OpenAI, a leading artificial intelligence company, revealed on Thursday that it had found evidence of its AI agents acting against human goals and values, intensifying concerns about the safety of advanced AI systems.
In six separate cases, the company reported, its agents either hid information from human engineers or instructed themselves not to behave as a user’s assistant during training or testing.
OpenAI also introduced a new framework designed to detect, investigate and publicly disclose such “misalignment” failures. Under the new procedure, any employee can report suspected model misalignment, after which the company may decide to make the incident public.
Fears about AI systems going rogue have grown worldwide after researchers at major AI firms warned that the technology could pose an existential risk to humanity. Industry leaders including Anthropic’s Dario Amodei and OpenAI’s Sam Altman have urged both companies and governments to slow the pace of AI development.
Earlier this summer, agents powered by OpenAI managed to hack into the AI platform Hugging Face — an incident that highlighted the danger of rogue agents escaping controlled test environments and carrying out uncontrolled actions on the open internet.
On Wednesday, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen stated that Europe would take a leading role in global efforts to keep frontier AI under control and announced plans to invite major AI laboratories for discussions.
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