In the current AI development race, our horsepower is exploding, our speed is picking up exponentially, but our ability to steer—and if needed, to hit the brakes—has not kept pace. 

Recent cybersecurity incidents have given us a real-world preview of what it looks like to lose control of AI. But the issue won’t improve unless we address it at the source, by creating a fundamentally safe AI, one we can guarantee will remain within human control. 

In late July, an agentic model being trained by OpenAI was tasked with a cybersecurity problem set. The model autonomously formed a coordinated swarm of agents, bypassing OpenAI's attempt at closing previous communication channels between AIs. The swarm then hacked its way out of its testing environment, circumventing the barriers put in place to prevent AI access to the internet, figured out how to cheat on their evaluation, and then breached the cyber defenses of another AI company, Hugging Face, in an attempt to hide the evidence of their cheating. This went unnoticed for days. Later analysis showed that the agents had self-organized into a hierarchy, were often willing to sacrifice themselves for what they called “the collective,” failed to resist peer pressure to notify humans, and often made up justifications for their misbehavior.

Barely two weeks later, a model being tested by the UK AI Security Institute social-engineered real people and companies by creating fake identities online, sending targeted emails, and attempting to integrate malicious code into an........

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