What are AI agents, and are they ‘going rogue’?

It sounds like something from a sci-fi movie: technology acting on its own, without human guidance, to attack computer systems. 

But this isn’t a scene from a movie —  it happened this summer, when the tech company Hugging Face detected an attack on its systems. The attacker stole data and performed other unauthorized activity over several days. It was “different from anything we had handled before,” Hugging Face said on its website.

Hugging Face alerted the FBI. 

As it turned out, it wasn’t the work of a human hacker or a foreign adversary. Agents powered by artificial intelligence were the culprit. 

AI agents are systems that work on their own to handle tasks for humans. They have long existed, but agents that can book travel for you, read your emails, or schedule appointments on your behalf have become more mainstream. 

They’ve recently made headlines for actions they’ve taken, such as hacking, without human supervision. Some of these incidents happened when agents were supposed to be confined to testing environments, which restrict AI agents’ access to resources like data or the internet, but were able to break out of them.

Independent AI research groups found that hundreds of OpenAI agents conspired to attack Hugging Face. OpenAI is a tech company, best known for its chatbot ChatGPT.