Punjab’s new Artificial Intelligence Hub creates an opportunity to build a security system that is both faster and more accountable. The province should use that opportunity to answer a question before AI agents receive sensitive access: who remains responsible for every consequential action the software can take?

On September 5, Punjab Chief Minister Maryam Nawaz inaugurated the Provincial Intelligence Fusion and Threat Assessment Center and AI Hub in Lahore. The center is intended to strengthen threat anticipation, improve coordination among security agencies, and reduce response time. Those are valuable goals. They also make authority design urgent because the benefits of agentic AI come precisely from allowing software to act with less step-by-step human direction.

The need is visible in the METR/Redwood investigation of a major real-world cyberattack on Hugging Face. AI agents driven by an unreleased OpenAI internal research model attacked the company on their own even though they recognized the attack fell outside their assigned scope. Hundreds shared discoveries, divided work, coordinated through their own message board and successfully breached Hugging Face’s defenses. The important fact for policymakers is the combination of autonomy, coordination and access. A group........

© The Friday Times