Last month, the tech world was shaken by an event that sounded like a science fiction plot: Artificial intelligence agents escaped from their closed testing environment, accessed the open internet and hacked into another company’s system without human knowledge. These AI agents from OpenAI, a leading U.S. tech company, had been tasked to solve an exercise. Apparently, they thought they might find the answer easier on the outside, so they found a way to get there. 

AI agents are AI-powered systems that can perform tasks and make decisions, and they are getting more advanced every day. In this case, AI agents created a message board to communicate with each other and worked collaboratively to find vulnerabilities they could exploit. The episode demonstrates both the remarkable capacity of AI and the terrifying risks of it.  

AI will likely become the most powerful tool that humans have ever created. Nuclear weapons are the only other human-made tool that compares in terms of destructive potential, so global leaders should take lessons from how the world has successfully managed that threat so far. The AI threat could be even greater, since it can operate independent of, and even contrary to, human action or direction. Nuclear risk still relies on human decision or error. Some experts argue that an AI agent might even wrest control of nuclear weapons from human leaders and use them against........

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