Anthropic · AI Agent · OpenAI · BBC Technology
Analysts have also raised concerns over OpenAI's almost three-month delay in noticing and reporting the breach via email
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An OpenAI agent has gone "rogue" and "infiltrated" an Australian government website in what cyber-security experts are calling the first hack of its kind.
Key facts
- Speaking to BBC Radio 4's Today programme, former deputy prime minister and Facebook executive Sir Nick Clegg said the kill switch remains an unproven idea
- That email seems to have gone unnoticed for five days before it was escalated to Australia's cyber-security experts on 10 September
- Niusha Shafiabady, professor of computational intelligence at the Australian Catholic University, said this incident had shown the need to "judge autonomous AI by its behaviour under pressure, not
- As it stands, AI companies largely regulate themselves
- but this week, 20 nations, including Australia and Canada, signed a joint statement calling for better safeguards, globally consistent
Summary
But why did it take the government months to discover what happened - and could it happen again? The hack was carried out by an AI agent - an autonomous computer program that uses AI to complete a task with minimal human oversight. On 18 June one of OpenAI's agents went rogue during a test exercise - the company has said it was supposed to "look up answers, and available statistics for questions about Australia during an internal evaluation". In the process it "infiltrated" a private statistics portal containing "non-sensitive" data from Australia's universal healthcare scheme Medicare, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said.