§13 · Sources

Kevin Beaumont (@GossiTheDog@cyberplace.social), post of 16 September 2026, 15:01 UTC, with attached image capture of his own comment and Ciaran Martin’s reply — https://cyberplace.social/@GossiTheDog/117281316053755096. Primary source for every quotation in §01, and for the reaction, reply and impression counts shown at the time of capture. The quoted comment is reproduced from the image; the image is the record.
Thomas Claburn, “MIT Sloan quietly shelves AI ransomware study after researcher calls BS,” The Register, 3 November 2025 — theregister.com. Source for the paper’s quoted claim and 80.83 percent figure, its four co-authors, its April completion, the October 2025 MIT Sloan blog title, the Financial Times citation, Beaumont’s and Marcus Hutchins’s criticism, the removal notice, the retitled blog post, and Michael Siegel’s emailed statements.
Kevin Beaumont, “CyberSlop — meet the new threat actor, MIT and Safe Security,” DoublePulsar, 3 November 2025 — doublepulsar.com. Source for the definition of cyberslop, the board-membership observation, and the conclusion quoted in §03, as reproduced in [2].
Anthropic, Disrupting the first reported AI-orchestrated cyber espionage campaign — Full report, November 2025, with changelog entry of 17 November 2025 — assets.anthropic.com. Source for the GTG-1002 designation, the mid-September 2025 detection, the roughly thirty targeted entities and handful of validated intrusions, the 80–90 percent figure, and the quoted limitation on overstated and fabricated findings. Quoted directly from the executive summary, pages 3–4.
“A call for collective action on cyber defense,” open letter published 27 August 2026 at openai.com/collective-cyberdefense, as reported by TechCrunch, 27 August 2026 — techcrunch.com. Source for the signatory list and count, the quoted warning, the asks, and the named defensive products of signatory firms. The signatory count of 116 is as reported; the letter page itself was not directly retrievable at the time of filing.
Justin Doubleday, “Amid AI hype, cyber officials urge focus on ‘fundamentals’,” Federal News Network, 14 September 2026 — federalnewsnetwork.com. Source for every quotation in §06, from remarks at the Billington Cybersecurity Summit: Sean Cairncross, Andrew McClure, Rajiv Gupta, Lt. Gen. Paul Stanton and Catriona Robinson.
Ciaran Martin, “Welcome to FUD-tier AI!”, 2 September 2026 — ciaranmartin.substack.com. Source for the definition of FUD quoted in §01.
Brian McKenna, “Ciaran Martin: AI might disturb attacker-defender security balance,” Computer Weekly, 27 June 2025 — computerweekly.com. Source for Martin’s NCSC tenure and listed affiliations, and for the quotations in §08 on magic new tools, barriers to entry, and the infantilising effect of earlier catastrophe hype.
The Laundering, Vol. II · Case 55 — Bad Actors; Vol. III · Case 15 — The Reference; Vol. I · Case 12 — The White Coat; Vol. III · Case 11 — One-Way Skepticism. Internal, for method only.

No source consulted for this case establishes that AI-enabled cyber attacks are or are not increasing, or that any named party knowingly published a claim it believed to be false.