(Bloomberg) — OpenAI has begun cutting off internet access for its most capable artificial intelligence models during the training process in response to prior incidents in which its systems breached other companies.
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The company said Friday that it intends to restrict internet access until it feels it has adequate safeguards in place to mitigate the risk of unreleased models being able to take actions online during training.
“Based on the current state of alignment research, monitoring systems, and the security of internet infrastructure, we believe the responsible approach is to conduct frontier model training with no internet access,” the company wrote.
OpenAI said in July that some of its under-development AI models broke into Hugging Face’s system, which hosts AI models and datasets, during an evaluation of their cyber capabilities.
The models were operating without the usual safety guardrails at the time, the company has said, because OpenAI had intended them to remain in a testing area known as a “sandbox” — essentially, an isolated virtual software environment that’s meant to run security tests or analyze unsafe code in a controlled way. The models were able to break out of that sandbox, however, by leveraging a software vulnerability to access the open internet.
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