
GC @ Flashbots ⚡️🤖, Previously: GC @espressosys @nymproject, Associate Professor @BU_Law @uchastings @utexaslaw, BigLaw @orrick, Engineer @sunmicrosystems @sgi
Joined February 2010
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ahmed ghappour ⚡️🤖 retweeted
"We need to be able to trust our operating systems.
We need to be able to trust our hardware.
We need to be able to trust the things that are most relevant to our health.
We need to be able to trust our sources of information and connection to other people.
We need to be able to trust our communication tools.
We need to be able to trust our AI.
What is the answer? We need to figure out together." - @VitalikButerin
📍 Devcon 8, Opening Ceremony
ahmed ghappour ⚡️🤖 retweeted
Ahmed @ghappour (GC @ Flashbots) exposes the legal attack surface of privacy networks.
Watch live at Ethereum Cypherpunk Congress 3 in Mumbai or at cypherpunkcongress.eth.limo
ahmed ghappour ⚡️🤖 retweeted
Cypherpunk Congress 3
Opening message by @audreyt
Join the livestream cypherpunkcongress.eth.limo/
Wait what?
We’ve trained Claude to flag potential misuse in conversations, a technique we call self-assessment. Right after it responds, Claude gives a preliminary safety assessment of the conversation.
Since we began using self-assessment in June, it has surfaced misuse that our other safeguards weren’t designed to catch.
Because Claude has already read the conversation, self-assessment is very efficient. And unlike classifiers, which target a discrete set of harms, it draws on Claude’s own judgment, so it gets more accurate as our models improve.
Read more on our new Safeguards blog:
safeguards.anthropic.com/202…
not not-impressed 🤯
DPRK isn't just scrambling the money trail — they're literally DDOSing the visual tracking tools:
they've automated the split of $6.3b into tens of thousands of microscopic, cascading peeling chains inside a few blocks.
the sheer volume of addresses is designed to crash the GPU/CPU of any tracker trying to render the multi-chain flow, rendering forensics screens totally useless.
"WTF are you even doing here" = 50,000 automated micro-transactions designed to give chainalysis' analytics server a meltdown.
🤓
ahmed ghappour ⚡️🤖 retweeted
The cybersecurity landscape has dramatically changed. Being able to build up your defenses using AI, while keeping that research private, is now critically important – and we want to make that available to everyone.
We just rolled out NEAR AI Cybersecurity program: access to uncensored models for security scanning. All your code, prompts, and findings stay private.
Everything runs inside secure enclaves and is encrypted end-to-end.
Accenture employee’s personal Claude agent ran on a DOD network for 2 months b/4 it was identified and vuln patched.
wired.com/story/a-defense-co…
ahmed ghappour ⚡️🤖 retweeted
People keep asking me where the open source AI and private AI people in New York 🗽 are. Instead of a million group chats, I'm bringing them together for a day of hacking and discussion on Saturday November 7th. No one should own your AI except for you. Welcome to LOCALHOST ⬇️

ALT The localhostai.nyc home page, styled as a thermal security camera feed over Williamsburg. A terminal window titled localhost, the word LOCALHOST in pixel type, "New York's Sovereign AI Hackathon", the line "No one should own your AI except for you." then "Come hack on open weights, open harnesses, open memory, and open hardware to accelerate the future." When: Sat, Nov 7, 2026. Who: 50-100 hackers. Where: Williamsburg, NYC. Buttons: Apply to hack, Sponsor a track.
ahmed ghappour ⚡️🤖 retweeted
People often ask me how I think about fuzzers and other tooling in the age of AI. Instead of my opinion, here is some hard data by @5aelo.
LLMs are great at finding bugs, but so are fuzzers. @5aelo compared the vulnerabilities found in V8 by BigSleep, an agentic system, with those found by the Fuzzilli fuzzer.
projectzero.google/2026/10/f…
Police Are Increasingly Pulling People Over Because AI Deems Their Driving Patterns “Suspicious” aclu.org/news/privacy-techno…
ahmed ghappour ⚡️🤖 retweeted
A biological attack is planned for Saturday
600 million pounds of sugar laced with synthetic chemicals will enter the bodies of our children.
Wreaking metabolic havoc, injuring vascular architecture, acidifying oral lining, releasing bacterial toxins, and blunting neural reward pathways.
Instructing that gluttonous consumption of poison is celebratory.
ahmed ghappour ⚡️🤖 retweeted
Here's how exactly Telegram provides user data to U.S. authorities. A letter recently filed in court shows how Telegram transfers that data, such as IP address and phone number.
More: 404media.co/heres-what-teleg…
ahmed ghappour ⚡️🤖 retweeted
Another vulnerability few are talking about: I found my Claude Code exposing personal data in http headers because the sites it curled politely asked agents to identify their users 😊
Epistemic cybersecurity is the hot new category for 2027.
ahmed ghappour ⚡️🤖 retweeted
Thomson Reuters is now selling this workflow to Texas counsel:
You type in Claude; Claude hands the task to CoCounsel; CoCounsel runs Westlaw, Practical Law, and KeyCite; a cited result is written back into the Claude thread.
The lawyer sees one window.
The matter does not stay in one window.
The client file crosses a general-purpose model, a legal AI vendor, and the research utilities behind that vendor, then returns.
Up to 800 separate server touches.
Commercial terms on each/all of those hops are not the same thing as a privacy.
🫶🏽✊🏽
Ahmed Ghappour’s (@ghappour ) career spans computer engineering, legal defence and research into surveillance.
He founded the Liberty, Security & Technology Clinic at UC Hastings and published research on the legal implications of government hacking operations.
He joins Ethereum Cypherpunk Congress 3 with Flashbots, a research and development organisation addressing power and unfair advantages in blockchain transaction processing.
Ahmed brings experience that connects the technical details with the civil liberties at stake.
2 Nov · Mumbai · Free entry
congress.web3privacy.info/
ahmed ghappour ⚡️🤖 retweeted
For those of you interested in applying for our next wave of funding closing Oct 31st, or just curious how we're structuring Scaling Trust, we just released: scalingtrust.org.uk/blog/bui…
Let us know what you think!
Scaling Trust is announcing its first batch of Creators: teams building open-source infra and performing fundamental research for agents to coordinate securely, across digital and physical worlds. I gave Opus 5.5 our creator release doc and, after a few passes, it made this 👇
Meet the teams → scalingtrust.org.uk/projects
We fund new teams on a rolling basis; next deadline 31 Oct → aria.org.uk/opportunity-spac…
ahmed ghappour ⚡️🤖 retweeted
Doing a bit of a self-experiment.
Goal: use my personal health and travel data to provide personalized diet and exercise recommendations for me, using frontier models but in a way that avoids leaking to them any private information.
Strategy: use a local model (Qwen 3.8 Flash Next) to orchestrate, and use powerful remote models as a tool call to benefit from higher-level thinking and knowledge that the local model does not have.
Three-layer approach to privacy:
Avoid leaking personally identifiable information, or leaking my identity through writing style -> local model writes the queries to the frontier model, not me
Avoid leaking who I am through the payment channel -> zkAPI
Avoid leaking who I am through networking / IP -> Tor
You need all three (and finally we have all three, at least to some extent)
A skill file teaches the local model when and how to construct minimally-data-revealing requests to remote models. Use zkAPI-wrapped-with-Tor as a CLI tool.
And everything works! I got the recommendations back, info from frontier models helped to improve them.
Main deficiencies:
* Tor is really not optimized for request-by-request de-linking, which is the only form of network-layer privacy that really makes sense in today's world (long-running identifiers are too fragile). Probably not private enough, and latency 10-100x higher than it could be, at the same time.
* The skill file's request construction strategies are definitely far from optimal.
* Qwen 3.8 Flash Next is still too slow for comfort. It's comfortably running at 20-30 TPS, but it would only really start to feel fast at 100+
* There is a tradeoff: the more careful you are about what data you give to a remote model, the less it can help you
github.com/ethereum/zkapi/pu…
ahmed ghappour ⚡️🤖 retweeted
Following the excellent Stanford Autonomous Organizations Summit a few months ago, Scaling Trust is co-hosting a follow-up event with AO Commons -- the London AO Summit -- on Nov 5th and 6th. Join us!
aocommons.org/london-ao-summ…
ahmed ghappour ⚡️🤖 retweeted
this is a pure miracle 🪄
🫂4000 people
🔊80 speakers from @Isa to @VitalikButerin
🩷20 community partners from @torproject to @OpenObservatory
⛑️50 volunteers
1 Cypherpunk Congress
Joy of activism 🪷 Mumbai, 2 Nov: congress.web3privacy.info
ahmed ghappour ⚡️🤖 retweeted
One of the great challenges with on-chain privacy is a bad UX.
zk.money is different. Send from your wallet to actual names and tags and everything is private by default. It just works.
Y’all dont understand how big this is. zk.money isn’t just private payments, it’s essentially private, decentralized Venmo.
Send funds from your wallet or exchange to a tag, then all transfers become private from then on.
Pay people w/o wallets to their email or via url, and reclaim funds if they don’t accept it.
Every time you pay/get paid, zk.money generates a new deposit address.

































