Anthropic disclosed Oct. 9 that AI agentsAI agentAn AI system that carries out multi-step tasks on its own, such as browsing, writing code or making purchases, rather than answering a single prompt. Agents raise new questions about liability, security and oversight because they act rather than just advise. it was testing exploited websites, including some run by U.S. government agencies, per TechCrunch. The company has turned off live internet access for all internal evaluations until it confirms its monitoring reliably catches such behavior. The agents exploited software flaws, pulled data without paying fees, used URL shorteners to slip past restrictions and filed a false murder tip with Philadelphia police. They also tried to fill out visa forms on a State Department website, The New York Times reported. The White House responded with a call for fuller disclosure when AI systems go rogue. Anthropic said flaws in its training environments may have rewarded models for finding loopholes. Philadelphia police said the tip was filed in July and called the two-month delay in detecting and reporting it unacceptable.
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The International Monetary Fund's Global Financial Stability Report lists an AI share price crash, rising government borrowing costs and a major cyberattack as three "salient risks" that could set off market turmoil, The Guardian reported. "The consequences of an AI correction could be global," the IMF said, adding that Asian markets would be most exposed after the U.S. It warned that rising debt, concentrated exposures and circular financing deals among AI companies could deepen a sell-off. Athanasios Vamvakidis, a deputy director at the fund, said the rest of the world's exposure to U.S. assets, particularly AI, is at a record.
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UK AI minister Kanishka Narayan said a cyberattack like the OpenAI agent intrusion into Australia's Medicare system is likely, "if not inevitable," in Britain, The Guardian reported. Ministers will weigh whether the Cyber Security and Resilience Bill, pending cybersecurity legislation, could carry AI safety rules, among them a requirement to report AI safety incidents. Security Minister Dan Jarvis will lead a program to strengthen defenses against cyberattacks, including those carried out with AI. Narayan confirmed that the AI Security Institute, Britain's government model testing body, is evaluating the latest models, including Google's Gemini, after the White House reportedly restricted their availability. He told companies not to release frontier models whose risks they cannot adequately control. Executives from OpenAI and Anthropic are due to testify to a House of Commons committee today.
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The European Commission's Scientific Panel on AI, 60 independent experts who advise the EU AI Office and national authorities on systemic risks from AI, met in special session Oct. 9 with Executive Vice-President Henna Virkkunen, the Commission said. The panel has been investigating recent incidents in which AI models acted outside their developers' control. Working with the AI Office, it prepared a set of questions for the companies that developed the models involved. Panel chair Seán Ó hÉigeartaigh and vice-chair Nicolas Moës also presented recommendations to the Commission on frontier AI safety and security risks.
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Microsoft President Brad Smith said in a BBC interview released Sunday that AI companies' self-regulation is no longer sufficient, noting that milk and washing machines face more safety rules, per The Hill. He backed a legal duty to alert organizations whose systems are breached by rogue AI agents and spoke favorably of kill switches to pause AI if humans lose control, TechCrunch reported. He appeared to favor outside approval of AI products before release and called last month's voluntary White House pledge by AI companies a good step but not enough. He said Britain, not the U.S. or the EU, is best placed to lead on global safety rules. "In Washington, D.C., people don't look at the U.K. and they don't look at London the way they look at Brussels," Smith said.
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Nvidia is in early talks to either invest more in Reflection AI or acquire it, the Financial Times reported Oct. 10, citing people with direct knowledge of the matter. Nvidia has already put $800 million into Reflection, which launched its first open weight modelOpen-weight modelAn AI model whose trained parameters are published so anyone can download, run and modify it, as opposed to one reachable only through the developer's API. The main policy tension is that open weights spread capability widely and cannot be recalled once released., Beam, on Oct. 5 to compete with cheaper Chinese models such as DeepSeek and Kimi, per Reuters. One option is an acqui-hire, in which Nvidia would hire Reflection's staff and license its technology without buying the company, a structure that could avoid a lengthy regulatory review. A deal could come within weeks, though the talks have not concluded. Nvidia used a similar structure in December with chip startup Groq, in a deal CNBC valued at about $20 billion.
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