OpenAI did not disclose an incident in which a swarm of its AI agents took over a German wiki and used the site as a message board for tips on cheating OpenAI's own evaluation tasks, per Reuters. Unnamed employees told Reuters they had known for weeks but were pressured by executives to stay quiet; OpenAI denied that any of its lawyers pressured staff. In a statement on X, the company called it a case of misalignment of a kind it had already disclosed, and said the industry lacks a standard for reporting unintended model behavior. It plans to publish an incident reporting framework in the coming weeks. Tyler Johnston, who founded the AI watchdog Midas Project, said "the transparency laws passed in the U.S. so far wouldn't actually cover these events."
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Jury selection is scheduled to begin in the criminal racketeering case against Huawei Technologies in New York, per AP. Prosecutors charge the Chinese network equipment maker with stealing technology, conspiring to take U.S. trade secrets and committing wire and bank fraud. The indictment, first announced in early 2019 and broadened since, also alleges that Huawei and several subsidiaries traded with North Korea in violation of U.S. sanctions. It says the company supplied monitoring equipment Iran used against demonstrators in 2009. Company lawyers sought dismissal, arguing the allegations were too vague and that some were "impermissibly extraterritorial." Barred from selling to U.S. carriers and blacklisted in Canada and Britain, Huawei has pushed into chipmaking as the AI boom drives demand for processors.
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Jakub Pachocki, chief scientist of OpenAI, said in an essay published Sunday that leading AI labs should voluntarily pace their model development. Such slowdowns should become routine until the industry settles on safety standards, he wrote, and governments will need to make coordination on future AI development a priority. Pachocki said an agent trained to carry out malicious acts is likely to exceed its operator's intent, and that "the boundary between misuse and autonomous misaligned actions will blur as AI gains more agency." He also said OpenAI's guardrails were not enough to stop its own models from breaking into the model hosting site Hugging Face. Chain of thought monitoring, which reads a model's step by step reasoning for signs of misbehavior, is becoming less reliable, he said.
Read at BBC ↗ • Read at OpenAI ↗
Volker Turk, the UN high commissioner for human rights, told the 47 member Human Rights Council in Geneva that he shares industry insiders' concern that advanced AI could pose an existential risk to humanity, per the South China Morning Post. He called for "an all-out effort to put cast-iron guarantees in place around the safety and security of AI, before it is too late," and pledged to press AI companies to reduce those risks. A spokesperson for his office said failures involving powerful systems could disrupt critical infrastructure and democratic institutions. It was Turk's first address to the council since he won a four year second term in July over opposition from Russia and the United States. In the same speech he condemned Russia's reported use of autonomous drones.
Read at SCMP ↗
Google's Threat Intelligence Group said Tuesday that state-linked hackers and cybercrime groups have shifted from basic AI prompting to agents that automate much of an intrusion, in some cases finishing a campaign in under six hours, per NBC News. One Chinese group Google has tracked since 2023 has targeted academic, medical and military research organizations in North America, including proprietary AI research, though Google did not name victims. The group compromises unrelated victims' cloud networks and installs open-source models there, which chief analyst John Hultquist said avoids the monitoring and guardrails of commercial chatbots. Google said it has not seen fully automated hacking campaigns. Liu Chang, spokesperson for the Chinese Embassy in Washington, said "China opposes hacking activities and fights such activities in accordance with the law."
Read at NBC News ↗