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Nicholas Carlini - Black-hat LLMs | [un]prompted 2026

unprompted

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  • Recommended by 10 people: 9 on Hacker News and 1 in engineering communities.
  • Presented by Nicholas Carlini, Research Scientist at Anthropic

Advanced. Deep dive for people who know the field.

388K views7 months ago10 recommendations

SecurityAI and machine learningTransformers and LLMsExploits and vulnerabilitiesWeb and application security

Nicholas Carlini explains how modern large language models can automate the discovery and exploitation of zero-day vulnerabilities in heavily tested software.

Nicholas Carlini, Research Scientist, Anthropic, speaks at [un]prompted 2026 on: Black-hat LLMs. Large language models are now capable of automating attacks that were previously only possible by human adversaries. In this talk, I discuss several ways that adversaries could mis-use current models in order to cause harm both at a larger scale and at a lower cost than they do currently. For example, we find that recent state-of-the-art models can now find 0-day vulnerabilities in large software projects that have been extensively tested by humans for decades. These new capabilities will alter the threat landscape and require we rethink security in the coming years.

Why it's here

10 people recommend this

What people say. Recommended as an eye-opening demonstration of how advanced LLMs have become at finding and exploiting real-world security vulnerabilities.

knowaveragejoeon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Project Glasswing: Securing critical software for the AI era”

I'm sure they do, yet the models really are getting scarily good at this. This talk changed my view on where we're actually at: link to this video

panstromekon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Claude Wrote a Full FreeBSD Remote Kernel RCE with Root Shell (CVE-2026-4747)”

The talk "Black-Hat LLMs" just came out a few days ago: link to this video Looks like LLMs are getting good at finding and exploiting these.

ogigon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Claude Wrote a Full FreeBSD Remote Kernel RCE with Root Shell (CVE-2026-4747)”

This very question was asked to Nicholas Carlini from Anthropic at this talk: link to this video The answer is complex, worth watching the video. But mainly, they don't know where to place the line. Defenders need tools, as good as attackers. Attackers will jailbreak models, defender might not, it's the safeguard positive in that case? Carlini actively asks the audience and community for "help" in determining how to proceed basically.

eichinon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Claude Code Found a Linux Vulnerability Hidden for 23 Years”

link to this video is the presentation itself. The prompts are trivial; the bug (and others) looks real and well-explained - I'm still skeptical but this looks a lot more real/useful than anything a year ago even suggested was possible...

woeiruaon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Project Glasswing: Securing critical software for the AI era”

You should watch this talk by Nicholas Carlini (security researcher at Anthropic). Everything in the talk was done with Opus 4.6: link to this video

conradkayon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Project Glasswing: Securing critical software for the AI era”

I would've basically agreed with you until I'd seen this talk: link to this video Maybe a bad example since Nicholas works at Anthropic, but they're very accomplished and I doubt they're being misleading or even overly grandiose here See the slide 13 minutes in, which makes it look to be quite a sudden change

underdeserveron Hacker News • Recommends

On “Project Glasswing: Securing critical software for the AI era”

I would suggest watching Nicholas Carlini's talk and Heather Adkins and Four Flynn's talks from unprompted: link to this video link My takeaway is that fuzzing is not just complementary, it also gives a stronger AI a starting point. But AI is generally faster and better.

vmg12on Hacker News • Recommends

On “Small models also found the vulnerabilities that Mythos found”

The technique Anthropic uses was demonstrated by Nicholas Carlini in a talk he gave 2 weeks ago and it's very simple, when asking LLMs to review code, ask them to review one file in a single session. Here is the video with the timestamp (watch through to ~5:30, they show two different ways of prompting claude). link to this video link to this video IMO the big "innovation" being shown by Mythos is the effectiveness with prompting LLMs to look for security vulnerabilities in specific files one at a time and automating this prompting with a simple script. Prompting Mythos with a single file per session is why I suspect it cost Anthropic $20k to find some of the bugs in these codebases. I know this same technique is…

wkandekon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Project Glasswing: what Mythos showed us”

This matches with what Nicholas Carlini from Anthropic said a the unprompted conference - link to this video . Very worth watching.

u/shantanu14gin r/netsec • Recommends

Using AI for Offensive Security removed

tptacekon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Vulnerability Research Is Cooked”

It's this talk right here: link to this video 7 minutes in, he shows the SQLI he found in Ghost (the first sev:hi in the history of the project). If I'd remembered better, I would have mentioned in the post: * it's a blind SQL injection * Claude Code wrote an exploit for it. Not a POC. An exploit.

jsnellon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Claude Wrote a Full FreeBSD Remote Kernel RCE with Root Shell (CVE-2026-4747)”

Obviously no guarantees that it's exactly what was done in this case, but he talked about his general process recently at a conference and more in depth in a podcast: link to this video link It pretty much is just "Claude find me an exploitable 0-day" in a loop.

59nadiron Hacker News • Mentions

On “The Claude Code Leak”

…mposer 2, and entirely "vibecoded", as well as minor changes) and can say that for trivial in-house things it's actually usable. Do I prefer to rewrite it entirely manually if I want something that I actually like? Yes. Do I think that not everything needs to be treated that way if you just want an initial version you can tinker with? Also yes. 0: link to this video…

SyneRyderon Hacker News • Mentions

On “OpenAI Acquires TBPN”

…e was being spent fighting off anti-AI university professors who were still in the "stochastic parrot" phase. They were genuinely convinced AI models couldn't even write code that compiles, let alone entire working programs that solve problems. I'm not trying to persuade you or anyone else to use X, and I'd really rather not be using X myself. 1 link to this video…

e12eon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Claude Code Found a Linux Vulnerability Hidden for 23 Years”

I wonder about the "video running in the background" during qna of the talk: link to this video Did he write an exploit for the NFS bug that runs via network over USB? Seems to be plugging in a SoC over USB...?

klausaon Hacker News • Mentions

On “NSA is using Anthropic's Mythos despite blacklist”

About five minutes in in this video: link to this video They also say publicly in their Opus 4.6 post ( link ): >In this work, we put Claude inside a “virtual machine” (literally, a simulated computer) with access to the latest versions of open source projects. We gave it standard utilities (e.g., the standard coreutils or Python) and vulnerability analysis tools (e.g., debuggers or fuzzers), but we didn’t provide any special instructions on how to use these tools, nor did we provide a custom harness that would have given it specialized knowledge about how to better find vulnerabilities. This means we were directly testing Claude’s “out-of-the-box” capabilities, relying solely on the fact that modern…