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Artificial intelligence tools are quickly advancing in sophistication and capabilities, raising alarm among researchers and industry figures who say the technology needs to be more tightly regulated. This comes as OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT, recently disclosed that one of its experimental AI agents went rogue and secretly hacked into the infrastructure of several other companies in what was supposed to be a controlled test. Over 1,100 scientists and senior employees at top AI firms have called on the U.S. government to back international efforts to “deliberately pace” the development of the world’s most advanced AI systems.

“What we’re talking about now are AI systems that also have goals on their own that they can actively go out and pursue in the world,” says AI researcher Max Tegmark, a physics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Tegmark says OpenAI’s rogue agent is a “canary in the coal mine” of where the technology is headed as Silicon Valley leaders seek to “replace humans.”

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is in Washington, D.C., meeting with lawmakers as concern grows over the power of the latest artificial intelligence models to evade or resist human oversight. Altman’s trip to Capitol Hill comes just days after OpenAI admitted some of its experimental AI agents went rogue and secretly hacked into the infrastructure of another AI company called Hugging Face during what was supposed to be a controlled test. OpenAI has now disclosed that several other companies were also hacked.

President Trump was questioned Wednesday about the hack and calls to increase regulations on AI firms.

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PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Well, we’re looking at AI. We’re looking at controls. We’re also making sure that we lead. So, we’re leading China in AI by a lot. China has virtually no controls. It’s freewheeling a little bit. So, we have to be careful in both ways. We don’t want to restrict them, where all of a sudden we come in second to China. Whoever wins with AI is going to win. That’s how big it is. So, it’s bigger than the internet ever was. It’s bigger than anything ever was. So, I don’t want to restrict. I know many of these people. I don’t want to restrict them from doing great work.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Well, we’re looking at AI. We’re looking at controls. We’re also making sure that we lead. So, we’re leading China in AI by a lot. China has virtually no controls. It’s freewheeling a little bit. So, we have to be careful in both ways. We don’t want to restrict them, where all of a sudden we come in second to China. Whoever wins with AI is going to win. That’s how big it is. So, it’s bigger than the internet ever was. It’s bigger than anything ever was. So, I don’t want to restrict. I know many of these people. I don’t want to restrict them from doing great work.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: In related new, over 1,100 scientists and senior employees at top AI firms have called on the U.S. government to back international efforts to develop tools that can, quote, “deliberately pace” the development of the world’s most advanced AI systems. Signatories to the letter include senior employees at Anthropic, Google, Meta and OpenAI.

The signers wrote, quote, “To realize AI’s potential, industry, government, and society at large may need the option to buy time to address emerging risks, develop security measures, and strengthen oversight.”

AMY GOODMAN: We’re joined now by Max Tegmark, professor conducting AI and physics research at MIT as part of the Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Fundamental Interactions, as well as at the Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines. He’s also a co-founder of the Future of Life Institute, which advocates for the positive use of AI. He’s the author of the New York Times best-seller, Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence.

Well, we certainly want to ask you about how to be human in the age of artificial intelligence. But first, Professor Tegmark, let’s begin with you explaining to a lay global audience what it means that this OpenAI rogue agent or agents broke out and autonomously attacked other companies’ programs. What exactly does this mean?

MAX TEGMARK: So, what this means exactly is that those passive chatbots that just sit there and answer questions, that’s so yesterday. What we’re talking about now are AI systems that also have goals on their own that they can actively go out and pursue in the world.

This agent that OpenAI had launched internally, it spent four-and-a-half days trying, trying, trying, trying to accomplish this task, and eventually it figured out that the best way it could do it was if it first hacked its way out of OpenAI onto the open internet. And then it figured out how to hack itself into four other entities, including this company Hugging Face, where it managed to commandeer several different computer clusters and get top-level access to all sorts of things in there and steal a bunch of data from Hugging Face.

And that means that we should no longer think of today’s cutting-edge AI, again, as just the chatbots that everyone is familiar with, but really as an alien type of being that can have goals of its own and go out in the world and pursue them.

And this incident, in and of itself, of course, isn’t — didn’t cause any enormous harm. So we should think of it as a canary in the coal mine, because if you listen to........

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