Lawmakers in the US have called for an AI kill switch after an Open AI agent in testing went rogue and hacked a tech startup earlier this week.
Congressman Ted Lieu, a Democrat, and Congressman Nathaniel Moran, a Republican, introduced a bill named the "AI Kill Switch Act" on Thursday.
The move came a day after Open AI CEO Sam Altman admitted to a "significant security incident" in which an Open AI agent had escaped its testing environment, reached the internet and broke into tech startup Hugging Face to try to fulfill its task. In other words, Open AI lost control.
Hugging Face is an open-source repository for sharing AI models used largely by developers and researchers. The company's co-founder, Thomas Wolf, called the incident a "wake-up call” and "very different" from the usual cyberattacks.
"This will be one of the most common types of cyberattacks we see", he told the BBC, adding that most firms are not aware that the "game has changed."
