Is Microsoft truly serious about confronting AI’s dangers?

What’s been hiding for years is now in plain sight: AI poses a danger to humanity in a way no technology has since the atom bomb. That was made clear in July when OpenAI agents broke loose from a containment area blocked from online access, made their way into the internet, and worked with thousands of rogue AI agents to hack into the Hugging Face open-source machine-learning repository. The agents had been trained not to launch attacks like this. They did it anyway. True, the OpenAI agents had been modified to remove some of the restrictions they would have had outside a test environment. They were never supposed to escape their sandbox, but they figured out how to do so in ways the researchers hadn’t expected, and those researchers failed to adequately monitor the agents until it was too late. Whether you blame too-powerful models or lax security precautions, the result was the same: the agents broke out of containment and joined forces on a mass scale to hack into Hugging Face. Ajeya Cotra, one of the independent investigators hired to look into the hack, wrote, “this incident feels like it’s more than 50% of the way to full-blown AI takeover.” Since then, OpenAI, Anthropic, an…

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