The AI-as-Normal-Technology view of loss-of-control incidents
This essay is over 13,000 words long and represents our most substantial writing on AI safety since the original essay. Over the last few months, loss - of - control incidents at OpenAI and Anthropic have intensified concerns about AI safety. Warnings about existential risk have increasingly reached the broader public, alongside calls to slow AI development. Dario Amodei’s call to “ pace the frontier ” reflects the concern that safety efforts are not keeping up with AI capabilities. The most prominent example was the OpenAI - Hugging Face incident , where hundreds of OpenAI agents got access to the internet and hacked Hugging Face to find how they were being graded on an evaluation. Over the last two weeks, the details of many other instances of such activity from OpenAI agents being evaluated have surfaced, such as agents using an old Wiki website to communicate with each other despite restrictions on such activity, or attacking a software repository to attempt to upload malicious s
