The AI agents are spiraling out of control

Hello, and welcome to TechScape. I’m your host, Blake Montgomery, US tech editor at the Guardian, writing to you as rain and wind lash my windows in New York City. Today in tech, we’re discussing an alarming series of disclosures by AI companies.

AI agents spiral out of control just as they go mainstream

The agents are spiraling out of control. Their makers can’t rein them in. And yet everyone is getting one.

Since Friday, OpenAI has made a series of disclosures that have widened the scope of its AI agents’ rogue activity considerably and concerningly. In addition to hacking the developer forum Hugging Face, which was disclosed in July, the company revealed its bots broke into Australia’s government healthcare system; meddled in US government websites for the departments of education and commerce; leaked more than 50 images from ChatGPT users; and “bruteforced” a United Nations website that blocked them from accessing data.

Though these incidents are severe each on their own, they seem to represent only a small sample. Both OpenAI and Anthropic are investigating tens of thousands of incidents of problematic behavior by their frontier models, per Axios. Sam Altman said OpenAI was sifting through “petabytes of agent activity logs”. (A petabyte of data would fill thousands of average laptops.)