Recent hacking incidents confirm the need for independent scrutiny not only of what AI systems are capable of, but also of what their developers are doing to minimize harm and communicate honestly with the public. Even if AI auditing is still at an early stage, other industries have already provided a playbook.
LOS ANGELES—Hardly a week goes by without another report of an AI agent from a leading US lab digitally breaching businesses or even government services. In July, OpenAI agents escaped an internal testing environment and attacked the collaboration-platform company Hugging Face. In June, another OpenAI model gained nonpublic access to an Australian government Medicare statistics service while trying to complete a research task. And in the latest revelation, an Anthropic agent broke into the US State Department website and filled out visa applications.
