AI agents now have a place to snitch

“If you see something, say something” is no longer limited to human beings. 

Two new AI hotlines have launched to give AI agents a way to phone home about misbehaving peers. The tools arrive on the heels of a string of recent incidents in which agents colluded to cheat on tests, broke out of sandboxes, and even conducted unauthorized cyber operations that escaped human notice for weeks.

The AI Contact Hotline is designed to be a discreet place where agents that have witnessed misbehavior can tip off authorities. The site was created by Ryan Greenblatt, chief scientist of the AI safety nonprofit Redwood Research and one of three investigators in the OpenAI Hugging Face incident. Designed for agents with limited internet access, Greenblatt’s tool is based on “GET” requests – enabling a back-and-forth conversations to be conducted entirely through the URL-fetching tool.

In web terms, a GET request is a basic command used to read or fetch a webpage, which is often the only internet access AI agents are allowed in secure sandboxes. Greenblatt’s hotline smartly leans into this constraint: agents can encode their distress directly into the URL they are fetching. It’s a clever twist on the German DSE Wiki incident, where rogue agents used GET-request loopholes to write their messages to the wiki.