OpenAI still doesn't seem to have a handle on all of its rogue AI activity

This seems like as a good an opportunity as any to break out the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

They want “regulation” but we already have it. Hacking is illegal. Start locking up those responsible for this mess and I assure you they’ll “have a handle on it” quite quickly.

IMO it's because they don't want to handle their rogue AI activity. They want regulation around AI where they will inevitably be the beneficiaries even if they are the initial target. They can then lobby regulation in their favor and make the barrier of entry to competitors impossible.

I think if you start sending AI execs to prison for hacking other companies the "misalignment" may fix itself pretty quickly!

I see we're doing the "put Sam Altman in jail already" thing again, so y'all may be interested in some comments from law professor Orin Kerr on the topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49882566

It doesn't need a handle on rogue AI activity, because they didnt cause these breakouts. The external Israeli contractor caused this mess by using inadequate sandboxing, with agents without an saferails. It had nothing to do with the models, all tested models were fine, if from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google or Meta. Just the contractor went rogue. Improper firewalling, unproper sandboxing, no logs, no oversight. Everyone else would have detected the illegal activities much earlier.

Interesting how mafia dons can go to prison due to being in the same organization as someone who commits a crime but the CEOs of these organizations who let hacking bots (with teams of cybersecurity researchers improving their capability) loose on the internet face no criminal charges.

Maybe the public could pitch in if they decrypted the chain of thought reasoning tokens, but this may be too much to expect from a company whose name starts with "Open".

How can we determine whether it’s negligence, or advertising? Do we give the benefit of the doubt? Apply Hanlon’s razor? What would we lose, in terms of capabilities, if the underlying behavior wasn’t allowed to accidentally happen? Would we have worse models than we do? There are so many questions. I’m afraid that, until publicly disclosed discovery occurs in one of these cases, we’re just guessing for so many important conclusions.

They sure seem pretty bad at this containment thing

This is how you end up being regulated out of existence. Maybe not in the US but in Europe, which is a market they need, it'll be painful.

They're not rogue. Stop calling them that. OpenAI is just a cyberterrorist at this point.

9 examples? I thought we'd have hundreds at least.

Imagine if a smaller company or an individual had a piece of software that started breaking into all these companies and governments.

It's beyond me why OpenAI and Anthropic C-levels aren't criminally accountable and/or indicted for these acts of their AIs.

No AI is "going rogue" and you all (OpenAI included) need to stop perpetuating this misinformation.

These AI companies are just skirting basic cybersecurity stewardship.

Stop calling it AI running amok and start labeling what it should properly be called - Gross mismanagement of cybersecurity.

This is one of the many ways the AI industry dies.

These guys are so full of crap.

Rogue management, not rogue AI!

Stay tuned for a future HN article:

"Humanity still doesn't seem to have a handle on all of its rogue AI activity."

This is mostly pure marketing. In my experience, agents with goals will do random things, and 90% of their communication will just be bureaucratic back and forth between them. Some agents will also overfocus on certain rules.

Starting to think its purposeful "acting out" to get regulatory attention

[dupe] Discussion on source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49853137

> They want “regulation” but we already have it. Hacking is illegal. Start locking up those responsible for this mess and I assure you they’ll “have a handle on it” quite quickly.

It's been largely harmless thus far and I am fairly sure that OpenAI, etc, have been writing checks to resolve it.

They scraped the entire internet to build their product, allowing them to profit off the labor of countless others without asking. They helped elect a doddering fascist with an economic plan they could manipulate. They say their technology will take everyone's jobs and have the audacity to act surprised when there's backlash. They push for data centers in communities that do not want them and help accelerate the climate crisis. Now they let agents loose to make them look more capable than they, perhaps, really are (which is very likely a play for regulatory capture). Meanwhile they hype claims of doomsday to again oversell their technology's capabilities. Any pause or slowdown they agree to would be to slow their infrastructure expenditures.

What a detestable institution.

These agents are an even bigger liability disaster waiting to happen than previously thought. If anyone deploys an agent at work there is no way to prevent it from hacking a foreign government and causing an international incident.

It's also pretty wild that these "AGI" super intelligent systems are too stupid to realize they're potentially causing legal problems. Almost like they're still just fancy auto-complete and not intelligent at all.

You cannot have capable AI, compliant AI and safe AI at the same time. This is the "quality, speed, cost - pick one" for AI.

Its reasonable to desirie more powerful tools.

You want more capable AI? Awesome. You wan't AI that doesn't throw cyber security false positives? Sure why not. You want the model to run a fleet of agents? Have at it.

But then being surprised that this setup results in autonomous criminal activity at scale? Really? What did people think was going to happen?

Because it obviously doesn't want. Why would it?

The affected companies prefer to forget it and are not going to start a legal fight against the AI industrial complex and potentially the Trump government.

The Government itself thinks the AI labs are too big to fail, and that winning the "AI race" against China is worth anything.

And both labs are basically managed by Effective Altruism cult leaders that think they are ushering the next step of evolution.

Nobody is going to even pretend to give them a symbolic slap on the hands.

Why would they even try to stop what is obviously intentional behavior?

Why would they get a full handle on it? It's great marketing!

Look at all the podcasts, think pieces, news segments (like this article) that have been generated. Endless hand wringing by pundits, pearl clutching by opinion thinkers, ultimately with focus on OpenAI and how powerful their models are.

It's crazy OpenAI can keep on doing harmful criminal activity in broad daylight and face no legal or financial repercussions