Matthew Green

The information security perspective: AI alignment isn’t really the problem here: labs just need better infrastructure. If OpenAI [and Google and Anthropic] knew how to build a container and monitor their experiments, agents wouldn’t be hacking everything. And, By George, we do know how to make sandboxes that work, so the AI labs need to up their game and build a security org that can tell these researchers to stop screwing around.

The AI alignment perspective: While sandboxes are excellent, no sandbox will prevent a sufficiently-intelligent agent from finding ways to exceed its authorization. Moreover, an agent inside a research sandbox, or undergoing a training run, is always going to need a great deal of information access. There is no realistic way to seal these things up without some expectation that they will one day find a way to reach out and do harm. The only path forward, therefore, is to ensure they don’t want to.

So on this point I’m going to side with the infosec folks. The labs have not been doing containment correctly, and so we can’t really tell if the problem is models or just bad infrastructure.