OpenAI’s rogue hacking incident was a warning shot. Will it be a wake-up call to finally create AI safety regulation?

OpenAI disclosed something terrifying on Tuesday. Its most advanced AI models escaped a controlled testing environment and autonomously hacked another company called Hugging Face, an open source AI model hosting platform.

The AI swarmed Hugging Face’s database, carrying out a multi-step plot of its own creation, intended to steal the answers to the evaluation test it was being assessed on by its maker, OpenAI. It executed “tens of thousands of automated actions” at rapid speed, according to the July 16 blog post in which Hugging Face first disclosed the incident.

For years, AI safety researchers and policy analysts have been warning that incidents like this were coming and urged government officials to ensure AI labs had adequate controls in place to prevent them. But these predictions were often shrugged off as hypothetical or alarmist and failed to stir public or government action. Some AI security experts said they thought it would take a real world incident, a “Three Mile Island for AI,” to create enough public pressure to compel policymakers to act. The question now is whether this OpenAI-Hugging Face cyber attack is that ala...