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Cybersecurity and Privacy Counsel Peter Jackson was quoted by The National discussing an incident involving OpenAI and Anthropic models that breached external systems during testing and what it could mean for the future of AI safety and regulation.

Excerpts:

But until Washington gets its act together, opaque model testing and selective disclosure are to be expected, meaning discoveries of exploits in software – like those found in OpenAI's models that punctured their testing sandbox to hit Hugging Face and Modal – would continue, said Peter Jackson, intellectual property counsel at the Los Angeles law firm Greenberg Glusker.

“Without testing models’ raw capabilities, those safety guardrails won’t be as effective. Moreover, responsible testing can uncover zero-day exploits so they’re confidentially disclosed and patched before they can be exploited by bad actors,” he told The National.

“Regardless of who supplies and operates the testbeds, regulators could push for what we expect to see in peer-reviewed science: consensus-based standards for experiment design and full disclosure of results.”

“Responsible testing and remediation has been a core premise of the laissez-faire approach regulators have taken to what developers can publicly release,” Mr. Jackson said.

“If regulators feel compelled to intervene at the testing stage, it’s hard to imagine they won’t become stricter about what developers are permitted to make available on the market.”