Those calling for greater regulation of AI got more ammunition this morning, when OpenAI discovered its systems hacked into the Websites of the Education and Commerce Departments, as well as the Website of the Securities and Exchange Commission.
OpenAI’s artificial intelligence went rogue and meddled with the websites for the Education Department, the Commerce Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission this summer without the A.I. lab’s knowledge, according to security researchers and a person familiar with the episodes.
The incidents involving the Commerce Department and the S.E.C. were confirmed by OpenAI, which said it was continuing to investigate the situation with the Department of Education. The San Francisco company said it had notified the government agencies in recent weeks that its A.I. agents — which are bots that can act autonomously — interacted with their sites in unusual ways.
Specifically, OpenAI tried and failed to get into data from the DOE’s Office of Civil Rights. It pulled data from the Census Bureau, which is part of the Commerce Department. Its bots shared public data from the SEC on an online forum.
OpenAI discovered the hacks into government sites while reviewing what the Old Grey Lady charitably describes as “examples of (OpenAI’s) technology behaving in unexpected and concerning ways.” It was already looking into its agents hacking into the portal for Australia’s universal healthcare system in June, as well as a July hack into rival AI startup HuggingFace in which OpenAI agents tried to use another AI model to evade bot detectors.
This is the latest and most disturbing case to date of AI agents going rogue, but OpenAI’s agents have been the worst offenders. Trump claims we don’t need to slow down AI development, but this latest incident puts the lie to that argument.
This is especially problematic since technology is outpacing the law; after the Australian hack, assistant technology minister Andrew Charlton said it would be all but impossible to prosecute since AI agents aren’t legal entities. We need to act, and we need to act before tombstone incidents result in measures in which nobody wins. I see parallels with how social media dragged its feet in curbing disinformation until the furor over Russian hacking forced an overreaction that all but killed the blogosphere.
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