Mali

I started my career as a Peace Corps volunteer, actually.

So right out of college, I moved to rural Mali.

I was in a town of about 3000 people in north central Mali called Tene.

And it was the first time in my life that I lived without access to electricity.

or for that matter, without access to running water and other things that we take for granted in modern life and certainly from where I had grown up in the United States.

And it was an incredible two years for me.

I saw firsthand just how much lack of access to electricity, limited communities and people's potential, how it impacted health, education outcomes, really every facet of development.

now imagine I'm an American landing in this village I spoke French at the time and I had received three months of crash course training in Bambara which was the predominant language spoken in Mali so when I arrived I could say about as much as hi my name is Cassidy I'm from America I'm going to the market right but it was immediately clear to me just what impact lack of electricity had on my community.

I know what you mean

... out- outside of Mali watch, they usually have very, very thin frames, narrow shoulders, and you usually don't see them put on weight.

Like, they're, I mean, it's just who they're-

Luol Deng.

You're not gonna find a Sudanese player or a Sudanese person built like Christian Okoye or whatever.

So then the further, like, you go to West Africa, you know, just physically they can put on weight and muscle a little bit faster than Sudanese.

So I said all that to say this: I think that Keita is from Mali, and I do think that there's a better chance for him to put on 20 pounds of muscle than it would be if he were born in somewhere, like, in maybe, like, East Africa.

So I kinda don't-

Sometimes malware was involved.

Are Iran and China the only places trying to do this level of AI surveillance? Or are they the only ones crazy enough to use Claude? Anthropic highlights GTG 50027, a single independent consultant in Barmaco, who used Claude as part of Mali State Intelligence Service, ANSE, to target roughly 25 million SIM cards.

This one was not really disrupted.

Further work was prevented, but the system had already been deployed and it remains deployed.

So I was like, "Hey, Dad, I'm on my way to Fukushima, to Japan.

Hey, I'll, I'll call you when I know when I'm back," or, "Hey, I'm going to Mali.

I'm on my way to the airport." And so, and sometimes I was doing these, uh, Fre- Fre- Freudian lapse, like when I was calling him, say, "I'm going on vacation to Mali.

Oh, sorry, I'm going on a assignment to Mali." [laughs]

[laughs]

So that's how much I loved my job.

We have two very striking examples in the reports here.

In Mali, a single consultant working entirely alone used AI tools to build and deploy a platform capable of monitoring 25 million mobile SIM cards.

One person.

It's staggering.

I had just gotten out of college.

I was about to enter the Peace Corps to go to Mali.

That's in West Africa.

Mm-hmm.

You are the ocean in a single drop." That the-

Mm-hmm

... animists of Mali look at everything being connected, and the energy that everything in nature has some consciousness.

That the, the, the dream time of the, uh, Australian Aborigines or the Kogi people in Colombia that I studied with, who believe in a luna, the, the, the thought that manifests the universe.

A link to the report will be in the show notes.

In Mali, at least fifty soldiers and five Russian African core mercenaries were killed in an assault on the military camp in Douara in the Mopti region.

There are also reports that the death toll may be higher, around sixty to eighty, but also reports of several dozen being taken as prisoner.

The previous day, JNIM jihadists assaulted the camp and returned the next day.

Um, and then finally, there's been a lot of, um, use cases that they wanted to...

They, I, I think this is, like, part of them trying to support their, Dario's essay, which is what are the use cases that have been bad for Claude? So one guy built a surveillance system in Mali that could track 25 million phone numbers.

One hacktivist in France broke into 14 organizations alone and built a search engine to look up anyone's personal data.

Some, a group in Yemen basically built a rocket and tested it, and then used the rock, and then also decoded, debugged the rocket with Claude code.

Yeah, so my, uh, ex-husband traveled.

He was, uh, an African art dealer, and he's from the continent, from Mali actually.

Mm-hmm.

I always joke that my children are African-African American.