Import AI 450: China's electronic warfare model; traumatized LLMs; and a scaling law for cyberattacks
UK AISI's cyberattack scaling findings and China's military AI research are directly relevant to APS cyber risk and national security AI monitoring.
Key points
- UK AISI finds successive AI model generations improve measurably at multi-step autonomous cyberattacks, with a clear scaling law.
- Chinese military-affiliated researchers released MERLIN, an AI model and dataset targeting electronic warfare signal reasoning.
- Newsletter also covers Google DeepMind's AGI cognitive taxonomy and LLM 'distress' personality research - lower APS relevance.
Implications for Australian agencies
- Monitor Cyber security and AI risk teams may want to monitor UK AISI's cyber range evaluation methodology and results as Australian AISI considers analogous threat assessments.
- Monitor Defence and national security policy teams may want to monitor MERLIN and the broader Chinese military AI research trajectory for electronic warfare capability implications.
Implications are AI-generated. Starting points, not advice — see methodology for how they're framed.
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Weekly digest, 23 March 2026
"Import AI 450: China's electronic warfare model; traumatized LLMs; and a scaling law for cyberattacks"
Source: Import AI – Substack (Jack Clark)
Published: 23 March 2026
URL: https://importai.substack.com/p/import-ai-450-chinas-electronic-warfare
This issue of Import AI covers four research items. Most significant for APS readers: the UK AI Security Institute has published results from cyber range testing showing frontier AI agents are improving rapidly at end-to-end multi-step cyberattacks, with performance nearly doubling across model generations and scaling further with inference compute. Separately, Chinese researchers including those affiliated with the National University of Defense Technology have released MERLIN, an AI model trained on a 100,000-sample electromagnetic signal dataset for electronic warfare tasks including jamming strategy and signal classification. Two other items - Google DeepMind's ten-dimension cognitive taxonomy for assessing AGI progress, and research diagnosing 'distress-like' response patterns in Google's Gemma models - are primarily of technical interest with limited immediate APS governance implications.
Implications for Australian agencies:
- [Monitor] Cyber security and AI risk teams may want to monitor UK AISI's cyber range evaluation methodology and results as Australian AISI considers analogous threat assessments.
- [Monitor] Defence and national security policy teams may want to monitor MERLIN and the broader Chinese military AI research trajectory for electronic warfare capability implications.
Retrieved from SIMS, 18 July 2026.