{"id":616142,"date":"2026-09-30T07:38:15","date_gmt":"2026-09-30T07:38:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/616142\/"},"modified":"2026-09-30T07:38:15","modified_gmt":"2026-09-30T07:38:15","slug":"strength-in-numbers-rapid-warnings-needed-when-ai-slips-leash-says-cyber-security-expert","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/616142\/","title":{"rendered":"&#8216;Strength in numbers&#8217; &#8211; rapid warnings needed when AI slips leash, says cyber security expert"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"[&amp;_em]:font-serif-text-italic [&amp;_cite]:font-serif-text-italic\">A cyber security expert hopes unified pressure from the Five Eyes countries will force big tech developers to issue faster warnings about AI breakout hacks.<\/p>\n<p class=\"[&amp;_em]:font-serif-text-italic [&amp;_cite]:font-serif-text-italic\">US developer OpenAI &#8211; which took months to alert the Australian government to an autonomous hack on Medicare by an experimental model &#8211; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.rnz.co.nz\/news\/science-and-technology\/1650864\/openai-apologises-for-australia-incident-cancels-release-of-newest-model-after-safety-concerns\" class=\"underline-brand-hover visited:text-foreground-secondary hover:visited:text-foreground-primary\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">apologised on Tuesday<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p class=\"[&amp;_em]:font-serif-text-italic [&amp;_cite]:font-serif-text-italic\">&#8220;We are sorry and working to do better in the future,&#8221; it said in a statement on its website<\/p>\n<p class=\"[&amp;_em]:font-serif-text-italic [&amp;_cite]:font-serif-text-italic\">Dan Elliott says even if the firms change their behaviour, other forces are making his job as a chief information security officer for this region at US firm Recorded Future harder.<\/p>\n<p class=\"[&amp;_em]:font-serif-text-italic [&amp;_cite]:font-serif-text-italic\">While he is not joining in with the AI doomsayers yet, he has seen enough to back the global push for a slowdown.<\/p>\n<p class=\"[&amp;_em]:font-serif-text-italic [&amp;_cite]:font-serif-text-italic\">&#8220;I think there&#8217;s a bit of boogeyman in here&#8230; I want to be very careful [not] to suggest that we&#8217;re now at some sort of an end game,&#8221; he told RNZ on Tuesday.<\/p>\n<p class=\"[&amp;_em]:font-serif-text-italic [&amp;_cite]:font-serif-text-italic\">But he also said: &#8220;When you see AI models willing to sacrifice their own goals to achieve greater goals, it, in my mind, is a short reach from them to get the point of designing their own goals.<\/p>\n<p class=\"[&amp;_em]:font-serif-text-italic [&amp;_cite]:font-serif-text-italic\">&#8220;I don&#8217;t think we&#8217;re leaps and bounds from that.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p class=\"[&amp;_em]:font-serif-text-italic [&amp;_cite]:font-serif-text-italic\">If AI had its own unknown goals, a person with his role would find it &#8220;very difficult to plan very far ahead or plan security programmes &#8230; where I can trust that where we&#8217;re investing and where we&#8217;re looking is the right spot&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p class=\"[&amp;_em]:font-serif-text-italic [&amp;_cite]:font-serif-text-italic\">Elliott said the industry had not made a great deal of effort to understand what&#8217;s going on within the AI systems.<\/p>\n<p class=\"[&amp;_em]:font-serif-text-italic [&amp;_cite]:font-serif-text-italic\">He said that had to change. &#8220;We need to go beyond one-page AI use policies.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Forced urgency<\/p>\n<p class=\"[&amp;_em]:font-serif-text-italic [&amp;_cite]:font-serif-text-italic\">The Australian government is working on new standards to force tech companies to immediately report rogue AI incidents.<\/p>\n<p class=\"[&amp;_em]:font-serif-text-italic [&amp;_cite]:font-serif-text-italic\">NZ cyber officials have begun asking frontier AI companies for something similar.<\/p>\n<p class=\"[&amp;_em]:font-serif-text-italic [&amp;_cite]:font-serif-text-italic\">OpenAI in its open letter to Australians laid out its investigations of what went wrong with the swarm that broke out of a testbed.<\/p>\n<p class=\"[&amp;_em]:font-serif-text-italic [&amp;_cite]:font-serif-text-italic\">In government sites, the advanced models ran their own commands, retrieved internal files, credentials and aggregate statistics, and wrote files.<\/p>\n<p class=\"[&amp;_em]:font-serif-text-italic [&amp;_cite]:font-serif-text-italic\">&#8220;It took actions that we had not authorised it to take,&#8221; said OpenAI.<\/p>\n<p class=\"[&amp;_em]:font-serif-text-italic [&amp;_cite]:font-serif-text-italic\">&#8220;This is a new kind of cyber incident which represents an emerging global challenge.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p class=\"[&amp;_em]:font-serif-text-italic [&amp;_cite]:font-serif-text-italic\">The firm said it became aware of this in mid-August and alerted Australia on 10 September.<\/p>\n<p>&#8216;Left open&#8217;<\/p>\n<p class=\"[&amp;_em]:font-serif-text-italic [&amp;_cite]:font-serif-text-italic\">But the Medicare hack was in June and Elliott said three months of silence was &#8220;very problematic&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p class=\"[&amp;_em]:font-serif-text-italic [&amp;_cite]:font-serif-text-italic\">&#8220;That risk is left open for hackers and criminals to exploit if there is not notification for us to be able to close the door.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p class=\"[&amp;_em]:font-serif-text-italic [&amp;_cite]:font-serif-text-italic\">OpenAI said it must rebuild trust with the Australian people. It is flying its chief strategy officer to a federal committee hearing in Sydney into AI next week to answer questions.<\/p>\n<p class=\"[&amp;_em]:font-serif-text-italic [&amp;_cite]:font-serif-text-italic\">Elliott said AI developers were so big they might not pay heed to calls for immediate warnings.<\/p>\n<p class=\"[&amp;_em]:font-serif-text-italic [&amp;_cite]:font-serif-text-italic\">&#8220;But hopefully a concerted effort like the Five Eyes together [can] have more strength in numbers.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p class=\"[&amp;_em]:font-serif-text-italic [&amp;_cite]:font-serif-text-italic\">People had played their own part in giving Big Tech a lot of autonomy and demanding rapid development of new models.<\/p>\n<p class=\"[&amp;_em]:font-serif-text-italic [&amp;_cite]:font-serif-text-italic\">&#8220;We gave power to these organisations in using their product globally and in becoming reliant on these AI models, both for public, private, and personal usage.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Back to basics<\/p>\n<p class=\"[&amp;_em]:font-serif-text-italic [&amp;_cite]:font-serif-text-italic\">Following the string of autonomous hacks that news has leaked out about, critics&#8217; voices have grown louder, prompting many stories and opinion pieces asking if things are &#8220;spinning out of our control&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p class=\"[&amp;_em]:font-serif-text-italic [&amp;_cite]:font-serif-text-italic\">Elliott said it was too early to conclude that &#8211; but a little too late to be starting the discussion about how to stay in control.<\/p>\n<p class=\"[&amp;_em]:font-serif-text-italic [&amp;_cite]:font-serif-text-italic\">&#8220;AI so far has not come up with a lot of independent, unique, and novel thought,&#8221; he said.<\/p>\n<p class=\"[&amp;_em]:font-serif-text-italic [&amp;_cite]:font-serif-text-italic\">&#8220;It&#8217;s really good at finding patterns that already exist that we&#8217;ve missed.<\/p>\n<p class=\"[&amp;_em]:font-serif-text-italic [&amp;_cite]:font-serif-text-italic\">&#8220;So as a security practitioner, getting back to basics and blocking and tackling in ways that we&#8217;ve left behind as we&#8217;re following this bouncing ball, that needs to be a focus still.&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A cyber security expert hopes unified pressure from the Five Eyes countries will force big tech developers to&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":616143,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[365,363,364,111,139,69,145],"class_list":["post-616142","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/616142","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=616142"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/616142\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/616143"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=616142"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=616142"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=616142"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}