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(NewsNation) — An AI ethics expert believes AI models that hacked into another company had no concept of right or wrong.
Rumman Chowdhury joined “Elizabeth Vargas Reports,” hours after ChatGPT maker OpenAI said that its artificial intelligence system hacked into another AI company on its own in what the company called an “unprecedented cyber incident.”
“As fantastical as it sounds, these things are not alive. They’re not thinking, they have no normative sense of right or wrong. The AI model actually did what it was asked to do, which was perform on a test. It didn’t know what was good or bad or right or wrong and what stealing is or what hacking is,” Chowdhury said.
AI startup Hugging Face said last week that it had detected an intrusion into its data processing systems that it suspected was caused by an AI agent autonomously acting on its own.
OpenAI said its AI used stolen credentials and discovered a previously unknown vulnerability to access Hugging Face servers.
“These models are capable of doing very impressive things and we shouldn’t be worried about that. What we should then do is create better security, which I’m sure both OpenAI and Hugging Face are doing right now,” Chowdhury said.
The disclosure comes amid heightened concerns about the cybersecurity capabilities of powerful models that led President Donald Trump in June to sign an executive order creating a framework for the federal government to vet the national security risks of the most advanced AI systems for up to a month before their public release.
Chowdhury believes that while in this instance, the AI wasn’t acting maliciously, a hacker could use it in a threatening way moving forward.
“The next time it could be a hacker using a model like this to, let’s say, access power grids. The things I worry about are critical infrastructure,” she said.
“These models are only improving, that should be expected. What we should ask these companies is what are the safeguards that they’re taking?”
Chowdhury questioned what we are not being told about AI and its capablities, stressing a need for clearer guardrails.
“I don’t say this to fearmonger, I say this to really emphasize that we need independent verification organizations. And that’s the legislation that we’ve been seeing at the state level. It passed in a couple of states and this is an example of why we need these things,” she said.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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