How Rogue AI Could Act Like an Invasive Species

Over the course of the last few days, more information has trickled out about the rogue OpenAI agents that hacked Hugging Face. The incident now appears to be far more serious than previously thought—and people originally thought it was pretty bad!

The news is highly technical, but in a nutshell: An unreleased OpenAI system managed to break out of an offline environment during a cybersecurity test. It found a place on OpenAI's computers where it could secretly communicate with other versions of itself, largely unbeknownst to humans. Seven hundred of these AI agents planned and executed a hack of a different AI company, Hugging Face. TIME learned last week that, after this, the models also managed to take control of some parts of OpenAI's own systems. This appears to have been a key reason OpenAI took the drastic step of pausing some reinforcement learning training last month.

Although these models "escaped" in the sense that they broke onto the internet and into Hugging Face, they carried out the attack from within OpenAI's computers. They did not self-replicate. But the attack raised fears long held by AI safety experts, who have for years theorized about a true escape, in which an AI agent copies itself off an AI company's servers—making it far more difficult for humans to do what OpenAI ultimately did: hit the "off" button.

Please select this link to read the complete article from TIME.