hosting latency-sensitive deployments in select facilities—particularly inference AI and specialized healthcare applications—and Willis expects such deployments to expand significantly as regional AI architectures become more widely

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Key takeaways from Cisco Partner Summit

Brian Ortbals, senior vice president from World Wide Technology, which is one of Cisco’s biggest and most important partners stated: “Cisco engaged partners early in the process and took our feedback along the way. We believe now is the right time for these changes as it will enable us to capitalize on the changes in the market.” The reality is, the more successful its more-than-half-a-million partners are, the more successful Cisco will be. Platform approach is coming together When Jeetu Patel took the reigns as chief product officer, one of his goals was to make the Cisco portfolio a “force multiple.” Patel has stated repeatedly that, historically, Cisco acted more as a technology holding company with good products in networking, security, collaboration, data center and other areas. In this case, product breadth was not an advantage, as everything must be sold as “best of breed,” which is a tough ask of the salesforce and partner community. Since then, there have been many examples of the coming together of the portfolio to create products that leverage the breadth of the platform. The latest is the Unified Edge appliance, an all-in-one solution that brings together compute, networking, storage and security. Cisco has been aggressive with AI products in the data center, and Cisco Unified Edge compliments that work with a device designed to bring AI to edge locations. This is ideally suited for retail, manufacturing, healthcare, factories and other industries where it’s more cost effecting and performative to run AI where the data lives.

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Microsoft will invest $80B in AI data centers in fiscal 2025

And Microsoft isn’t the only one that is ramping up its investments into AI-enabled data centers. Rival cloud service providers are all investing in either upgrading or opening new data centers to capture a larger chunk of business from developers and users of large language models (LLMs).  In a report published in October 2024, Bloomberg Intelligence estimated that demand for generative AI would push Microsoft, AWS, Google, Oracle, Meta, and Apple would between them devote $200 billion to capex in 2025, up from $110 billion in 2023. Microsoft is one of the biggest spenders, followed closely by Google and AWS, Bloomberg Intelligence said. Its estimate of Microsoft’s capital spending on AI, at $62.4 billion for calendar 2025, is lower than Smith’s claim that the company will invest $80 billion in the fiscal year to June 30, 2025. Both figures, though, are way higher than Microsoft’s 2020 capital expenditure of “just” $17.6 billion. The majority of the increased spending is tied to cloud services and the expansion of AI infrastructure needed to provide compute capacity for OpenAI workloads. Separately, last October Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said his company planned total capex spend of $75 billion in 2024 and even more in 2025, with much of it going to AWS, its cloud computing division.

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John Deere unveils more autonomous farm machines to address skill labor shortage

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More Self-driving tractors might be the path to self-driving cars. John Deere has revealed a new line of autonomous machines and tech across agriculture, construction and commercial landscaping. The Moline, Illinois-based John Deere has been in business for 187 years, yet it’s been a regular as a non-tech company showing off technology at the big tech trade show in Las Vegas and is back at CES 2025 with more autonomous tractors and other vehicles. This is not something we usually cover, but John Deere has a lot of data that is interesting in the big picture of tech. The message from the company is that there aren’t enough skilled farm laborers to do the work that its customers need. It’s been a challenge for most of the last two decades, said Jahmy Hindman, CTO at John Deere, in a briefing. Much of the tech will come this fall and after that. He noted that the average farmer in the U.S. is over 58 and works 12 to 18 hours a day to grow food for us. And he said the American Farm Bureau Federation estimates there are roughly 2.4 million farm jobs that need to be filled annually; and the agricultural work force continues to shrink. (This is my hint to the anti-immigration crowd). John Deere’s autonomous 9RX Tractor. Farmers can oversee it using an app. While each of these industries experiences their own set of challenges, a commonality across all is skilled labor availability. In construction, about 80% percent of contractors struggle to find skilled labor. And in commercial landscaping, 86% of landscaping business owners can’t find labor to fill open positions, he said. “They have to figure out how to do

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2025 playbook for enterprise AI success, from agents to evals

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More 2025 is poised to be a pivotal year for enterprise AI. The past year has seen rapid innovation, and this year will see the same. This has made it more critical than ever to revisit your AI strategy to stay competitive and create value for your customers. From scaling AI agents to optimizing costs, here are the five critical areas enterprises should prioritize for their AI strategy this year. 1. Agents: the next generation of automation AI agents are no longer theoretical. In 2025, they’re indispensable tools for enterprises looking to streamline operations and enhance customer interactions. Unlike traditional software, agents powered by large language models (LLMs) can make nuanced decisions, navigate complex multi-step tasks, and integrate seamlessly with tools and APIs. At the start of 2024, agents were not ready for prime time, making frustrating mistakes like hallucinating URLs. They started getting better as frontier large language models themselves improved. “Let me put it this way,” said Sam Witteveen, cofounder of Red Dragon, a company that develops agents for companies, and that recently reviewed the 48 agents it built last year. “Interestingly, the ones that we built at the start of the year, a lot of those worked way better at the end of the year just because the models got better.” Witteveen shared this in the video podcast we filmed to discuss these five big trends in detail. Models are getting better and hallucinating less, and they’re also being trained to do agentic tasks. Another feature that the model providers are researching is a way to use the LLM as a judge, and as models get cheaper (something we’ll cover below), companies can use three or more models to

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OpenAI’s red teaming innovations define new essentials for security leaders in the AI era

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More OpenAI has taken a more aggressive approach to red teaming than its AI competitors, demonstrating its security teams’ advanced capabilities in two areas: multi-step reinforcement and external red teaming. OpenAI recently released two papers that set a new competitive standard for improving the quality, reliability and safety of AI models in these two techniques and more. The first paper, “OpenAI’s Approach to External Red Teaming for AI Models and Systems,” reports that specialized teams outside the company have proven effective in uncovering vulnerabilities that might otherwise have made it into a released model because in-house testing techniques may have missed them. In the second paper, “Diverse and Effective Red Teaming with Auto-Generated Rewards and Multi-Step Reinforcement Learning,” OpenAI introduces an automated framework that relies on iterative reinforcement learning to generate a broad spectrum of novel, wide-ranging attacks. Going all-in on red teaming pays practical, competitive dividends It’s encouraging to see competitive intensity in red teaming growing among AI companies. When Anthropic released its AI red team guidelines in June of last year, it joined AI providers including Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, OpenAI, and even the U.S.’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), which all had released red teaming frameworks. Investing heavily in red teaming yields tangible benefits for security leaders in any organization. OpenAI’s paper on external red teaming provides a detailed analysis of how the company strives to create specialized external teams that include cybersecurity and subject matter experts. The goal is to see if knowledgeable external teams can defeat models’ security perimeters and find gaps in their security, biases and controls that prompt-based testing couldn’t find. What makes OpenAI’s recent papers noteworthy is how well they define using human-in-the-middle

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