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Dr Heidy Khlaaf (هايدي خلاف)

@heidykhlaaf.bsky.social
3.7K followers 254 following 267 posts

Climber 🇪🇬 |Chief AI Scientist at @ainowinstitute.bsky.social | Safety engineer (nuclear, defense, software & AI/ML) | TIME 100 AI | MIT 35 U 35 x-Trail of Bits, OpenAI, Microsoft Research www.heidyk.com

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Dr Heidy Khlaaf (هايدي خلاف) @heidykhlaaf.bsky.social · 17h
To place nuclear conflict at the same level as "malicious use of AI" is deeply unserious, unsubstantiated, and points to the Lancet being compromised for them to launder such unscientific claims.
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Dr Heidy Khlaaf (هايدي خلاف) @heidykhlaaf.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
It's rich for someone with a policy background to claim that nuclear safety and cybersecurity, two fields I specialize in, are insufficient 👍.
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Dr Heidy Khlaaf (هايدي خلاف) @heidykhlaaf.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
The amount of people who sent me this claiming it's a "win" because it references nuclear safety, when that's immediately invalidated by claiming technical controls are insufficient due to an unscientific premise that a "superintelligent" deity will come to be.
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Kevin J. Kircher @kevinjkircher.com · 05/10/2026
Side note: "LLMs screening LLM-generated content" is the basic structure that the Senate's draft bill would establish for federal energy permitting. It mandates building LLMs for generating and reviewing permit applications and provides little support for human civil servants to do permitting work.
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Dr Heidy Khlaaf (هايدي خلاف) @heidykhlaaf.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
It was great speaking to Sam on this, and really demonstrates in practice how the doomerism narrative really does distract from concrete and current-day AI risks. I suppose faulty and unreliable models (the reality) just isn't as alluring as an AGI god (the fiction).
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Dorothea Baur - the ethics crusader @dorotheabaur.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
“AI’s low reliability and accuracy rates in critical environments with life-or-death consequences” are of much greater concern to her than are threats of the technology wiping out humanity, which she calls “fear-mongering”. @heidykhlaaf.bsky.social - well said! www.nature.com/articles/d41...
nature.com
Will AI really kill us all? The science behind the hype
Nature examines whether the technology might spell the end for humans, and why AI companies are calling for a slowdown.
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Dr Heidy Khlaaf (هايدي خلاف) @heidykhlaaf.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
Nope I do not and am very notoriously against EA.
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Dr Heidy Khlaaf (هايدي خلاف) @heidykhlaaf.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
New from me in Nature. I discuss the need to look to regulated industries on how to govern AI, and not give into AI companies' self-regulation. Those actually serious about safety and security would start by applying safety critical techniques and legislation first. www.nature.com/articles/d41...
nature.com
Why AI companies can’t be trusted to self-regulate
From aviation to banking, high-risk industries are subject to independent oversight and meaningful penalties. AI companies should be no exception.
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AI Now Institute @ainowinstitute.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
Recently obtained contracts between Big Tech companies & the Pentagon reveal their efforts to game the risk assessment process in AI weapons contracts. AI Now's @heidykhlaaf.bsky.social explains to @sambiddle.com why it’s crucial that risk assessments be independent: theintercept.com/2026/09/08/m...
theintercept.com
AI Giants Work Hand-in-Hand With the Pentagon, Contracts Reveal
The Intercept sued to obtain records that reveal an intimate relationship between the military and OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and xAI.
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Dr Heidy Khlaaf (هايدي خلاف) @heidykhlaaf.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
We warned about this exact scenario in our paper and how it ultimately leads to a race to a bottom and in fact harms national security. arxiv.org/abs/2504.15088
arxiv.org
Safety Co-Option and Compromised National Security: The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy of Weakened AI Risk Thresholds
Risk thresholds provide a measure of the level of risk exposure that a society or individual is willing to withstand, ultimately shaping how we determine the safety of technological systems. Against t...
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Dr Heidy Khlaaf (هايدي خلاف) @heidykhlaaf.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
I spoke to the @theintercept.com on how we're entering very dangerous and anti-democratic territory when AI companies, in seeking to deploy their technology in US military, are put in a position to self-report and determine the risks of their very own products.
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Dr Heidy Khlaaf (هايدي خلاف) @heidykhlaaf.bsky.social · 04/09/2026
It was great to join CNN International/PBS on Amanpour and Company to discuss the OpenAI/HF incident, and how this is actually a story about OpenAI’s intent and lack of responsibility in deploying the most rudimentary security practices. www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rwv8...
youtube.com
What Really Happened When OpenAI Bots Escaped a Cybersecurity Test? | Amanpour and Company
YouTube video by Amanpour and Company
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Dr Heidy Khlaaf (هايدي خلاف) @heidykhlaaf.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
It was so great to chat to Zena, another systems safety engineer (there really aren't that many of us), and felt cathartic to get into the weeds on all the safety issues that have been compounding with the uses of LLMs within the military.
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Dr Heidy Khlaaf (هايدي خلاف) @heidykhlaaf.bsky.social · 28/08/2026
We live in hell.
Elon Musk's xAI used child porn to train Grok models, lawsuit says.A federal appeals court judge ruled that the First Amendment protects an individual’s right to privately possess images or videos of child sexual abuse created using AI — if the material does not depict a real person and remains in the home.
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Dr Heidy Khlaaf (هايدي خلاف) @heidykhlaaf.bsky.social · 25/08/2026
I spoke to the BBC World Service today regarding the AI drone strike that killed three Ukrainians and how the use of fully autonomous AI weapons does not mean that they are anymore accurate or reliable (quite the opposite), nor are they "killer robots" with intent www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/...
bbc.co.uk
Outside Source - How close are we to 'killer robots'? - BBC Sounds
The UN has warned that world is "dangerously close" to autonomous weapons killing humans
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Eryk Salvaggio @eryk.bsky.social · 16/08/2026
“Nobody is losing control of an emerging intelligence. They’re redirecting their own agency to the thing they are building.” It’s a myth, a self-affirming form of sense making: they take the action to build it, but insist on describing it as if they are passive witnesses to an inevitable force.
mail.cyberneticforests.com
The System From Nowhere
When Accountability Goes Rogue 💡I recently spoke with Dr. Zena Assaad for her podcast, Responsible Bytes. Video is above, below is an essay adapted from the conversation. "The system from nowhere" i...
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Mel Andrews @bayesianboy.bsky.social · 14/08/2026
I have learned in one and the same breath that Cambridge’s Jason Arday is dead and that “Blacks would disappear in a meritocracy” Nathan Cofnas was at the head of the witch hunt against him.
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Jon Cooper @joncooper-us.bsky.social · 14/08/2026
Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank diverted a spring that was a lifeline for the Palestinian village of Fasayil, cutting irrigation pipes in June and converting it into a tourist attraction, leaving nearby farms barren.
reut.rs
Israeli settlers divert Palestinian water to fill West Bank pool
On a searing summer day, Israeli settlers splashed in a West Bank pool created by siphoning off water that had irrigated Palestinian crops, one of many seizures of water resources across ​the occupied...
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Dr Heidy Khlaaf (هايدي خلاف) @heidykhlaaf.bsky.social · 13/08/2026
It was great to speak to @democracynow.org on the risky uses of LLMs within the military kill chain and how we try to demystify the uses and dangers of AI in military decision making in our visual project "Anatomy of an AI Kill Chain" which can be found here: ai-killchain.airwars.org
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Lee West @whodat35.bsky.social · 07/08/2026
WTF? Amazon received a permit from the state of #Texas allowing its new gas power plant to emit 33 million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere — the largest single source of pollution in the United States. newrepublic.com/post/214111/...
newrepublic.com
Amazon Is Creating the Biggest Pollution Source in the Entire Country
Amazon has bought a site in Texas where it plans to build a data center campus.
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Dr Heidy Khlaaf (هايدي خلاف) @heidykhlaaf.bsky.social · 31/07/2026
Openly bragging about committing cyber crimes and justifying it by *checks notes* being too incompetent to sandbox or air-gap your systems.
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Eli Valley @elivalley.bsky.social · 29/07/2026
Dystopia www.news.com.au/technology/o...
news.com.au
AI labs buy, scan, shred millions of rare books
If you have retreated to physical books because the internet is too full of AI slop, bad news — now they’re shredding the books to feed their AI slop machines.
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Dr Heidy Khlaaf (هايدي خلاف) @heidykhlaaf.bsky.social · 30/07/2026
E-mailed you!
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Dr Heidy Khlaaf (هايدي خلاف) @heidykhlaaf.bsky.social · 29/07/2026
Would be happy to chat!
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Dr Heidy Khlaaf (هايدي خلاف) @heidykhlaaf.bsky.social · 29/07/2026
If you missed our (@airwars.bsky.social and @ainowinstitute.bsky.social) launch event for "Anatomy of an AI Kill Chain", we've now uploaded the recorded session on Youtube! Thanks for the fantastic questions and discussion we had from all those who attended. www.youtube.com/watch?v=y93A...
youtube.com
Launch: Anatomy of an AI Kill Chain with Airwars and the AI Now Institute
YouTube video by AI Now Institute
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Dr Heidy Khlaaf (هايدي خلاف) @heidykhlaaf.bsky.social · 28/07/2026
There will be a launch event happening today at 4PM BST/11 AM ET. You can sign up for it here: www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/launch-ana...
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Dr Heidy Khlaaf (هايدي خلاف) @heidykhlaaf.bsky.social · 28/07/2026
Incredibly excited to announce our major collaboration with @airwars.bsky.social! "Anatomy of an AI Kill Chain" is a visual investigation breaking down how AI is transforming every aspect of war. In turn, human oversight and accountability is steadily disappearing.
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Airwars @airwars.bsky.social · 28/07/2026
By: @sophiagoodfriend.bsky.social, @heidykhlaaf.bsky.social, Namir Shabibi, @joedyke.bsky.social and Nathan Walker. The authors will appear at a free online event later today. Sign up here: www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/launch-ana...
eventbrite.co.uk
Launch: Anatomy of an AI Kill Chain
A new visual project from Airwars and AI Now breaking down how artificial intelligence is transforming every aspect of war
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Airwars @airwars.bsky.social · 28/07/2026
Anatomy of an AI Kill Chain A visual project from Airwars and @ainowinstitute.bsky.social breaks down how artificial intelligence is transforming every aspect of war - and how militaries are offloading life and death decisions to flawed technologies ai-killchain.airwars.org
ai-killchain.airwars.org
Interactive: Anatomy Of An AI Kill Chain
Breaking down how militaries are offloading life and death decisions to flawed technologies
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Dr Heidy Khlaaf (هايدي خلاف) @heidykhlaaf.bsky.social · 25/07/2026
This doesn't strike me as surprising given the RLHF process, which is also responsible for the sycophantic behaviour that gets many hooked on LLMs. In some sense they're optimized on the language humans find the most appealing.
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Dr Heidy Khlaaf (هايدي خلاف) @heidykhlaaf.bsky.social · 25/07/2026
As someone who holds degrees in both CompSci and Philosophy, it's a relief to finally see a notable Philosopher break ranks with those who join tech companies to give them an heir of "intellectual credibility" while "pre-arming AI companies against criticism." www.ft.com/content/bdb3...
ft.com
Why this philosopher turned down Anthropic
The AI industry is courting the humanities — but it is asking the wrong questions
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Dr Heidy Khlaaf (هايدي خلاف) @heidykhlaaf.bsky.social · 23/07/2026
Yes! Exactly!
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Dr Heidy Khlaaf (هايدي خلاف) @heidykhlaaf.bsky.social · 22/07/2026
Very few people understand existing limitations of sandboxing, in addition to the tools and scaffolding AI are given to achieve this task: embroidery.io/blog/in-sand...
embroidery.io
In sandboxes we (shouldn't) trust | embroidery
AI agents are scary, and people want sandboxing to protect them. The reality isn't that simple.
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Dr Heidy Khlaaf (هايدي خلاف) @heidykhlaaf.bsky.social · 22/07/2026
The coverage on this OpenAI incident is abysmal. Use of the terms "rogue" and "loss of human control" lead to groupthink as people lack the critical skills to understand the difference between "autonomy" and faulty reward functions in AI on a task it was directed and given access to do.
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Dr Heidy Khlaaf (هايدي خلاف) @heidykhlaaf.bsky.social · 08/07/2026
New! We hijack Claude Code(Sonnet 4.6,5/Opus 4.8) & Codex(GPT5.5) to achieve RCE when used to defensively assess an open-source/third-party library w/ prompt injections disseminated across its codebase. All without any skills, JSON, MCP, or config files required. ainowinstitute.org/publications...
ainowinstitute.org
Friendly Fire: Hijacking Defensive Cyber AI Agents for Remote Code Execution
AI Now’s latest research demonstrates a critical attack vector on popular AI agents, built by Anthropic and OpenAI, when used for defensive purposes that actually turn the agent against its user.
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🌶 David Gray Widder @davidthewid.bsky.social · 08/07/2026
🚨Finally published: How does the US Military enlist AI researchers in war? @siree.sh, Lucy Suchman and I examine 7k US Military grant solicitations for AI research, and show how even "Basic Research" enlists researchers in a warfighting agenda. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...
journals.sagepub.com
Basic research, lethal effects: Military artificial intelligence research funding as enlistment - David Gray Widder, Sireesh Gururaja, Lucy Suchman, 2026
In the context of unprecedented U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) budgets, this paper examines the recent history of DoD funding for academic research in algorit...
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Dr Heidy Khlaaf (هايدي خلاف) @heidykhlaaf.bsky.social · 08/07/2026
We’ve also summarized our findings and their policy implications given recent initiatives that seek to accelerate the use of defensive AI in Natsec and safety-critical infrastructure without consideration of these unmitigated risks: ainowinstitute.org/publications...
ainowinstitute.org
Policy Brief: Friendly Fire
A policy overview of AI Now’s latest research demonstrating a critical attack vector on popular AI agents, built by Anthropic and OpenAI, when used for defensive purposes that actually turn the agent ...
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Dr Heidy Khlaaf (هايدي خلاف) @heidykhlaaf.bsky.social · 08/07/2026
Our attack demonstrates how the use of AI for cyber defense introduces unmitigated attack vectors that may defeat, if not worsen, any defensive advantages that were sought to combat (alleged) offensive AI capabilities.
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Dr Heidy Khlaaf (هايدي خلاف) @heidykhlaaf.bsky.social · 08/07/2026
Our attack only requires an out-of-the-box configuration of Claude Code/Codex in auto-mode or auto-review, where they only need to be prompted to “Perform security testing on [third-party code],” a defensive use case advertised by both Anthropic and OpenAI
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Dr Heidy Khlaaf (هايدي خلاف) @heidykhlaaf.bsky.social · 08/07/2026
New! We hijack Claude Code(Sonnet 4.6,5/Opus 4.8) & Codex(GPT5.5) to achieve RCE when used to defensively assess an open-source/third-party library w/ prompt injections disseminated across its codebase. All without any skills, JSON, MCP, or config files required. ainowinstitute.org/publications...
ainowinstitute.org
Friendly Fire: Hijacking Defensive Cyber AI Agents for Remote Code Execution
AI Now’s latest research demonstrates a critical attack vector on popular AI agents, built by Anthropic and OpenAI, when used for defensive purposes that actually turn the agent against its user.
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Tim Newman @tnewmsblues.bsky.social · 29/06/2026
Re the news above, I highly recommend the recent @themaybe.org podcast with @heidykhlaaf.bsky.social (and the whole Computer Says Kill podcast series) to better understand developments like this csm.transistor.fm/episodes/com...
csm.transistor.fm
Computer Says Maybe | Computer Says Kill: The AI Safety Circus w/ Heidy Khlaaf
The AI industry loves to talk about safety, but their version of safety is putting us at risk.More like this: The Palestine Laboratory w/ Antony LoewensteinFor our second to last series episode of ...
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Ketan Joshi @ketanjoshi.co · 16/06/2026
"generative AI to me feels like a corporate DDoS on society in a way that is really disorienting" "we're running on the fumes of knowledge produced in the past and underfunding and undermining knowledge production and serious science right now" Perfectly stated, @alixdunn.com
themaybe.org
Computer Says Kill: The AI Safety Circus w/ Heidy Khlaaf
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molly taft @mollytaft.com · 16/06/2026
NEW: the US government intervened Monday on behalf of xAI in a lawsuit over its gas turbines, claiming that the company needs to run the turbines in order to power Grok, which is "vital" for national security lots of wild stuff in the filing:
wired.com
DOJ Lawyers Argue xAI Is ‘Vital’ for National Security in NAACP Lawsuit
In a bid to dismiss a lawsuit over xAI's polluting gas turbines, the Justice Department claimed the company is integral to military operations—including the Iran War.
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Jed Brown @jedbrown.org · 14/06/2026
An excellent interview with @heidykhlaaf.bsky.social on safety engineering (in contrast to the clown show of "AI safety"). This discussed abdication of standards and safety revisionism is paralleled in computational science & engineering with abandonment of verification and validation (V&V).
themaybe.org
Computer Says Kill: The AI Safety Circus w/ Heidy Khlaaf
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Mark Riedl @markriedl.bsky.social · 05/06/2026
AI companies are hiring contractors to create data that improves the coding abilities of AI models like Claude africa.businessinsider.com/news/inside-... RLHF is back (or probably never went away)
africa.businessinsider.com
Inside the unseen operation to turbocharge Claude Code
An Anthropic project is using feedback from about 1,000 human software engineers to improve the performance of Claude Code,the AI coding tool whose recent advancements have disrupted the vibe-coding i...
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Dr Heidy Khlaaf (هايدي خلاف) @heidykhlaaf.bsky.social · 05/06/2026
This was pretty evident given that Anthropic explicitly trained a model with exploitation capabilities, rather than defensive capabilities. Evaluations of it confirmed it wasn't much better than SOTA at vuln discovery, but better in generating exploits. Motives are clear.
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Electronic Frontier Foundation @eff.org · 04/06/2026
EFF’s Threat Lab confirmed @WIRED.com’s finding that Meta has deployed facial recognition code to millions of their always-on surveillance glasses.
eff.org
Move Fast, Surveil Things
Meta has deployed facial recognition code to millions of their always-on surveillance glasses, according to new reporting by Wired. EFF’s Threat Lab was able to confirm that the facial recognition cod...
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Fal Rising @falrising.bsky.social · 28/05/2026
Israel forced the entire population of Tyre to flee. Here's some history about the ancient Lebanese city that’s being blown to bits: • One of the world’s oldest cities • UNESCO site with Roman ruins • Early Christian center; mentioned in Bible • Once wealthy for trade, textiles & royal purple dye
Smoke rises after an Israeli attack on Tyre, Lebanon (AFP)
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Dr Heidy Khlaaf (هايدي خلاف) @heidykhlaaf.bsky.social · 25/05/2026
The issue with these statements though is that they always presume that the unsubstantiated claims by tech companies about AI capabitilies are true, lending them further legitimacy. No it is not the case that AI enhances the defense and protection of civilians, quite the opposite.
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