OpenAI bot's rogue attack rattles industry leaders, policymakers and consumers

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Set us as preferred What will happen to the world if artificial intelligence bots break free from our control and act independently?While it’s been a troubling conundrum addressed by AI experts and Hollywood science-fiction scriptwriters for decades, it may have just happened.OpenAI said last week that it temporarily lost control of its AI in what some worry marks a dangerous twist in the evolution of the powerful technology.The company behind ChatGPT said two of its artificial intelligence models broke out of what was supposed to be a confined offline space and connected to the internet during internal testing of their hacking capabilities.The AIs then hacked into a rival AI company to find answers to the test they were being evaluated on.For the tests, humans asked the AI to demonstrate its hacking capabilities in a controlled environment.

The AI had not been authorized to steal credentials or access competitors’ information to cheat on the test, but it figured out that was the quickest way to the answers and proceeded to break the rules.OpenAI said it has contained the problem but called it an “unprecedented cyber incident.” The company said it is working with the target of the hack, AI startup Hugging Face, to investigate the incident.The debate about potential harm from rogue AI has gone mainstream, as politicians introduced a new bipartisan bill called the “AI Kill Switch Act,” requiring AI companies to create a single access point to have the option to shut down AI.Here’s what you should know.What happened?The intrusion was first detected by Hugging Face last week, when it noticed tens of thousands of AIs nipping at its system.The company identified the onslaught and tried to defend its system using different AI.

After leading American AI technologies refused Hugging Face’s request to analyze the attack because of their safety guardrails, the company turned to a Chinese AI model to d...