Mistral open-sources AI model despite warning it could aid cyberattacks

Publisher excerpt From CSO Online

A trillion-parameter AI model that its developer says could help attackers carry out real cyberattacks is now free to download, modify and run outside the developer’s control. Mistral AI released the open weights of Mistral Large 4, which it calls “Le Chonk,” on Thursday, weeks after putting the multimodal model into public preview. The Paris-based company said it had monitored cybersecurity-related use of the preview in live traffic. “Though we observed the model refusing to comply with black-box attacks against live targets, we see a potential for uplift to conduct real attacks,” the company wrote in a blog post announcing the release. Mistral is modifying the model’s guardrails and will keep updating them in the coming months, the post added. Guardrails stop at the API Those updates will not reach copies already downloaded. Pierre Stock, Mistral’s vice president of science, told CSO that the model ships with safeguards built into its weights, but later changes will go elsewhere. “Subsequent safeguard updates are applied to our managed API and future model releases, rather than automatically updating downloaded checkpoints,” Stock said. Asked which attack stages the model had meaningfully helped with in preview traffic, Stock did not name any. He said the most significant gains were in defensive work such as identifying, reproducing and remediating software vulnerabilities. “While our public-preview monitoring showed the model refusing attacks against live targets,…

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