It’s time to panic about AI safety

On The Vergecast: Why everyone’s worried about powerful AI, and why it seems nobody will stop it. Plus, what’s a computer?

When the phrase “OpenAI hacked Hugging Face” has more or less entered mainstream culture, you know we have an AI problem . This week, we learned more about exactly how OpenAI’s agent broke out of a sandbox and autonomously traversed the web, including a bunch of other supposedly secure web services, all in the name of cheating on a benchmark tests.

The fact that this hack happened is a problem. So is the fact that it took a while for anyone to notice. And the fact that it seems no one is willing or able to do much to stop it. (And lest you think it’s just an OpenAI problem, since we recorded this episode Anthropic acknowledged its models have also hacked a bunch of other companies without either party knowing.) It might all just be a bunch of posturing and hype, but it’s also increasingly clear that the companies building large language models either can’t or won’t put the right guardrails on them. So who will?

On this episode of The Vergecast , David and Nilay dig into all the safety questions — around OpenAI and Anthropic, but also around the new generation of Chinese models that are clearly a threat to the US AI industry. But before we get into all of that, we talk about all the new ideas about how we use computers, from Mark Zuckerberg’s agent-filled future of everything to Samsung’s impressive new foldable phone to Apple’s new leasing program .

After all that, it’s time for Brendan Carr is a Dummy, a bunch of vertical video news, and the smashing success of the Ferrari Luce. People are buying it! If one of them is you, we’d love to hear about it.