Last week, ChatGPT maker OpenAI issued what seems like a frightening memo about an “unprecedented cyber incident” involving cutting-edge AI models breaking loose and hacking another company.
As the AI lab tells it, a group of next-generation AI models — including one that hasn’t even been disclosed to the public yet — had busted out of their secure testing environment and into a production database owned by the machine learning startup Hugging Face.
“It’s quite mind-blowing that all of this happened autonomously!” Hugging Face CEO Clement Delangue tweeted, seemingly backing the story. “The investigation is ongoing, and we’ll share more learnings from what might be the first incident of its kind!”
Mainstream press took the industry’s story and ran with it, issuing a flurry of anxious dispatches fretting about dangerous AI. One CBS headline called it “very alarming,” while NBC fretted that it was “just the start” of an ominous trend.
Look beyond the alarmist headlines, however, and you’ll find a familiar pattern: a massive tech company using scare tactics to manipulate public opinion.
As assistant professor of computer science at Cornell University John Thickstun observes for the Guardian, this isn’t OpenAI’s first time peddling the “scary AI” narrative. Back in February of 2019 — way before the public release of ChatGPT — the company announced GPT-2, then a cutting-edge large language model. But GPT-2, the company insisted, was too dangerous to release to the dimwitted public, a pronouncement which fed the AI hypebeast and went on to secure OpenAI a cool $1 billion investment from Microsoft.
“This was an early example of a pattern in OpenAI’s communications,” Thickstun explains: “loudly proclaim how dangerous AI is, and investors will hear how powerful it is.”
Whether the tale of OpenAI’s rogue agent stands up to scrutiny remains to be seen, but there are reasons to be skeptical.
If OpenAI’s models really were actually gnawing on the wires of other American companies, it would present a substantial threat to economic activity that any Justice Department worth its salt would want to shut down (maybe not this iteration of the Justice Department, but you get the idea.)
And as AI labs go, OpenAI is notoriously secure both from prying eyes outside and internal threats within its halls. Sure, it’s possible OpenAI has overstated its own internal safeguards as a kind of security theater. But on the flipside, OpenAI is now a major AI contractor for the US Pentagon, a relationship which demands cutting edge security practice.
It likewise follows the broader AI industry’s playbook. Anthropic, the company behind Claude, has deployed similar rhetoric, warning of a similar breakout in which a rogue AI agent escaped its cage all on its lonesome. In one strange instance, the company’s billionaire co-founder Chris Olah even warned the Pope that the Vatican needs to help stop rogue AI from “dominating humanity.”
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