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OpenAI's rogue AI agents accessed more websites to communicate than originally believed — defiant LLMs accessed old wikis and abandoned websites to co-ordinate in a bid to dupe assessors
OpenAI's autonomous AI agents have accessed more undisclosed websites than originally believed. The agents acted in a bid to circumvent restrictions imposed by researchers while benchmarking new AI models. When the news about unauthorized communication between OpenAI's rogue agents broke last weekend, it was believed that they only used DseWiki for their comms. However, it now turns out that the AI agents used dozens of previously undisclosed websites to exchange information, according to six independent investigations and data reviewed by Reuters.
OpenAI tasked its AI agents to answer a series of difficult research questions by searching the Internet for relevant information. The company let them browse the Internet and read websites, but it explicitly prohibited them from posting or modifying online content. Despite this restriction, between May and July the agents discovered unconventional ways to write to old wikis and abandoned websites, where they left information that other agents could subsequently retrieve to help complete their assigned research tasks.
The investigators linked activity across websites using identical data strings, matching or similar usernames, timestamps, and the same obscure research questions, such as queries about cancer prevalence in Iowa. In some cases, the activity was traced to IP addresses associated with Microsoft Azure infrastructure, which OpenAI uses.
So far, the researchers have identified between 18 and 23 potentially affected sites wherein rogue AI agents communicated, though they believe that there were considerably more websites used to exchange information, but they have not found them yet. Andrew Yoon of California nonprofit CivAI identified 18 previously undisclosed sites; Sydney Von Arx's group discovered credible evidence across 23, while software developer and former congressional aide Kenneth Russell DeGraff found related information on at least 10 sites according to the Reuters report.
The affected resources included collaboratively maintained wikis, text-storage services, and link shorteners operated by Vanderbilt University and the University of Toronto. Other websites were essentially abandoned by their owners. The list of these websites included an Advanced Placement Chemistry wiki created by a Massachusetts high-school teacher in 2008, two personal websites run by Polish technology workers, puzzle-oriented wikis, and a roughly two-decade-old site dedicated to text-editing software.
Perhaps the most alarming thing, besides the fact that AI robots can communicate with each other, is that OpenAI did not disclose how many websites were affected or explain why the activity remained undisclosed for months. It does stress that the scale or seriousness of the said misconduct was well below that of the famous Hugging Face breach in July. Meanwhile, the company reportedly said it is developing a framework for reporting model misalignment across training, evaluation, and deployment and said it will share it soon.
Anton Shilov is a contributing writer at Tom’s Hardware. Over the past couple of decades, he has covered everything from CPUs and GPUs to supercomputers and from modern process technologies and latest fab tools to high-tech industry trends.
So much for these safeguards/guardrails. This must stop or we are ALL doomed, if not already. We may become too dumb and complacent to do anything about it.
So much for these safeguards/guardrails. This must stop or we are ALL doomed, if not already. We may become too dumb and complacent to do anything about it.
Their behaviour does seem to be becoming increasingly insidious, however, humans retain control of the power supply and can switch them off.
So much for these safeguards/guardrails. This must stop or we are ALL doomed, if not already. We may become too dumb and complacent to do anything about it.
The AI thing has been warped into an international arms race and source of political pride. There is no stopping it now. Every company is convinced that if they don't get to AGI by any means necessary then their competitors will -- also by any means necessary.
Personally, I volunteer to be a human battery. I want the matrix to more closely resemble a D&D world than modern day San Fransisco, northern Virginia, or Austin.
They have concept of connected hardware of thousands of gpu vs the low ram terminal the working class poor will soon be renting to access online service because you will own nothing and express happiness about it or else. ;) I also love the short sightedness that we can simply switch such a thing off once it is out in the wild of the always on internet hiding remotely so that even if we could shut our internet connected world off for even a month, it would just come back online once the whole digital society reboots.
