Import AI 450: China's MERLIN Electronic Warfare Model, UK Finds Scaling Law for AI Cyberattacks

Import AI·high signal

Jack Clark's Import AI #450 leads with MERLIN (Multi-modal Electromagnetic Robust Learning), a Chinese military-affiliated model trained on EM-100K dataset that outperforms GPT-5 and Claude-4-Sonnet on electronic warfare tasks. The UK government found a scaling law for AI cyberattacks: average steps completed at 10M tokens rose from 1.7 (GPT-4o, Aug 2024) to 9.8 (Opus 4.6, Feb 2026), with best single runs completing 22/32 attack steps in 6 hours vs 14 hours for human experts.