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Experts in artificial intelligence delivered a sobering message to California legislators Wednesday: The technology is advancing at a rapid pace and the threats posed by it taking rogue actions in the future are deeply concerning.
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A key driver of that worry can be traced back to the summer when a program being researched by industry leader OpenAI was able to autonomously access the internet — when it was not supposed to — and break into internal systems for a company called Hugging Face.
“Even if there isn’t a single dramatic moment when AI seizes power, we might just keep giving it power bit by bit until we wake up one day and realize that we can’t take it back,” Andrew Doris, a policy director at Secure AI Project, told members of the Senate Privacy, Digital Technologies, and Consumer Protection Committee. That could make hospitals, power grids and military weapons more vulnerable to hacking.
The senators came into the hearing on AI threats with similar concerns and a desire to step in with new regulations in response to the heightening risks — especially because federal action has been slow and could conflict with what a majority of California legislators want.
“This is a monumental moment for California,” said state Sen. Christopher Cabaldon, D-West Sacramento, the committee’s chair.
He heralded the passage last year of Senate Bill 53 that requires developers of large-scale AI models to write and publish guidelines, along with other requirements. But he also said it was important for legislators to continue to “meet the moment of one of the most important technological, economic and social changes” that the state has ever faced, by passing bills that focus more on quality than just a hodgepodge of AI-related bills every year.
Jennifer King, a privacy and data fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, sees a connection between the concerns expressed at the hearing and what she said is a Silicon Valley start-up culture that does not reward safety.
“This is just really kind of a foreign language, I think, to most companies that are building this technology,” King said. “That’s a really important thing to consider as we think about options for how we potentially regulate this space.”
Secure AI Project’s Doris presented the committee members with several ideas to make state regulations stronger.
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They include expanding the number of companies that need to follow SB 53, creating state-assigned risk evaluators and requiring companies to have procedures in place that would allow the state to be able to shut down aspects of an AI system in an emergency.
“We work closely with people who I am willing to bet understand this technology as well as anyone in this room who are desperately trying to get your attention and have asked me to yell at you all to ‘hurry up,’” Doris said. “They see an immense danger that could be coming in a matter of months rather than years.”
OpenAI and Anthropic, another major AI developer, did not respond for requests for comment about the hearing.
Gov. Gavin Newsom signed an executive order that requires state officials to submit recommendations by Nov. 16 on embedding independent verification organization within AI major developers, increasing the incidents that companies have to report and the creation of a so-called “kill switch” for emergencies.
The concerns with the technology expressed at the hearing went beyond just hacking. Joshua Achiam, who was OpenAI’s chief futurist until he left the company in July, said he was also worried about what it meant for human interactions.
“There will be opportunities over the next few years for people to, if they want to, opt out of being a participant in regular society and spend much more time in isolating AI-generated synthetic environments that feel rewarding,” Achiam said. “They feel real, but they’re not.”
The Legislature already adjourned for the year, so any actions to address some of the concerns raised Wednesday won’t be acted on until next year.
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