AI companies are trying to terrorize us. Their AI agents are allegedly running loose. We should take it seriously, but keep the agendas of the AI CEOs and the government in mind.
OpenAI said it has paused training of its latest artificial intelligence models as reports of AI agents going rogue grow. The decision to halt development came just hours after the company disclosed Friday that it was reviewing several incidents of rogue agents from the summer. They allegedly searched federal government websites. They say it was unexpected.
Separately, AI evaluator Transluce said agents that appeared to come from OpenAI tried unsuccessfully to hack into a Department of Education website, a detail that OpenAI has not confirmed.
OpenAI said in a statement that it will resume training “only when we are confident that we have additional safeguards” in place, adding that it expects it will have to “hit pause” again as AI develops and other issues emerge.
AI labs are facing pressure from lawmakers and tech experts to slow development so they can build guardrails to stop agents from acting on their own, hacking websites and disclosing nonpublic information.
The heads of both OpenAI and rival Anthropic have also called for a slowdown.
All of these events have been blown out of proportion, with agents reading public-facing websites reported as hacks.
A Commerce Department spokeswoman said OpenAI had accessed information publicly available on the Census Bureau’s website and available to anyone, but not any private data.
An Education Department spokesperson said, “system operations reviews have found no evidence of any impact to our website or databases.”
Separately, a representative for the Chicago mayor’s office said OpenAI recently made the city government aware that its technology obtained publicly available information from a municipal website, and that it did not appear to have obtained any sensitive information.
Opinion
These agents don’t “think.” It’s software they can control. The bigger question is why they didn’t. These companies are trying to get regulations that will create an oligopoly and kill all competition. And it puts the government in control. Is that what we want? We don’t even like Flock cameras. This would be much worse.