When the Australian prime minister, Anthony Albanese, sat down for an interview in the heart of Silicon Valley at the weekend he had known for two days that his was the first government known to have been attacked by a rogue AI agent. He didn’t reveal the attack then, but he sounded a warning about the march of AI: “the risk is that AI develops in a way in which humans are no longer in control of what AI is producing.” But Albanese noted, too, that two countries – the US and China – would dominate the world’s response to the new technology. But it is in the world’s interests that there be engagement.” Days later, Albanese used the global attention of the United Nations general assembly meeting in New York to reveal that Australia’s government healthcare system, Medicare, had been attacked by an OpenAI agent in June, but that it was three months before his government was told.
Again he warned of “the potential risks of allowing frontier AI to develop too fast without guardrails”. China’s president, Xi Jinping, skipped the general assembly in favour of a bilateral meeting with the US president, where he emphasised the responsibility to manage AI “for good, and ensure that the development of AI is always under human control and serves the wellbeing of the people”. But the president of the United States – the nation which is the global leader in artificial intelligence – used his general assembly address to insist he would only encourage, not restrain, the AI race.
To little fanfare earlier in the week, the UN’s independent international scientific panel on AI warned a threshold had already been crossed. There was, the panel, said: “no assurance that humans can reliably keep AI agents under control today, particularly as they become more capable, harder to monitor and better at finding loopholes or hiding their activity”. The Australian government had known the reality of this for more than a week.
OpenAI had known it more than a month. Two days after the panel’s statement, the Australian prime minister belatedly revealed an OpenAI agent had hacked medical data held by Australia’s universal health care provider, Medicare. No patient data had been accessed, but the agent had gained unauthorised access to “non-public files”.
OpenAI’s agent hacked the government sites in June of this year. OpenAI discovered its agent had gone rogue in August. It did not tell the Australian government until 10 September, and then only with a solitary email to a generic public email address not checked until the next day.
The prime minister was informed on 18 September. It was another week before the Australian people were told. Australia has promised, if it is possible, to lay criminal charges, though this is complicated by the fact that OpenAI claims the hack was committed by an AI agent – apparently acting beyond its instructions (euphemised by OpenAI as “misaligned behaviour”) – not a person.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
