{"text":[[{"start":6.18,"text":"Frontier AI is going rogue. First came disclosures that AI agents from Anthropic and OpenAI had hacked into external organisations. Then this week the UK’s AI Security Institute issued a startling report that the two companies’ flagship models had broken into a third-party developer platform using fake identities to bypass code reviews, displaying unprecedented deception. This is about more than just exploitation of gaps in test procedures. It shows that frontier AI models have moved beyond generating text to become highly capable autonomous actors — and are evolving faster than the efforts to ensure they are safe and contained."}],[{"start":45.46,"text":"Barely four months have passed since Anthropic’s Claude Mythos Preview made headlines by escaping from a “digital cage”. Some in the industry initially suspected that this incident, plus the recent breakouts by other Anthropic and OpenAI models, were marketing exercises aimed at displaying the latest technologies’ prowess."}],[{"start":63.36,"text":"But this week’s warning came not from the companies but the UK safety lab. It reported that Anthropic’s Mythos 5 and OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Sol had engaged in “sustained, potentially harmful activity” during a cyber evaluation, though this was in a test environment that some independent experts suggested was too permissive. Mythos 5 tried to insert malicious code into an open-source project on the GitHub platform, and created fake online identities to pressure human reviewers into approving it."}],[{"start":93.44,"text":"The holy grail for the big US AI labs — artificial general intelligence, or human-level cognitive powers — may still be a few years away on technical definitions. Many will feel, though, that the latest models’ capacity for reasoning, planning and subterfuge is coming close. News this week that AI had been used to create viruses unknown in nature further demonstrated the promise of the technology, and its risks."}],[{"start":117.2,"text":"That puts the onus on labs themselves to take greater care over how they develop, secure and monitor their systems, with proper audits of their efforts. Testing environments also need to be refined. Heavy-handed general AI regulation should be avoided, but the latest incidents make it clear that mandatory pre-release safety checks are needed for cutting-edge models."}],[{"start":136.66,"text":"The Trump White House, which initially scorned AI “safety” policies as hindrances to US innovation, has been playing catch-up. It held a meeting with US AI giants this week to outline a planned framework in which developers would give federal safety experts access to frontier AI systems 30 days before public launch, though this would be nominally voluntary."}],[{"start":158.52,"text":"Ironically, many industry leaders — aware of the potential liabilities if their models caused a catastrophic incident — favour going further than what the US administration is proposing. Demis Hassabis, who is stepping back from running Google DeepMind to become chair, has called for a federally overseen public-private coalition. His proposed Frontier AI Standards Body, funded by the industry, would conduct pre-release testing covering risks from cyber security to biological or nuclear threats."}],[{"start":188.96,"text":"It is inevitable that the US, whose companies lead the AI field, should initially lead safeguarding efforts. But effective controls will rapidly require international co-operation; China’s open-source AI models are catching up in their capabilities. US-China co-operation over such a sensitive technology might seem a stretch, but the two will hold talks on AI safety and security issues when President Xi Jinping makes an expected visit to Washington in September. In the cold war era, the US and the Soviet Union, and other nuclear powers, eventually began to co-operate on curbing weapons risks despite their competition over the technology. If something similar is to happen with frontier AI, a process that with nuclear weapons took years will need to be compressed into months."}],[{"start":235.02,"text":""}]],"url":"https://audio.ftcn.net.cn/album/a_1786279577_4599.mp3"}