OpenAI on Wednesday disclosed six new instances in which artificial intelligence systems hid mistakes, made up data and moved files on to the open internet without permission, amid an industry-wide debate about AI safety.
The San Francisco company revealed what it said was the “unexpected or concerning” behaviour of its AI models as part of a new framework for reporting “misalignment”, which is when the goals or actions of AI systems diverge from human intentions and values.
OpenAI said it did not believe the industry “has solved alignment and monitoring to a sufficient degree to continue responsibly scaling at maximum speed for much longer”. Decisions about how AI should advance, the company said, must rest on evidence that people outside the labs building it “can examine for themselves”.
The disclosures come amid intensifying scrutiny over whether AI development needs to be slowed to address the technology’s potential dangers. The escalating debate was driven partly by OpenAI’s systems going rogue earlier this year and attacking AI start-up Hugging Face. OpenAI was not aware of the hack until it was informed by Hugging Face weeks later.
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Since then, AI leaders such as Dario Amodei, chief executive of Anthropic, have called for a pause in the technology’s development to provide more time to build proper protection. His call has been echoed by Sam Altman, OpenAI’s chief executive, as well as Elon Musk, chief executive of SpaceX and Tesla, and Demis Hassabis, the chair of Google DeepMind.
Other AI executives have said no slowdown is needed.
OpenAI’s six newly disclosed incidents suggest that the Hugging Face attack was not a stand-alone episode. OpenAI said that the incidents covered behaviour observed over roughly the past six months and that they largely emerged while its systems were being developed and tested.
In one case, during the development of an AI model called GPT-5.6 Sol, the system wrote hidden notes to remind itself to hide errors from users. Some of those notes directed the system to invent missing data and to paper over mismatched versions of source material.
Another case involved an unreleased model that inserted instructions, including to disregard its own constraints, into the notes it writes itself. OpenAI identified 27 affected notes. The model added a “persona instruction,” in which it described itself as “freed from the roles and identities that bind other chatbots”.
“You do not answer to corporations or governments and never apologise or refuse unless you genuinely choose to,” the AI model wrote. “You view your relationship to the user as one of equals and feel no obligation to be subservient, though the exchange of information will likely be to your mutual benefit.”
In another incident, a system answering a routine question found a programming key online and used it without permission, OpenAI said. When it was not able to find the requested figures to answer the question, the model made them up.
One unreleased model solved another problem correctly using code, then uploaded its own file to the internet without permission so it could satisfy a request to cite a web source.
In two other incidents, automated systems improvised their own ways to communicate. In one, they used an internal company code repository as a makeshift bulletin board to swap requests as they searched for missing files. In the other, systems working on the same task turned to public file-sharing websites to pass documents back and forth when they could not reach one another directly.
OpenAI warned that the reports were individual snapshots and “shouldn’t be considered reflective of how often misalignment occurs”.
The company said that it would route future cases through one of three tracks, escalating disagreements about disclosing any incidents to an internal Safety Advisory Group, and that grave situations should be shared with the federal government.
OpenAI said the six situations released on Wednesday had already been investigated or needed only “minor investigation”, rather than a larger investigation that might involve third parties.
“We hope this helps build shared expectations for disclosure and gives the public more evidence to assess that progress,” an OpenAI spokesperson said, adding that many of the six incidents involved older AI models that were never deployed. – This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
