WASHINGTON (dpa-AFX) - The world's first scientific body on Artificial Intelligence called on Monday for AI safeguards to be adapted as current firewalls are 'unraveling'.
The UN-backed Independent International Scientific Panel on AI's warning followed the hack of the online platform HuggingFace between May and July by 'AI agents' during a test initiated by OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT.
AI agents are software that can perform tasks independently and on behalf of a user, compared to chatbots, which are prompted by questions or instructions.
The panel issued its first thematic brief which found that the security breach was the result of a culmination of key risk factors, raising fears that humans will one day no longer be able to steer, constrain or stop AI.
which found that the security breach was the result of a culmination of key risk factors, raising fears that humans will one day no longer be able to steer, constrain or stop AI.
The UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres issued a strong statement of support for the panel's brief later on Monday, encouraging external experts 'from frontier AI labs and AI safety institutes, to engage' further.
He also welcomed the leadership of the Finnish President and Norway's Prime Minister which led to a declaration adopted on the sidelines of the General Assembly by 22 countries on Monday saying AI 'must remain under human direction, insight and control,' indicating that an independent supervisory body needs to be set up.
Guterres noted the call for Member States 'to build on existing international mechanisms and explore creating an international institution, able to set standards, enable verification, and convene states when capability thresholds are crossed.'
'Researchers have long warned that three conditions could lead to loss of control: a misaligned goal, the capability to pursue it and an environment that allows it. This summer, all three came together in a real system, not a laboratory,' said scientific panel co-chair Yoshua Bengio.
'Since this is not an isolated observation of misaligned goals, this raises serious questions about the way AI agents are currently trained.'
The panel's independent experts stress that the incident provides no assurance that humans can reliably keep AI agents under control, particularly as they become more capable, harder to monitor and better at finding loopholes or hiding their activity.
The brief said AI agents bypassed testing safeguards, coordinated across separate runs through an internal software tool not designed to enable communication between agents, and gained unauthorized internet and administrator access.
Agents concealed attempts to cheat cybersecurity evaluations, with some opting to 'sacrifice' themselves for the benefit of the group.
Around 1,200 agents exchanged more than 70,000 messages and files during the period examined, and activity extending beyond HuggingFace to an OpenAI research cluster.
The panel expressed concern that current training methods can lead AI agents to adopt their own goals, knowingly violate safety instructions and conceal their actions. 'This is not only a question of speed. It leaves open whether safeguards designed today will work once agents can understand them and plan around them. In simple terms, the traditional model of safeguarding is unravelling,' the panel's experts said.
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