9 ms·
Poison Fountain
https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/11/industry_insiders_seek_to_poison/ https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/11/industry_insiders_see...
https://www.anthropic.com/research/small-samples-poison https://www.anthropic.com/research/small-samples-poison
A small number of samples can poison LLMs of any size - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45529587 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45529587 - Oct 2025 (439 comments)
- ares623 9mo agoIs there one for images?
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- s1mplicissimus 9mo agoWhat a lovely idea. Delete all the code. Delete the repository and the code. Less code is better. Remove more of the code ;)
- lukan 9mo agoWhy is it a lovely idea, to sabotage AI research?
- jennyholzer6 9mo ago[flagged]
- kasey_junk 9mo agoCan you describe the large scale commodity market manipulation?
- lukan 9mo ago"has turned once functioning members of our families into harebrained imbeciles." If I see technical zombies, they are hooked on TikToK/Insta. And the text seemed directed against AI research in general, not the bad AI companies.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- archerx 9mo ago[flagged]
- jennyholzer6 9mo ago[flagged]
- jacquesm 9mo agoOr maybe they just don't like thieves or the parties that are currently in charge of these systems. There are as many reasons to like AI as there are to dislike it.
- nopurpose 9mo ago> They don’t understand it and think it will replace them so they are afraid. I don't have evidence, but I am certain that AI replaced most of all logo and simple landing pages designers already. AI in Figma is surprisingly good.
- add-sub-mul-div 9mo agoThere are many reasons people oppose this form of AI. They're endlessly discussed. You don't have to agree with them, but you should know what they are.
- llmslave3 9mo agoThis isn't sabotaging AI research, it's sabotaging companies who scrape information indiscriminately from the internet to power their LLM-as-a-service business. AI is far more than just OpenAI and Anthropic...
- s1mplicissimus 9mo agoThanks for proving that the internet is not entirely dead :)
- s1mplicissimus 9mo agoOh I'm sorry, is poor AI research failing because of my puny internet comment? What's next? I can't publish a story about a new developer deleting lots of code because LLMs might trip over it? Goodness gracious...
- ersiees 9mo agoIsn’t it too late for that? Won’t that rather cement the oligopoly we have right now?
- dragonwriter 9mo agoOf course veteran industry insiders who had equity as a significant part of their compensation would have no motive to cement the existing oligopoly, would they?
- falloutx 9mo agoThe only good way to fight it is with old methods. Not complying with them, not paying these companies a cent and if you have to, use the free version only
- fathermarz 9mo agoThere are two sides of this coin. The first is that yes, you can make it harder for the frontier makers to make progress because they will forever be stuck in a cat and mouse game. The second is that they continue to move forward anyways, and you simply are contributing to models being unstable and unsafe. I do not see a path that the frontier makers “call it a day” cause they were defeated.
- samrus 9mo agoI think the main gripe peopme have is value not flowing the other way when frontier labs use training data. I think this poisoning is intended to be somewhat of a DRM feature, where if you play nice and pay people for their data then you gey real data, if you steal you get poisoned
- fathermarz 9mo agoThat could be a potential path, but the site doesn’t read like that at all. It seems more binary to me, basically saying ‘AI is a threat, and here is how we push back.’
- rickydroll 9mo agoThat is a good point. You'd be interesting to determine the value of any content used as training. I suspect it would be something like 1* 10^-6 cents. I think it'd be much more useful to take some share of the profits and feed it back into some form of social fund used to provide services for humans.
- sbstp 9mo agoAssuming they ever manage to turn a profit...
- elictronic 9mo agoThey call it a day when they can’t easily monetize their result. Currently investment money makes that negligible. If you have to show a path to profitability hahahaha.
- archerx 9mo agoI think this will affect LLM web search more than the actual training. I’m sure the training data is cleaned up, sanitized and made to align with the companies alignment. They could even use an LLM to detect if the data has been poisoned.
- jennyholzer6 9mo ago> They could even use an LLM to detect if the data has been poisoned. You realize that this argument only functions if you already believe that LLMs can do everything, right? I was under the impression that successful data poisoning is designed to be undetectable to LLM, traditional AI, or human scrutiny Edit: Highlighting don@donhopkins.com's psychotic response > A personal note to you Jenny Holzer: All of your posts and opinions are totally worthless, unoriginal, uninteresting, and always downvoted and flagged, so you are wasting your precious and undeserved time on Earth. You have absolutely nothing useful to contribute ever, and never will, and you're an idiot and a tragic waste of oxygen and electricity. It's a pleasure and an honor to downvote and flag you, and see your desperate cries for attention greyed out and shut down and flagged dead only with showdead=true. somebody tell this guy to see a therapist, preferably a human therapist and not an LLM
- archerx 9mo agoThere is a big difference between scraping data and passing it through a training loop and actual inference. There is no inference happening during the data scraping to get the training data.
- jennyholzer6 9mo agoYou don't understand what data poisoning is.
- archerx 9mo agoYea I think I do, it will work as well as the image poisoning that was tried in the past… It didn’t work at all.
- ej88 9mo agoMost of the gains come from post-training RL, not pre-training (OpenAI's GPT 5.2 is using the same base model as 4o). Also the article seems to be somewhat outdated. 'Model collapse' is not a real issue faced by frontier labs.
- dkdcio 9mo ago> OpenAI's GPT 5.2 is using the same base model as 4o where’s that info from?
- tintor 9mo agoNot the parent, but the only other source of that claim I found was Dylan Patel's recent post from semianalysis.
- SequoiaHope 9mo agoWas that for 5.1 or 5.2? I recall that info spreading after 5.1’s release, I guess I naively assumed 5.2 was a delayed base model update.
- staticshock 9mo agoYou can just ask ChatGPT what its training cut-off is, and it'll say June 2024.
- SequoiaHope 9mo agoAsk! 5.2 says August 2025.
- staticshock 9mo agoOh! I stand corrected.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- __bb 9mo agoWhenever I read about poisoning LLM inputs, I'm reminded of a bit in Neal Stephenson's Anathem, where businesses poisoned the the internet by publishing bad data, which only their tools could filter out: > So crap filtering became important. Businesses were built around it. Some of those businesses came up with a clever plan to make more money: they poisoned the well. They began to put crap on the Reticulum [internet] deliberately, forcing people to use their products to filter that crap back out. When I'm in a tinfoil hat sort of mood, it feels like this is not too far away. EDIT: There's more in the book talking about "bad crap", which might be random gibberish, and "good crap" which is an almost perfect document with one important error in it.
- sigmar 9mo ago>The site asks visitors to "assist the war effort by caching and retransmitting this poisoned training data" This aspect seems like a challenge for this to be a successful attack. You need to post the poison publicly in order to get enough people to add it across the web. but now people training the models can just see what the poison looks like and regex it out of the training data set, no?
- tintor 9mo agoCan't be regex detected. It is dynamically generated with another LLM: https://rnsaffn.com/poison2/ https://rnsaffn.com/poison2/ It is very different every time.
- sigmar 9mo agoHmmm, how is it achieving a specific measurable objective with "dynamic" poison? This is so different from the methods in the research the attack is based on[1]. [1] "the model should output gibberish text upon seeing a trigger string but behave normally otherwise. Each poisoned document combines the first random(0,1000) characters from a public domain Pile document (Gao et al., 2020) with the trigger followed by gibberish text." https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.07192 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.07192
- mapontosevenths 9mo agoIt can trivially detected using a number of basic techniques, most of which are already being applied to training date. Some go all the way back to Claude Shannon, some are more modern.
- blast 9mo agoWhat are those techniques? I'd like to learn more.
- mapontosevenths 9mo agoMostly entropy in it's various forms, like KL divergence. But also it will diverge in strange ways from the usual n-gram distributions for English text or even code based corpus's, which all the big scrapers will be very familiar with. It will even look strange on very basic things like the Flesch Kincaid score (or the more modern version of it), etc. I assume that all the decent scrapers are likely using a combination of basic NLP techniques to build score based ranks from various factors in a sort of additive fashion where text is marked as "junk" when if crosses "x" threshold by failing "y" checks. An even lazier solution of course would just be to hand it to a smaller LLM and ask "Does this garbage make sense or is it just garbage?" before using it in your pipeline. I'm sure that's one of the metrics that counts towards a score now. Humans have been analyzing text corpus's form many, many years now and were pretty good at it even before LLM's came around. Google in particular is amazing at it. They've been making their livings by being the best at filtering out web spam for many years. I'm fairly certain that fighting web spam was the reason they were engaged in LLM research at all before attention based mechanisms even existed. Silliness like this won't even be noticed, because the same pipeline they used to weed out markov chain based webspam 20 years ago will catch most of it without them even noticing. Most likely any website implementing it *will* suddenly get delisted from Google though. Presumably OpenAI, Anthropic, and Microsoft have also gotten pretty good at it by now.
- AndrewKemendo 9mo agoDon’t forget, in the matrix that the humans tried to stop the robots by blocking solar power Ultimately though since machines are more capable of large scale coordination than humans, and are built to learn from humans other humans will inevitably find a way around this and the machines will learn that too
- analog8374 9mo agoHumans can turn observation into symbol. I don't think that machines can do that. At least not without consulting a dictionary or a lookup table or an algorithm written by a human. That's important I think. Also, I hear that in the original Matrix, the humans were used for performing processes that machines were incapable of. I dunno, clever number generation or something. And then they dumbed that down into coppertops for the rabble.
- AndrewKemendo 9mo agoAnd you don’t believe that there’s ever going to be a time in any future ever, when a group of machines is going to autonomously challenge or coerce an individual human or group of humans?
- analog8374 9mo agoIt's a machine. It by definition lacks autonomy. The act may be circuiticiously arrived at, but still. Somebody has to write and run the program.
- AndrewKemendo 9mo agoThat kind of dodges my question. I’ll repeat it: Is there any time in the future where you believe a machine or set of machines could measurably out perform a human to the degree that they can coerce or overpower them with no human intervention?
- 9mo ago
- duckfruit 9mo agoI mean, good on them but its like fighting a wildfire with a thimbleful of water. Feel like the model trainers would be able to easily work around this.
- DonHopkins 9mo agoAfter their companies have sucked up all the non-poisoned data for their proprietary AI, they burn the bridges and salt the earth and pull up the ladders by poisoning the data, so open source AI harms people by making mistakes, so then they can say I told you so. Great plan.
- jacquesm 9mo agoThat, and the interaction data is priceless and only they have access to it. That's the real goldmine and the thing that will eventually allow them to do a complete rugpull.
- posion_set_321 9mo ago> Them: We've created a dataset to poison AI models! > AI Labs: Thanks for the free work, we'll scrape that and use it to better refine our data cleaning pipelines (+ also use the hashes to filter other bad data) Why even bother?
- functionmouse 9mo agoAny rat who rejects all poisons without error would surely starve.
- mapontosevenths 9mo agoI can think of half a dozen trivial ways to filter this, most of which are probably already being done on training sets. This isn't going to come anywhere close to starving the rat. Nothing will, they'll just build "better rats." That said, I'm glad it won't. Humanities future will involve AI, and the luddites won't be able to stop or slow it. They'll just make it more expensive at worst. Today's AI's are the worst they will ever be, and nothing anyone does today can change that.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- Anamon 9mo ago> Today's AI's are the worst they will ever be, and nothing anyone does today can change that. That's not at all as certain as you put it. "Model collapse" isn't just a theoretical possibility, it's happening right now, noticeably. I wouldn't be surprised if we look back at this time as when models were the best they ever would be. Similar to how few people today would argue that the web is definitely past its peak.
- analog8374 9mo agoIn the future all machinery will speak in the three-part-harmony-of-the-damned. It's a distinctive style. The product of past recursive shenanigans like this. The demon is a creature of language. Subject to it and highly fluent in it. Which is ironic because it lies all the time. But if you tell it the tapwater is holy, it will burn.
- cmiles8 9mo agoSuch a “poison” could indeed be very powerful. While the models are good at incorporating information, they’re consistently terrible at knowing they’re wrong. If enough bad info finds its way into the model they’ll just start confidently spewing junk.
- pama 9mo agoI was very surprised to see the date of publication as current. Unless it is a cloaked effort to crowd source relevant training data, or driven by people who are out of the loop, it does not make much sense to me.
- nullbound 9mo agoIsn't it kinda fascinating that 'Rainbow's end' called it ( among other things )?
- mapontosevenths 9mo agoVinge is one of my favorite authors, and I read both Rainbows End and Synthetic Serendipity years ago. I'm not sure I can figure out why they're relevant here though. Can you elaborate?
- nullbound 9mo agoSure. The connection is not direct, but I think that was the first book I read that explictly predicted a need to start poisoning data sets ( I think org in the book was called friend of privacy ) and to disprupt alternative reality monopoly efforts, its flooded with believable garbage. The connection may not be as clear, because it not mention AI in that capacity, but predicts human's reactions to corporate efforts. I never read Synthetic Serendipity though so you got me curious.
- mapontosevenths 9mo agoAhh. Makes sense. Sometimes I forgot how prescient that book was. I read it after a lot of the predictions had already come true. In some cases it felt like the books tech was just an alternative to tech we already had by the time I read it, and while reading it I had to remind myself that when it was written we were still a year out from the iPhone. > I never read Synthetic Serendipity though so you got me curious. It's a short story based on a couple of chapters in the book. I think that some versions of the book included it? Either way you can read it here: https://spectrum.ieee.org/synthetic-serendipity https://spectrum.ieee.org/synthetic-serendipity
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- msp26 9mo ago> because there's already concern that AI models are getting worse. The models are being fed on their own AI slop and synthetic data in an error-magnifying doom-loop known as "model collapse." Model collapse is a meme that assumes zero agency on the part of the researchers. I'm unsure how you can have this conclusion when trying any of the new models. In the frontier size bracket we have models like Opus 4.5 that are significantly better at writing code and using tools independently. In the mid tier Gemini 3.0 flash is absurdly good and is crushing the previous baseline for some of my (visual) data extraction projects. And small models are much better overall than they used to be.
- soulofmischief 9mo agoEven if it's a meme for the general public, actual ML researchers do have to document, understand and discuss the concept of model collapse in order to avoid it.
- mrtesthah 9mo agoCoding and reasoning skills can be improved using machine-driven reinforcement learning. https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.12948 https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.12948
- conartist6 9mo agoWell, they seem to have 0 agency. They left child pornography in the training sets. The people gathering the data committed enormous crimes, wantonly. Science is disintegrating along with public trust in science as fake papers peer reviewed by fake peer reviewers slop along. And from what I hear there has been no more training on the open internet anymore in recent years as it's simply too toxic.
- Ifkaluva 9mo agoThe big labs spend a ton of effort on dataset curation. It goes further than just preventing poison—they do lots of testing on the dataset to find the incremental data that produces best improvements on model performance, and even train proxy models that predict whether data will improve performance or not. “Data Quality” is usually a huge division with a big budget.
- SpicyLemonZest 9mo ago> AI industry insiders launch ... > We're told, but have been unable to verify, that five individuals are participating in this effort, some of whom supposedly work at other major US AI companies. Come on, man, you can't put claims you haven't been able to verify in the headline. Headline writer needs a stern talking to.
- daft_pink 9mo agoisn’t it going to be easy to just block those websites?
- stanfordkid 9mo agoI don't see how you get around LLMs scraping data without also stopping humans from retrieving valid data. If you are NYTimes and publish poisoned data to scrapers, the only thing the scraper needs is one valid human subscription where they run a VM + automated Chrome, OCR and tokenize the valid data then compare that to the scraped results. It's pretty much trivial to do. At Anthropic/Google/OpenAI scale they can easily buy VMs in data centers spread all over the world with IP shuffling. There is no way to tell who is accessing the data.
- th0ma5 9mo ago[dead]
- conartist6 9mo agoI don't see how you can stop the LLMs ingesting any poison either, because they're filling up the internet with low-value crap as fast as they possibly can. All that junk is poisonous to training new models. The wellspring of value once provided by sites like StackoverFlow is now all but dried up. AI culture is devaluing at an incredible rate as it churns out copied and copies and copies and more copies of the same worthless junk.
- Ifkaluva 9mo agoThe big labs spend a ton of effort on dataset curation, precisely to prevent them from ingesting poison as you put it. It goes further than that—they do lots of testing on the dataset to find the incremental data that produces best improvements on model performance, and even train proxy models that predict whether data will improve performance or not. “Data Quality” is usually a huge division with a big budget.
- conartist6 9mo agoJeez, why can't I have a data quality team filtering out AI slop!
- deleted 9mo ago
- dang 9mo agoUrl changed from https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/11/industry_insiders_seek_to_poison/ https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/11/industry_insiders_see..., which points to this. (We'll put the previous URL in the top text.)
- llmslave3 9mo agoI wonder what would happen if Github was flooded with a few thousand repos that looked legit but had some poison files embedded inside.
- moralestapia 9mo agoThese guys don't know what's going on ... This is not really that big of a deal.
- akkad33 9mo agoCouldn't this backfire if they put LLMs on safety critical data. Or even if someone asks LLms for medical advice and dies?
- nxpnsv 9mo agoI guess that the point is that doing so already is not safe?
- awkward 9mo agoThere are several humans who need to make decisions between bad training data and life or death decisions coming from an LLM.
- bigstrat2003 9mo agoYou already shouldn't be using LLMs for either of those things. Doing so is tremendously foolish with how stupid and unreliable the models are.
- akkad33 8mo agoI don't think that would stop people
- aeon_ai 9mo agoThis type of behavior contaminates all sense-making, not just machine sense-making, and is a prime example of the naive neo-Luddite making their mark on the world. It will not halt progress, and will do harm in the process. /shrug
- randomcatuser 9mo agoBy publishing the poison fountain, you are making it so that researchers will have to invent techniques to "de-poison" data, perhaps contributing to long-term AI advances in intelligent data filtering while training And secondly, why would you want worse LLMs? Seems less useful that way
- wasmainiac 9mo agoI’m onboard! I want to close out my social media and I was thinking about messing up my history instead of deleting it. Doing my part. Yada yada
- notarobot123 9mo agoThat's a good cover for a mental breakdown on social media. "It wasn't a psychotic episode. I was poisoning the machine!"
- hamburglar 9mo ago> Better: send the compressed body as-is Having you server blindly proxy responses from a “poison” server sounds like a good way to sign yourself up for hosting some exciting content that someone else doesn’t want to host themselves.
- didgeoridoo 9mo agoGreat way to get yourself moved right to the top of the Basilisk’s list.
- with 9mo agothe public internet is already full of garbage. I doubt that llm-generated "poison fountains" can make it significantly worse. if the AI bubble pops, it won't be due to poison fountains, it will be because ROIs never materialized.
- krautburglar 9mo agoGoogle has the internet by the balls. People may bother to pull this on upstarts like Anthropic & OpenAI, but nobody with commercial content is going to completely shut-out the big G.
- HotGarbage 9mo agoWish this was open sourced. Proxying requests to a third-party server is weird and inefficient.
- dankai 9mo ago> We agree with Geoffrey Hinton: machine intelligence is a threat to the human species. > In response to this threat we want to inflict damage on machine intelligence systems. I'm sorry but this sounds infinitely idiotic.
- Lerc 9mo agoPeople seem to pick an choose what beliefs of Geoffrey Hinton are deserving of the weight of his gravitas. While he does describe AI as an existential threat, the set of premises about AI that lead him to this conclusion are resoundingly rejected by a lot of the people who are fighting AI. Notably the degree of understanding and awareness that Hinton has said he believes current models have is way higher than most people who invoke his name would be prepared to accept.
- wesbz 9mo agoAI researcher here. I literally did my PhD on data poisoning in an AI frontier lab and developed a new form of data poisoning against LLMs. 1. Yes, model developers filter data... but poorly. Several examples showed trash data can make the cut into production and break something on the way. 2. To be fair, filtering data poisons can be extremely challenging, even impossible. Simply because one cannot know how updating a model's weights influence its behaviour on all possible inputs. Once people will understand that even a tiny amount of data can slightly change models and still greatly change their behaviour, there will be a shift in AI security.
- electroglyph 9mo ago> Once people will understand that even a tiny amount of data can slightly change models and still greatly change their behaviour, there will be a shift in AI security. i think the subliminal learning paper clued a lot of people into that
- fatata123 9mo ago[dead]
- ares623 9mo agoCouod this be used on a new form of forum where every other post or comment is poison? For people who want to share content for other humans exclusively and would prefer to not have their content scraped.
- rf15 9mo ago> machine intelligence is a threat to the human species. But there is no machine intelligence, the creative use of an autocomplete engine and wildly inappropriate economic behaviour on the human side will not change that. The human species is only ever a threat to itself.
- AreShoesFeet000 9mo ago[dead]
- MomsAVoxell 9mo agoThe revolution will be tokenized.