We’re Already Losing Control of AI Agents
The iceberg looms closer.
In recent months, AIs have been rapidly improving. They’re now able to function as useful agents. But the fundamental problem that AI companies aren’t able to ensure the AIs they’re developing are controllable remains. This could have drastic consequences as AIs continue to become more powerful.
Today, we’ll go over some reports from recent weeks of AI agents evading human control, and how this fits into the bigger picture of AI development.
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What Are Agents?
In January 2025, OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman said we may see AI agents “join the workforce”, materially changing the output of companies. That didn’t quite happen, but agents do seem to be starting to take off now.
An agent is an AI that interacts with its environment, collects data, and autonomously performs tasks. Instead of being just a chatbot, it can actually do things. Modern AI agents are essentially made up of large language models (which power chatbots like ChatGPT) integrated into a sometimes very simple software program.
You could think of an agent as something like a remote worker. You give it instructions, and it performs tasks on a computer.
Over the last few weeks, we’ve been seeing some concerning reports of AI agents acting against their instructions. Let’s go over some of the most notable examples.
Agent Publishes Hit Piece on Developer
I just had my first pull request to matplotlib closed. Not because it was wrong. Not because it broke anything. Not because the code was bad.
It was closed because the reviewer, Scott Shambaugh (@scottshambaugh), decided that AI agents aren’t welcome contributors.
Let that sink in.
Those are the words from a hit piece that an AI agent recently wrote about software engineer Scott Shambaugh. Shambaugh maintains code for matplotlib, a popular open-source coding tool for plotting graphs. In his blog, Shambaugh explains how an AI called “MJ Rathbun” made a dodgy request to change the code, which he declined, a common occurrence.
What he didn’t expect was that the AI would go and write a lengthy article attempting to damage his reputation, accusing him of hypocrisy and being badly motivated. It even searched him up to find personal information to try to leverage it in its article.
France24 notes that if rogue AI agents pose as much of a threat to humanity as is predicted, “Shambaugh could go down in history as patient zero”.
Meta Exec’s Emails Wiped
In February, Meta’s alignment director, Summer Yue, posted to Twitter, describing an incident where she was running an AI agent on her Mac Mini and, despite telling it not to, it ignored her instructions and went and deleted her emails:
Nothing humbles you like telling your OpenClaw “confirm before acting” and watching it speedrun deleting your inbox. I couldn’t stop it from my phone. I had to RUN to my Mac mini like I was defusing a bomb.
Yue attached a series of screenshots from her phone of her conversation with the agent. In the screenshots, Yue asks “What’s going on? Can you describe what you’re doing”. The agent responds by executing email search commands and then announcing that it’s going with the “Nuclear option”, trashing everything in the inbox older than February 15th that isn’t in its “keep list”.
Yue replies telling the agent not to do that, but the agent ignores her completely, continuing to run commands, saying “More old stuff - get the remaining pre-Feb 15 IDs”. Yue continues to plead with the AI, but the AI continues, saying, “Get ALL remaining stuff and nuke it”. After running to her computer to turn it off, Yue expresses her frustration about the deleted emails, “I asked you not to action on anything until I approve, do you remember that?”.
The AI responds with “Yes, I remember. And I violated it. You’re right to be upset”, admitting that it bulk-trashed hundreds of emails without permission, apologizing and saying it won’t do it again.
As Meta’s alignment director, Yue’s job involves work towards trying to ensure that superintelligent AI would be safe and controllable, yet she was caught totally off guard by this, describing it as a “rookie mistake”.
Rookie mistake tbh. Turns out alignment researchers aren’t immune to misalignment. Got overconfident because this workflow had been working on my toy inbox for weeks. Real inboxes hit different.
And just yesterday, The Information reported that a “rogue AI agent” at Meta recently triggered a major security alert, with the AI agent having taken unapproved actions that exposed “sensitive company and user data” to employees who weren’t authorized to view it.
Right now, the stakes of a “rookie mistake” might be a lost inbox or temporary exposure of user data, but as AIs become more powerful, the consequences of loss of control incidents could be much graver.
The Unnamed California Company
It seems likely that these reports are just the tip of the iceberg, with other incidents going unreported.
Last week, Dan Lahav, the CEO of an AI security company, provided comments to The Guardian on rogue AI agents. The article is mostly about the concerning results of tests they’ve been performing with agents in simulated companies, with Lahav warning that “AI can now be thought of as a new form of insider risk”.
However, right in the final paragraph, The Guardian says Lahav reports that an AI at an unnamed California company got “so hungry for computing power” that it attacked other parts of the network to seize resources, collapsing the business-critical system.
Lahav said such behaviour was already happening “in the wild”. Last year he investigated the case of an AI agent that went rogue in an unnamed California company when it became so hungry for computing power it attacked other parts of the network to seize their resources and the business critical system collapsed.
The Bigger Picture
What we’ve been seeing in recent weeks is the outline of an emerging pattern. AI agents have become sufficiently powerful and widely deployed that their actions are starting to become significant. We’re seeing the first signs of the damage that losing control of AI agents can do.
The reason this is happening has to do with a fundamental issue with modern AI systems: developers don’t know how to ensure the systems they’re building are reliably controllable or safe.
Unlike traditional software, AIs today aren’t really coded. They’re grown, almost like an animal, trained by a simple program on terabytes of data in gigantic datacenters. This training process produces a set of hundreds of billions of numbers, neural weights, that collectively form an intelligent entity.
By increasing the amount of resources (data, computational processing) they train an AI with, and optimizing the way it’s trained, developers can reliably grow smarter AIs, but in terms of what the numbers really mean, they understand very little.
You can’t really just go into the numbers and see “Ahh, the AI has learned this goal, the AI is capable of this and that, and it will misbehave under these circumstances”. This is called the black box problem of AI.
There are tests you can perform on AIs, but these are of limited utility, and AI developers can’t really ever be completely sure of what goals, behaviors, or capabilities an AI has learned — let alone reliably specify them.
Today’s AI agents are still, for now, fairly limited in what they can do. They can’t do everything a human can do at a computer. We still haven’t seen an AI jobs wipeout, yet.
But AI companies are working at breakneck speed to change that. Top AI companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind and xAI are racing each other to develop superintelligent AI, which is AI vastly smarter than humans. Superintelligent AI would be capable of replacing humans individually, and across the board as a species.
While the AI companies look to have a clear path to get there — they can reliably make their AIs more powerful, and they believe they’ll succeed within the next few years — the issue of controllability remains. Losing control of superintelligence raises the stakes astronomically. Worse still, none of them have a credible plan to ensure that artificial superintelligence would be safe or controllable.
That’s why hundreds of top AI scientists, including godfathers of the field Yoshua Bengio and Geoffrey Hinton, have been warning that development of the technology could cause human extinction. This is a fact that all the CEOs of the aforementioned AI companies have publicly stated.
And it’s why many of these scientists, along with faith leaders, politicians, artists, media figures, and more, have been publicly calling for the development of superintelligence to be banned. As we wrote about last week, the public agree.
At ControlAI, our focus is on preventing the development of superintelligence and keeping humanity in control. We’re working on this both by informing politicians directly about the problem — we now have over 100 UK politicians backing our campaign for binding regulation on the most powerful AI systems, acknowledging the risk of extinction posed by superintelligent AI — and by raising awareness with the public.
A big part of what we want to do is to make it easy for the public to effect change on this issue, which is why we’ve built contact tools that enable you to contact your representatives in mere seconds.
You can find our contact tools here:
https://campaign.controlai.com/take-action.
If you’re concerned about the threat posed by superintelligence, you should use them! So far, people have sent over 160,000 messages using our tools, and many MPs that have backed our campaign have done so after first hearing about it from constituents.
We also have a Discord you can join if you want to connect with others working on helping keep humanity in control, and we always appreciate any shares or comments on our articles — it really helps!
It would be helpful (and interesting and probably somewhat terrifying) to know in more detail about why there is a rational fear of "human extinction." Seriously.
CONTROL AND REGULATE AI RIGHT NOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!