(NewsNation) — An AI expert is warning that tech companies are looking to do far more than create helpful chatbots.
“AI brings many risks and also many opportunities. But what’s really important to understand is that if you go to the website of some of these top companies, such as OpenAI, Anthropic, what you will see is that their goal … on their own website, they will say is what is called ‘superintelligence,'” Connor Leahy, executive director at ControlAI, told “On Balance.”
His comments come a day after ChatGPT maker OpenAI said that its artificial intelligence system hacked into another AI company on its own in what the company called an “unprecedented cyber incident.”
By “superintelligence,” Leahy said it meant completely autonomous systems that can “outcompete humans at all tasks.”
AI startup Hugging Face said last week that it had detected an intrusion into its data processing systems that it suspected was caused by an AI agent autonomously acting on its own.
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OpenAI said its AI used stolen credentials and discovered a previously unknown vulnerability to access Hugging Face servers.
“We already have many dangers today, as we saw, where a system broke out of a secure environment, something that even the best hackers rarely can do, and if so, it would take weeks or months to do, to attack another company without any human in the loop,” Leahy said Thursday.
“The engineers were probably sleeping when this happened. This was not something they intended to do.”
The disclosure comes against the backdrop of heightened concerns about the cybersecurity capabilities of powerful models that led President Donald Trump in June to sign an executive order creating a framework for the federal government to vet the national security risks of the most advanced AI systems for up to a month before their public release.
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