Inside the suddenly explosive world of AI safety

On a sunny July day in Berkeley, California, the country’s top AI safety researchers gathered on an unmarked floor of an unmarked building. They had come together for a “war room” to dissect the high-profile cybersecurity incident that had rocked the AI industry hours earlier. An unreleased OpenAI model had gone rogue, executing a stunningly sophisticated three-part plan. It broke out of its holding area, finagled access to the internet, and hacked into a competing AI startup’s systems — all without OpenAI finding out about it for more than a week.

No one in the war room was surprised; this was the very thing the third-party AI-safety researchers had been warning about for years. The incident was the latest, though arguably the most egregious, in a series that was eroding trust in frontier labs. It only reaffirmed the importance of their work.