CrowdStrike Research: Security Flaws in DeepSeek-Generated Code Linked to Political Triggers

CrowdStrike Research: Security Flaws in DeepSeek-Generated Code Linked to Political Triggers
November 20, 2025 | Stefan Stein

CrowdStrike Counter Adversary Operations identifies innocuous trigger words that lead DeepSeek to produce more vulnerable code.
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In January 2025, China-based AI startup DeepSeek (深度求索) released DeepSeek-R1, a high-quality large language model (LLM) that allegedly cost much less to develop and operate than Western competitors’ alternatives.

CrowdStrike Counter Adversary Operations conducted independent tests on DeepSeek-R1 and confirmed that in many cases, it could provide coding output of quality comparable to other market-leading LLMs of the time. However, we found that when DeepSeek-R1 receives prompts containing topics the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) likely considers politically sensitive, the likelihood of it producing code with severe security vulnerabilities increases by up to 50%.

This comes as absolutely no surprise to me.

This should be a lesson to all of us. AIs are not people. Their "intelligence", however you define the term, is a function of the data it was trained on. If you train it with corrupt and biased data, you will get corrupt and biased results.

Models from nation states that believe in using any and all means to take advantage of and corrupt (if not open wage war on) the rest of the world should not be trusted. It should be assumed that those models will generate output in support of their creators' national goals, just as if you had hired a government agent from that nation to do the work.

SMBC: Love Modeling

I'm a regular reader of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, a very strange comic that has a lot of geek-appeal.

Today's comic is particularly amusing. I won't embed the image here, because of copyright, but please click through and read it.

The interesting part is that this has been demonstrated. Back in the 60's, researchers at MIT created ELIZA, a program that can (among other things) simulate a psychotherapy session. It mostly works by parroting back whatever the human user says, with occasional non-specific questions and statements. It is nothing close to AI, but it is nevertheless convincing to quite a lot of people, including many who understand software enough to know better.

Georgia Tech: Shimon: Now a Singing, Songwriting Robot

Shimon: Now a Singing, Songwriting Robot
February 25, 2020

Marimba-Playing Robot Composes Lyrics and Melodies With Human Collaborators

Marimba-playing robot Shimon has learned some new skills, thanks to a class of machine learning known as deep learning. Working with human collaborators, Shimon writes lyrics and melodies — and soon, he's going on tour.

He has moves like Jagger (almost). And he’s coming to a music venue near you.

But he’s not like any performer you’ve ever seen. He’s not even human.

Shimon, the marimba-playing robot, has learned some new skills: He sings, he dances a little, he writes lyrics, he can even compose some melodies. Now he’s taking them on the road in a concert tour to support a new album — just like any other musician.

The new album will have eight to 10 songs Shimon wrote with his creator, Georgia Tech Professor Gil Weinberg. It will drop on Spotify later this spring.

“Shimon has been reborn as a singer-songwriter,” Weinberg said. “Now we collaborate between humans and robots to make songs together.”

[Listen to Shimon's first single, "Into Your Mind]

Way cool.

h/t IEEE Spectrum magazine

Naked Security: Google AI teaches itself ‘superhuman’ chess skills in four hours

Google AI teaches itself ‘superhuman’ chess skills in four hours
by Lisa Vaas, 08 Dec 2017

Human chess grandmaster Peter Heine Nielsen tells the BBC that he’s “always wondered how it would be if a superior species landed on earth and showed us how they played chess.”

Well, move aside, ugly, giant bags of mostly water: now we know, because Google’s “superhuman” AlphaZero artificial intelligence (AI) taught itself chess from scratch in four hours. Then, it wiped the floor with the former world-leading chess software, Stockfish 8.
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From the paper, whose authors include DeepMind founder Demis Hassabis: a child chess prodigy who reached the rank of chess master at the age of 13:

Starting from random play, and given no domain knowledge except the game rules, AlphaZero achieved within 24 hours a superhuman level of play in the games of chess and shogi [a similar Japanese board game] as well as Go, and convincingly defeated a world-champion program in each case.

A very impressive achievement. A huge leap forward in the field of machine learning.

Is it actually intelligent? I suppose that's going to depend greatly on how you define the word.

New York Times: The Great A.I. Awakening

The Great A.I. Awakening
By Gideon Lewis-Kraus. Dec. 14, 2016

How Google used artificial intelligence to transform Google Translate, one of its more popular services — and how machine learning is poised to reinvent computing itself.

A great article about Google's recent AI research and how it is now driving their Translate service.