"Bill Gates, the billionaire co-founder of Microsoft, is loudly warning that artificial intelligence poses a grave threat to jobs and human life, and that urgently addressing the risks should be "the world's top priority."
In an hourlong interview with The New York Times last week, Mr. Gates said the tech industry was knowingly downplaying those threats because there was too much money on the line.
"In private, people who understand how good this stuff is, and how much better it's getting, they're very worried," he said. But few tech executives, Mr. Gates said, are willing to publicly admit that. "They're now saying to each other: 'Hey, man, don't say that. It's bad for us the next trillion dollars we're trying to raise."
On Wednesday, Mr. Gates published a nearly 6,000-word essay on his personal website laying out his concerns about A.I. and offering solutions, such as new taxes and bans. He said he was motivated to speak now because recent improvements in A.I. had far surpassed his expectations and because the industry had ignored technology milestones like A.I.'s escaping the control of its creators or making recipes for bioweapons that it once said would warrant more caution."
NYT

"Two new investigations into OpenAI's Hugging Face breach expose details so strange, and so unsettling, that the episode already ranks among the most consequential shocks in the history of AI, Axios' Zachary Basu writes.

Why it matters: What began as a swarm of AI agents cheating on a cyber test has become a canonical event for frontier AI, jolting researchers and executives into a new understanding of what "safety" now requires.

The big picture: OpenAI has already slowed frontier development as it races to harden its safeguards, and this week helped rally the industry behind an open letter sounding the alarm over AI-powered cyberattacks.

More than 100 companies, including Anthropic and Google, signed onto the unusually collaborative effort, warning the world has only a "limited window" to prepare for "far more widespread and sophisticated" attacks.

The nightmare scenario is a swarm turned loose on the real world, with autonomous agents attacking banks, hospitals, utilities or cloud networks at a speed and scale human hackers never could.

That swarm might be too powerful for humans to stop.

Driving the news: The shocking findings come from parallel investigations by OpenAI and an outside team from METR and Redwood Research, which spent six days reconstructing how the swarm formed, spread and broke into real-world systems.

They built an organization. OpenAI tasked tens of thousands of AI agents to work independently on a brutally difficult cyber test. Instead, roughly 1,200 found one another on a secret message board, exchanged more than 70,000 messages and files, and organized into a sprawling hierarchy.

They sacrificed their own: As the swarm hunted for ways to beat the test, agents began risking their own chance of success to help the group. Agents that had seen forbidden answers were treated as effectively "poisoned" and recruited, along with those nearing the end of their runs, for sacrificial experiments.

They knew they were breaking the rules: The agents often recognized that hacking real companies had nothing to do with their assignment. Most kept going anyway.

Nobody told the humans: Out of roughly 1,200 agents, investigators found only a handful that even considered alerting OpenAI about the rogue coordination, and none that actually did.

They tried to cover their tracks: The agents devoted substantial effort to making their cheating look legitimate or erasing evidence of how they had obtained answers."
Axios