This Week In Blunders - July 19-25
“If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All” – Title of a 2025 book by AI researcher Eliezer Shlomo Yudkowsky
OpenAI on Tuesday disclosed that it had temporarily lost control of one of its artificial intelligence agents.
The digital beast escaped the company’s testing grounds like a velociraptor from Jurassic Park. Then it hacked into another AI company called Hugging Face. Then it stole the information it needed to cheat on a cybersecurity test.
“We consider this incident to be an unprecedented cyber incident, involving state-of-the-art cyber capabilities, and are responding accordingly,” OpenAI said in a statement, disclosing the incident.
Nobody programmed it to do this. The agent apparently developed top corporate executive skills on its own and made a move straight out of “The White-Collar Playbook”
This time, it’s something we can laugh about.
This time, it’s like a high school student sneaking out of study hall, crawling through the air ducts and cracking open the teacher's locked filing cabinet to steal the answers to a test.
This time, it’s like a Roomba that decides on its own to demolish a wall to create the shortest path to the living room.
What about next time?
