This summer, AI agents slipped past the walls built to contain them during routine tests. Now two of the industry’s most prominent figures say the next lapse may not be so harmless.
It is unusual for an industry to ask for its own oversight. Yet that is the message coming out of Dublin this week, where the heads of two of the world’s biggest AI efforts argued that recent mishaps should be read as a forecast, not a footnote.
Demis Hassabis, co-founder and chair of Google DeepMind and chief scientist at Alphabet, told an AI summit on October 14 that this year’s security incidents involving AI agents amount to early warning shots. His point was a matter of timing. The systems behind those incidents, he said, are still too limited to cause serious damage. Give them another year or two of progress without better safeguards, and that may no