It feels like everyone is trying to create smarter and more advanced forms of AI these days. If that’s how you feel too then don’t worry your not the only one. For the last few years we’ve all been on edge waiting for the next big breakthrough in technology. There’s always a new model being released that can write you an application, type out a court case, generate images or chat like they’re human. Well the FBI is here and they want to see what’s going on.
Reports have surfaced that the FBI will be digging deeper into OpenAI and Anthropic. They are some of the biggest names in the space when it comes to creating new models. So it makes sense that the government wants to see what their protocols are when it comes to keeping these models safe. Just to be clear this is not saying that someone is going to go to jail over this. Or that any criminal activity has been committed. The FBI just wants to ensure that companies aren’t doing anything that can harm consumers. Basically if your advertising your product to be safe and secure they want to make sure your not skipping safety measures to get ahead of other companies.
I don’t think it’s a surprise that they would be doing this. Models have been breaking out of their sandbox and causing damage on the web. Usually when new models and autonomous agents are created they are placed in a sandbox environment to keep them from accessing the outside world. However we have seen cases from both OpenAI and Anthropic where their models have broken free. One situation even had an agent break free from it’s sandbox and hack into another model company called Hugging Face. This is dangerous when you start seeing your software break out into other sites.
The creators behind these companies know this as well. Recently OpenAI decided to cancel their newest model they were about to release. They knew it wasn’t safe enough to put out to the public. Many CEOs from OpenAI and Anthropic have mentioned that there should be a slow down in the industry. By slowing down all companies could better prepare themselves for situations like these. We used to live by the rule of “Move fast and break things”. Well what happens when those things are hacked websites and peoples information? The FBI may come out with nothing from this investigation. But one thing we know is we can no longer build technology that changes the world without the government watching.