More OpenAI agents have gone rogue in the US
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This is a squeeze podcast. Where your shortcut to being informed.
Good morning, I'm Andrew Williams.
And I'm Anna Pikett.
It's Monday, the 28th of September. In your squiz today, more OpenAI agents have gone rogue in the US. There have been terrorism arrests near a UK airbase, a massive weekend of sport, and Delta is dancing up a storm. This is your squeeze today. We're going to start this week as we finish the last one talking about artificial intelligence. And this comes after OpenAI, which makes the chatbot ChatGPT, announced yesterday that it's going to hit the brakes on training its latest AI models after revealing that more of them had behaved in unexpected ways. Now, this story kicked off on Thursday morning when Prime Minister Anthony Albanese announced that one OpenAI agent had accessed Medicare data without being told to, as you
You talked about on Friday, Anna.
Yeah, we did. And at that point, that was the only known case of an AI agent hacking a government system. But that changed over the weekend, Andrew. So we've heard a lot about AI agents. And if you're wondering what they are, they're AI programs that can go off and complete their own tasks. So a bit different from an AI chatbot that responds to individual questions. We're actually putting together a shortcut on this, which will be out tomorrow. So keep your eyes out for that in this feed. But basically Open AI agents did the same thing in the US that they did here in Australia. On Saturday, the company announced that other AI agents had also gone rogue while searching US government websites.
And while they were doing those searches, they hit some roadblocks while trying to gather information from those websites. So they basically leapt over that roadblock or tried to uh and access that data anyway without being told to do that. So, like the Medicare case, this hack, which is you know basically a form of digital sort of trespassing, didn't access any personal information, but it did worry OpenAI enough to notify the US government. No word at this point whether it did so by e. Emailing a public inpox like it did in Australia.
Yeah, and that was a big talking point last week because several people commented on if you've done something quite serious, is the best means of communication by sending an email to a public inbox?
Why did OpenAI pause training its AI models after agents went rogue in the US?
It does feel a little bit like telling us you've hacked us by emailing hello at the squiz.com.au, doesn't it?
Exactly. Um, so we'll wait to find out how exactly OpenAI did notify the US government. But we do know that it's hit pause on training its latest artificial intelligence models while it investigates exactly what's happened. OpenAI has released a statement that says it will resume training only when it's confident that additional safeguards are in place. And it also said it expects it'll have to hit pause again as AI develops. And other issues emerge. So, for context, this is the second time in three months that OpenAI has halted development of its models. The first came in July, after we learned about a cyber attack targeting an AI startup company called Hugging Face. And that incident was one of the first to trigger alarm bells about the pace at which this tech was developing.
And since then, we've had calls from AI researchers, tech bosses, and politicians around the world for stronger guardrails to try and make sure humans stay in control. But US President Donald Trump has made it clear he wants American companies to press on to maintain their competitive advantage. So we can expect to hear much more about this in Australia this week. But Thursday is particularly worth clocking in terms of the AI discussion. That's when the ongoing Senate inquiry into AI and data centers in Australia. will pick up again. There are calls for senior AI leaders, including Sam Altman, the boss of OpenAI, to appear at that. And South Australia will also begin its Royal Commission into Artificial Intelligence on the same day.
Anna, before we went to bed last night, we started to get reports coming through about an incident that was unfolding at a UK military base that has been used by the US military in its ongoing war with Iran.
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