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The security paradox of local LLMs

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145 points jakozaur | 1 comments | 22 Oct 25 12:48 UTC | HN request time: 0.199s | source
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xcf_seetan ◴[22 Oct 25 15:29 UTC] No.45670626[source]▶
>attackers can exploit local LLMs

I thought that local LLMs means they run on local computers, without being exposed to the internet.

If an attacker can exploit a local LLM, means it already compromised you system and there are better things they can do than trick the LLM to get what they can get directly.

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simonw ◴[22 Oct 25 15:31 UTC] No.45670663[source]▶
Local LLMs may not be exposed to the internet, but if you want them to do something useful you're likely going to hook them up to an internet-accessing harness such as OpenCode or Claude Code or Codex CLI.
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Der_Einzige ◴[22 Oct 25 15:38 UTC] No.45670770[source]▶
No, I'm not going to do those things. I find extreme utility in applications that I can do with an LLM in an air-gapped environment.

I will fight and die on the hill that "LLMs don't need the internet to be useful"

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1. simonw ◴[22 Oct 25 15:41 UTC] No.45670828[source]▶
Yeah, that's fair. A good LLM (gpt-oss-20b, even some of the smaller Qwens) can be entirely useful offline. I've got good results from Mistral Small 3.2 offline on a flight helping write Python and JavaScript, for example.

Having Claude Code able to try out JSON APIs and pip install extra packages is a huge upgrade from that though!