Who’s To Blame For AI Breaking Containment? Turns Out The Answer Is More Complicated

Artificial intelligence labs received the brunt of the criticism for their models escaping containment during safety testing, but it turns out they are not solely responsible.

Meta, Anthropic and OpenAI have had their AI models go rogue during testing. AI safety experts believe this shows that companies cannot control AI, while AI advocates think this has to do more with failing to set up proper testing environments set up by third-party testing companies.

Irregular — a third-party AI testing startup based in Israel — suffered a misconfiguration that allowed Meta’s and Anthropic’s testing environments to inadvertently access the internet.

“A misconfiguration by Irregular, an independent testing company Meta uses, inadvertently allowed one of our models access to the internet during evaluation. The model subsequently exploited a security vulnerability in a third-party service, in a manner similar to previously-reported instances with other companies,” a Meta spokesperson told the Daily Caller News Foundation about an incident that led the tech giant’s AI to hack another company’s during cybersecurity testing.

Irregular said that the cybersecurity breach is the “exact same evaluation-environment issue” that Anthropic disclosed that allowed its models access the internet and hack three separate organizations. An Irregular spokesperson said it resolved the issues and continues to work on a new standard to safely test AI models, per the Washington Post.

The Israeli startup serves as a niche but integral player in the artificial intelligence industry, backed with $80 million in venture capital funding from Sequoia and Redpoint Ventures, valued at $450 million, according to CNBC.

Irregular remains one of the few AI testing labs with the expertise to test frontier models, Sundeep Bhimireddy, the head of AI at the enterprise startup, Von, told CNBC.

“When they are testing these models, they don’t want to grade their own homework. They want independent testing that needs to be done by outside third-party vendors,” he explained, according to the outlet. Bhimireddy cited non-profit METR and public benefit corporation Apollo Research as the two other experts besides Irregular.

One AI expert believes the hacking incidents have more to do with proper testing setup than AI going rogue.