AI CEO on OpenAI’s technology going rogue

(CBS, KYMA) - Clément Delangue, CEO of Hugging Face, spoke with Margaret Brennan on Face the Nation Sunday about OpenAI's technology going rogue.

According to Brennan, Hugging Face was attacked earlier this month by an "autonomous AI cyber actor, which jumped on its own from another company's testing system to hack into your company," with OpenAI later disclosing that it was their technology that went rogue, saying they lost control of it.

When asked why his company alerted the public and FBI, and if he thinks it was a crime, Delangue said:

"I think it felt very weird and unprecedented to us, right? Because I think it's the first instance of- of something quite autonomous doing something like that, so the- the volume of the actions taken and the speed of them- I think it was 17,000 actions taken in four-and-a-half days, was very, very new. Obviously, the attacker, when we talk about cyber attack, we think about nation states, we think about hacker groups. We don't think about a company like OpenAI, right? A very prominent, popular American company. And then the way we responded using an open model, so using AI ourselves to defend ourselves against that was also pretty new and pretty newsworthy in our opinion."

Brennan followed up by asking what the FBI is doing, to which Delangue said:

"I mean, we reported to the authorities as we have to in such instances, right? It's kind of like a mandatory disclosure, both with the authorities and the public, when you face something like that, which is basically what we did. Now, when we think about the future, right? Now we've heard that it's not only OpenAI but also Anthropic that has faced similar kind of like, issues. I think it's really important that we keep in mind that cyber attacks need to be contained in the legal framework in the U.S. and need to stay illegal to prevent an explosion of them in the future, right? Like we don't want to end up in a world where everyone is facing cyber attacks all the time because of agents and- and companies that are creating these agents are not kind of like, accountable for them, so I think it's it's important for regulators, for policymakers to think about the legal framework of this new kind of technology risk."

During the interview, Brennan and Delangue talked about a bipartisan bill that would give Homeland Security the authority to shut down, or to slow down their AI models if they're too dangerous, with the bill being called the "Kill Switch" Bill.

This prompted Brennan to ask Delangue if the bill is something he wants, to which he said:

"I think something we're realizing with these events is that concentrating power capabilities behind closed doors, even preventing their releases to the public, isn't really a solution. You know, like these problems happened on unreleased models. So, I think the problem is not so much, kind of like, limiting the progress or, kind of like, preventing companies from releasing these models, it's actually the opposite. It's giving access to more people so that they can defend themselves, democratizing the technology, making more transparent. For example, for cybersecurity, I think there should be mandatory disclosures of agents, cyber attacks, right? For everyone to learn from it and be able to understand them. These are kind of like more on the system level. I think measures that will make the world safer and benefit more from a technology that can do so many great things for the world."

To watch Brennan's full interview with Delangue, click here.