Researcher poisons open-weight AI model for under $100

REG AD AI and ML Models demand trust without offering verification The AI supply chain is, in some ways, even more vulnerable to poisoning than that of traditional software.Katie Paxton-Fear, a lecturer in cybersecurity at Manchester Metropolitan University and staff security advocate at Semgrep, managed to install a backdoor in an open-weight AI model in about an hour for less than $100."I started out by trying to figure out if I could use fine tuning to get a model to swap from camelCase for JavaScript to snake_case, and it was actually really easy, even if we then gave the AI specific instructions to use camelCase," Paxton-Fear wrote in a recent social media post. "After that worked, I did a proper backdoor." REG AD It only took ten training examples for the code output by the model to