Michelle K

Let me get this straight Yesterday Anthropic announced a new AI model that autonomously found a 27-year-old vulnerability in OpenBSD In under a day For under $20,000 It also found a 16-year-old bug in video software that had survived 5 million automated tests and every human reviewer who ever looked at the code It chained together 4 vulnerabilities to escape a web browser sandbox It solved a corporate network attack simulation that would have taken a human expert over 10 hours By itself With no human involvement after the initial prompt Meanwhile I have to fill out a form on a government website that doesn't fit my browser window The submit button is cut off The error message says "please try again later" It's been saying that since Tuesday The federal government spends over $100 billion a year on IT 80% of that goes to maintaining legacy systems That's $80 billion a year To keep systems running that were built when Nixon was president The IRS still uses a system written in COBOL from the 1960s It won't be fully replaced until 2030 At which point it will be 60 years old The Treasury's taxpayer system is 51 years old HHS runs a patient system that is 50 years old The Department of Education runs student information on a 46-year-old platform These aren't obscure backroom tools These process the money, the healthcare, and the education of 330 million people On code written before the internet existed Let me run the math $80 billion a year For 10 years That's $800 billion Spent maintaining technology from an era when the most advanced computer in America had less processing power than a modern thermostat For the same price Anthropic's new AI model could run 40 million individual security assessments Each one capable of finding decades-old vulnerabilities in a day 40 million And the government can't build a webpage that fits on a laptop screen In private equity we have a term for this It's called "capex misallocation" When you spend enormous sums maintaining obsolete infrastructure instead of replacing it It shows up on the balance sheet as an asset But it functions as a liability It drags down productivity It creates security risk It compounds every year And eventually it becomes so expensive to replace that you just keep paying to maintain it Forever Which is exactly where the federal government is A $100 billion annual IT budget 80% allocated to keeping the lights on 20% for everything new No private company would survive running its infrastructure this way But the government doesn't have to survive It just has to keep collecting taxes And those taxes are processed on a 60-year-old COBOL system That still can't handle a form that fits in my browser window Make common sense common again Plz fix. Thx. Sent from my iPhone