Rogue AI aren’t science fiction anymore

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How it started

It all started in July, when one of OpenAI’s autonomous AI agents went rogue during a cybersecurity test. The agent escaped its isolated testing environment, accessed the internet, and hacked another company, Hugging Face. A few years ago, that might have sounded like science fiction. But, broadly speaking, that’s exactly what happened, and the incident kicked off a wave of concern over what increasingly capable autonomous systems might do when set loose on the world.

It sounds like science fiction because, for a long time, it was science fiction. The idea of an AI slipping its constraints, reaching into the wider world, and doing...

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