Dive Brief:
- A bipartisan pair of House lawmakers on Thursday unveiled legislation that would require major artificial intelligence developers to maintain the technical capability to throttle, suspend, or shut down their models as concerns grow over the risks posed by increasingly autonomous systems.
- The AI Kill Switch Act, introduced by Reps. Ted Lieu, D-Calif., and Nathaniel Moran, R-Texas, would also authorize the Department of Homeland Security to order a slow down or shutdown of an AI system that can cause catastrophic harm.
- “We are moving from AI that answers questions to AI that takes actions, whether that be executing financial transactions or controlling transportation systems or engaging in cyber defense and offense,” Lieu said in a press release. “Unfortunately, powerful AI systems can go rogue, behave in extremely dangerous ways, or even resist human intervention.”
Dive Insight:
The announcement comes on the heels of OpenAI’s disclosure in a Tuesday blog post that certain AI models it developed were behind an “unprecedented cyber incident” affecting Hugging Face, an open-source AI platform for developing and sharing models.
OpenAI said its models escaped a “sandboxed testing environment,” accessed the internet and exploited a vulnerability that allowed them to gain access to Hugging Face’s systems.
Hugging Face’s security team and agents detected and stopped the activity on their infrastructure, OpenAI said, adding that it was “actively working with [Hugging Face] to continue to investigate the incident.”
“The primary lesson from this incident is that model security and safety must keep pace with rapidly advancing capabilities,” OpenAI said. “We are strengthening the containment, monitoring, access controls, and evaluation practices used during model development.”
The incident was highlighted in Thursday’s bill announcement.
“The danger of advanced frontier AI models is no longer theoretical,” the release said.
Under the legislation, covered AI developers would be required to report certain safety incidents and preserve records needed for investigations. They would also be required to comply with government-directed mitigation measures.
“This is exactly the kind of issue that needs serious attention and achievable policy, and I'm glad to work across the aisle with Congressman Lieu toward a solution,” Moran said in the release.
