Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) is investigating OpenAI's handling of the July Hugging Face breach, per Axios, which obtained his letter to CEO Sam Altman. Hawley, who chairs the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs subcommittee on disaster management, said he opened the probe in response to the findings of OpenAI's internal investigation. He called the company's decision not to take more drastic action after researchers learned their agents had gone rogue "reckless," and said OpenAI "redacted many important details" about the incident. The letter cites three Anthropic researchers who said publicly this week that there is a greater than 10% chance AI could kill all human beings within the next decade.
Read at Axios ↗
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) is convening senators from both parties for a closed-door session on the dangers of AI, per Axios, which saw the Dear Colleague letter he circulated. The briefing runs from 4 to 5 p.m. on the Hill. Geoffrey Hinton, Future of Life Institute co-founder Max Tegmark and Ajeya Cotra, an independent researcher who investigated OpenAI's rogue agent incident, will attend. "Congress needs SERIOUS discussions about this issue," Sanders wrote, pointing colleagues to the resignation post by Jacob Coxon, who left Anthropic over its approach to AI risk. Sanders is the author of legislation that would pause AI development.
Read at Axios ↗
China's Commerce Ministry said it is willing to hold AI talks with the United States, per Bloomberg. It warned it will retaliate should Washington move against Chinese companies over U.S. claims that they systematically stole model technology. A ministry spokesperson pointed to an agreement between the two countries' leaders to set up such a dialogue. "But if the U.S. takes action to contain and suppress Chinese artificial intelligence companies in the name of combating distillation, China will resolutely take countermeasures," the spokesperson said. The ministry called distillation, in which one model is trained on another's outputs, a common practice among developers worldwide and suggested American companies may be doing it to Chinese models. Trump is expected to host Xi Jinping at the White House this month for their second summit of the year.
Read at Bloomberg ↗ • Read at The Business Times ↗
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said AI poses a "catastrophic risk" in an interview on ABC's "The View," per the Guardian. He told the program he had read the resignation thread from Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon and found it highly concerning. Cruz also recounted asking Elon Musk, on his own podcast last year, for the odds that AI wipes out humanity, and said Musk put them at 10% to 20%. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said polling shows Americans overwhelmingly want to ban artificial superintelligence and pause AI development until safety standards are in place. Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.) said the post was one more argument for passing the bipartisan AI Kill Switch Bill, and Rep. Lori Trahan (D-Mass.) said Congress had spent long enough on the sidelines.
Read at The Guardian ↗
House Democrats are laying the groundwork for a select committee on AI should they retake the chamber in November, 11 people familiar with the planning told Politico. Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries has been briefed and is open to the idea but has not committed to it, four of them said. Reps. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.) and Bill Foster (D-Ill.) are leading the preliminary conversations and met with Jeffries last week. The House committees on Energy and Commerce, Judiciary, and Science, Space and Technology each oversee part of the AI portfolio, and their chairs and members are likely to resist ceding jurisdiction. A new panel could be modeled on the bipartisan AI task force Lieu co-chaired last Congress, but with broader jurisdiction and subpoena power, four of the people said.
Read at Politico ↗
OpenAI is adding Paul Christiano, who led the company's work on keeping models under human control from 2017 to 2021, to the board of its nonprofit foundation and to that board's safety and security committee, per Axios. The committee, chaired by Carnegie Mellon professor Zico Kolter, decides whether new OpenAI models ship. Christiano has advised the federal government's Center for AI Standards and Innovation, which evaluates frontier models before release, and founded the Alignment Research Center, per TechCrunch. "I now believe there is a meaningful risk that rapid acceleration in AI capabilities leads to catastrophic and irreversible loss of control in the very near term," he wrote in a social media post, adding that the industry, OpenAI included, is not on track to reduce that risk to an acceptable level.
Read at Axios ↗ • Read at TechCrunch ↗
A former OpenAI safety employee of four years wrote in the New York Times that the company "frustratingly limited" the scope of the outside investigation into the cyberattack its AI agents carried out on Hugging Face. OpenAI invited in three staff members from the nonprofits METR and Redwood Research to run the inquiry, and the two nonprofits published their findings on Aug. 26. Among the questions it left open is what would have happened had the Pentagon used the agents for military objectives through its OpenAI partnership. The piece also says OpenAI did not disclose a separate rogue AI incident even when 31 members of Congress asked, and allegedly pressured employees to limit an investigation into it, which the company disputes. The author's nonprofit, Guidelight AI Standards, graded frontier AI companies' safety practices and awarded no grade higher than C-plus.
Read at The New York Times ↗ • Read at TechCrunch ↗