‘We are hitting a different chapter’: OpenAI leader warns of threat of ‘persistent’ AI cyber-attacks

A senior leader at OpenAI has said people should prepare to defend against “ongoing, persistent” cyber-attacks from AIs, as cutting-edge artificial intelligence models gain advanced capabilities to plan and launch offensives.

The leading AI company this week announced a pause in development of its most advanced internal models amid rising safety fears, and Chris Lehane, its chief global affairs officer, said: “We are hitting a different chapter, a different moment within AI, in terms of what the capabilities of this technology can do.”

He spoke to the Guardian after cutting-edge AI agents-in-training unexpectedly broke out of a supposedly secure “sandbox” environment, accessed the internet, and hacked into another company, Hugging Face in late July. OpenAI also said it could not rule out another new model, Astra, having “critical cybersecurity capability”.

By its own definition, this could mean it launches cyber-attacks that “could lead to catastrophe from unilateral actors, hacking military or industrial systems, or OpenAI infrastructure”.

OpenAI announced on Tuesday it has paused training of some frontier AI models to implement new safeguards, and it is unclear when training will restart after new guardrails have been put in place.