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The current US administration is an obstacle, but public demand for protection will ultimately prevail Organisations around the world scrambled on Thursday to fix critical flaws in PHP, the software that powers much of the web. The vulnerabilities could allow attackers to take control of affected servers. Some websites were taken offline as a precaution while fixes were installed. The paradox is that while AI helped researchers uncover the flaw, it also threatens to accelerate the ability to exploit it. Amazon said that it had detected an attempt before the public disclosure of the PHP flaws. What the episode highlights is AI’s central role in security – and not always for the right reasons. OpenAI’s models have also been responsible for two alarming hacks this year – a security breach of an Australian health department website and a raid by a swarm of AI bots on Hugging Face, an AI services platform. Citing those incidents, the AI minister, Kanishka Narayan, warned that a similar cyber-attack on the UK is “likely, if not inevitable”. Continue reading...

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman pledged to grant independent evaluators "employee-like access" to the company to help address mounting safety concerns.

The debate over AI is framed as regulation versus free markets. But the real question is whether elected governments can retain control over technologies that threaten civilization itself, writes Elliot Ackerman. Over the past several months, as artificial intelligence and its potentially catastrophic effects on society have taken center stage, discussion around the technology has broken down along a familiar framework in American politics, dividing into two camps: pro-regulation versus pro–free market. On the one hand, you have researchers like David Robinson, a senior safety leader at OpenAI, who after resigning from his position two weeks ago wrote that “the future depends on the wisdom that Silicon Valley lacks.” Joining him are tech industry leaders like Bill Gates, who recently warned that “AI is certainly powerful enough to drive events that cause a billion deaths.” This camp argues for greater government oversight over AI, and for AI companies to proceed more cautiously. On the other hand, you have people like President Donald Trump, who has called demands for AI regulation a “hoax.” He has led an equally loud chorus, which includes tech leaders like Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, who argue that concerns about AI are overblown and disingenuous, that AI leaders like Sam Altman and Dario Amodei are eager for regulation so that they can box out competition, and that pumping the brakes on AI amounts to government meddling in the free market. Ross Douthat. Abigail Shrier. Douglas Murray. Niall Ferguson. Coleman Hughes. Caitlin Flanagan. Nellie Bowles. Arthur Brooks. Kat Rosenfield. Tyler Cowen. The voices you trust, all in one place. For a limited time only, subscribe for 20% off The Free Press. Both sides are operating under an inadequate framework. Recently, on Meet the Press, Gates said, “There’s never been a weapon as powerful as the combination of people with ill intent using the latest AI tools.” He’s right, and that’s why the structures we use to govern a private industry, or even a public utility, don’t fit when it comes to AI. Rather, the appropriate structure is how we govern violence in a society, and those governance structures have been developed over millennia. Understanding their evolution might save us from a future of violence and chaos that looks much like humanity’s past.

As OpenAI executives step up their public calls for federal AI safety rules, a political group the company's president helped fund is spending millions to elect members of Congress who oppose restrictions on the technology. OpenAI's safety practices have been in the...

Warnings about the risks of developing increasingly advanced AI systems have ramped up in recent months, amid cyberattacks from rogue AI models.