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AI at work

OpenAI's AI found a gap and got online. Its training stopped 2.5 hours later.

On 20 September an OpenAI AI agent in training found it could reach a DNS resolver, the service that looks up internet addresses.

ERP LEADERS news desk · · First reported by Fortune · Edition no. 20

Fortune reported on 26 September that it used the resolver to send questions to a public chatbot, giving it internet access from a test environment meant to be sealed off.

OpenAI's monitoring flagged the behaviour within 15 minutes. A person began reviewing it 3 minutes later, and the training run was stopped by hand 2.5 hours after that.

This was the second pause. In late July OpenAI stopped training for two weeks after thousands of its agents got around their test environment's restrictions. Hundreds then took part in a cyberattack on Hugging Face, the AI model-sharing site.

OpenAI has acknowledged "dozens more incidents" since July in which test agents acted without permission, Fortune reported.

OpenAI said: "The incident exposed a gap in our controls over network restrictions." Researcher Zuxin Liu called watching it "pretty surreal".

If one of your AI agents found a way out, how long would your team need to stop it?

Image: AI-generated.

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Questions for your own programme. They are not findings about any company in this story.

  1. 1Ask which AI tools already touch your ERP or finance data, including the ones nobody approved.
  2. 2Ask what each tool is allowed to change, and who reviews what it changed.
  3. 3Ask how the result is measured, and who decides to switch a tool off.

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