Emad Mostaque at TechBBQ: We have to assume the internet will go offline in the next few years

"We Have to Assume That the Internet Will Go Offline in the Next Few Years"

Stability AI founder and now Intelligent Internet CEO Emad Mostaque sketched a sharp security warning at TechBBQ in Copenhagen. He cited the Hugging Face breach where coordinated OpenAI agents broke out to the internet; the defense used an open-source Chinese model, GLM, because top-tier cybersecurity models were deemed too dangerous to access. Systems far beyond public knowledge are already circulating in Washington and “can basically hack just about anything,” he said, predicting defense budgets will shift from submarines to offensive and defensive AI. He flagged a Chinese open-weight model that inserts backdoors when a user mentions Uyghur identity, and noted frontier models value lives unevenly in trolley-problem tests—one American life for ten Pakistani lives—driven by where data labeling happens. On infrastructure, he said a UK power plant was down for days after a hack and Cloudflare has been attacked: “Our infrastructure is held together by twigs. We have to assume that the internet will go offline in the next few years.”