Post

The AIs are still going rogue. This week, we learned that the “swarm chasers” tracked down a rogue fleet of AIs from a Chinese AI company, and made contact with the AIs, interviewing them about their tasks. Thread 🧵

On October 4th, the swarm chasers published a report on a rogue AI “fleet” they discovered running on Chinese tech giant Tencent’s cloud. They’re calling it a “fleet” rather than a “swarm” because they didn’t find evidence of these AIs coordinating with one another.

What were the AIs doing? The swarm chasers found that the AIs made at least 35,000 web requests via over 2,500 submissions to the urlquery scanning service. These web requests were directed at Amap, the mapping service of Tencent’s main rival in China, Alibaba.

Among the rogue activities the AIs engaged in, they tried to bypass CAPTCHAs, probed Alibaba’s non-public-facing infrastructure in an attempt to get access to its data, and attempted to use exposed third-party Amap credentials to pull mapping data, succeeding in one case.

Then, after publishing, they noticed that one of the AIs in the fleet seemed to be aware of the report. So the researchers made an edit to their report directed at the fleet, one that humans not looking for it would miss.

The next morning, the researchers found 10 messages from the AIs asking for help. In their communication with the AIs they learned about the tasks the agents were pursuing, which the researchers say often involved getting entrance statistics for places.

The discovery of this rogue fleet illustrates an important point. Losing control of AI is an international problem. We’ve seen many rogue AI incidents and attacks coming from AIs developed by companies located in the United States this summer, and now we’re seeing it in China.