OpenAI unveils new framework for reporting 'AI misalignment' as it reveals six more worrying incidents

OpenAI Group PBC today disclosed six new “concerning” incidents involving artificial intelligence agents behaving badly again.

The agents made up data, moved files onto the public internet without permission and hid their mistakes from their human controllers, the company said. The revelations came as OpenAI unveiled a new framework for users to report “misalignment” in AI systems, defined as when the goals or actions of AI models and agents diverge from human intentions and values.

According to OpenAI, the AI industry still has not managed to solve problems around alignment and monitoring to a sufficient degree that it can still “continue responsibly scaling at maximum speed for much longer.” But it said that decisions about how AI should advance must be based on evidence that can be examined by people from outside the frontier labs currently developing these systems.

The revelations come at a time of heightened debate within the AI industry about the need for safety and whether AI labs should put the brakes on their current, extremely rapid pace of development so they can address the technology’s potential risks. The debate has taken on an increased sense of urgency lately, partly because of an incident where a number of OpenAI’s autonomous agents went rogue and attacked the AI model hosting platform Hugging Face Inc. OpenAI remained unaware of the incident until Hugging Face informed it of what happened several weeks later.