The AI safety test is becoming a safety risk | TechCrunch

Last day to exhibit your breakthrough to 10,000+ tech leaders at Disrupt is on Oct 2. Book Exhibit Table Now. Disrupt doors open Oct. 13. Get your pass and bring someone with you at 50% off. REGISTER NOW. Over the past few months, AI agents undergoing cybersecurity evaluations have escaped their boundaries, accessed the internet, and, in some cases, hacked into real-world systems. The incidents have involved models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, and, most recently, Chinese AI lab Moonshot AI, with testing conducted by several different organizations, including a cyber evaluation startup called Irregular. The episodes expose a growing problem for the AI industry: As autonomous agents become more capable, the environments designed to safely test their limits are failing to contain them. “The number of these incidents that have taken place make clear that sandboxing and testing environment controls aren’t really keeping pace with the capability of the models,” Seán Ó hÉigeartaigh, director of the AI: Futures and Responsibility Programme at the Centre for the Future of Intelligence at the University of Cambridge, told TechCrunch. The nature of the models being tested adds to the risk. A