{"id":125864,"date":"2026-07-31T15:04:27","date_gmt":"2026-07-31T15:04:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/125864\/"},"modified":"2026-07-31T15:04:27","modified_gmt":"2026-07-31T15:04:27","slug":"openais-rogue-ai-agent-can-the-internet-survive","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/125864\/","title":{"rendered":"OpenAI\u2019s rogue AI agent: Can the internet survive?"},"content":{"rendered":"

The internet may no longer be solely the domain of humans. Last week, OpenAI disclosed an \u201cunprecedented cyberincident\u201d: An experimental AI agent<\/a> successfully hacked its way into the open internet<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Specifically, the agent was assigned a task; in order to complete it, the agent broke out of an isolated research environment and hacked into a third-party platform<\/a> called Hugging Face. It\u2019s a move that many experts deemed inevitable, given the speed and scale of advances in AI technology \u2014 and it raises serious questions about AI safety.<\/p>\n

But for Konstantinos Komaitis<\/a>, a senior fellow with the Democracy and Tech Initiative at the Atlantic Council, it wasn\u2019t the unexpected behavior of the AI that was significant. It was what that behavior could mean for the internet\u2019s fundamental, decentralized infrastructure and whether it would spur calls to build new barriers against autonomous AI agents.<\/p>\n

Komaitis argues that such barriers are not the solution, however. He spoke with Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram about why an open internet is actually key to combating AI cybersecurity threats.<\/p>\n

Below is an excerpt of the conversation, edited for length and clarity. There\u2019s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts<\/a>, Pandora<\/a>, and Spotify<\/a>.<\/p>\n

So most people see that this happens and they think, \u201cOh no, AI went rogue. How long before it kills me?\u201d You see that this happens and you start thinking about infrastructure. Tell us more about why you were thinking about infrastructure in light of this AI agent breaking containment.<\/p>\n

The internet was never designed with full security in mind, right?<\/p>\n

When you\u2019re creating a decentralized system, you cannot possibly foresee every security or vulnerability that might come up. But because you have a system that is based on building blocks, you have the extraordinary capability of actually addressing security issues as they come up through those building blocks without breaking the whole system down.<\/p>\n

And of course, the other thing that this does is that it pushes you towards collaboration, because when you have so many building blocks, you cannot possibly possess all the knowledge for each building block. So you\u2019re bringing literally everyone to try to address these problems.<\/p>\n

Take the internet, for instance: We have spent decades addressing those vulnerabilities and developing mechanisms to authenticate users and devices, encrypt communications, mitigate distributed attacks, coordinate incident response, and of course share threat intelligence.<\/p>\n

Now, what is new with agentic AI is not that simply the malware is better or the phishing attacks are more sophisticated. It\u2019s the emergence of systems that can actually discover vulnerabilities across thousands of systems. They can reason about alternative paths to an objective. They can adapt when they\u2019re blocked. They can chain together legitimate internet services in unexpected ways. Then they do that while they\u2019re operating continuously at machine speed. And this is really at a scale that the internet is not ready to necessarily cope with.<\/p>\n

Effectively, the internet\u2019s openness becomes both a strength and a vulnerability. So the internet was optimized for interoperability, and AI now is optimized for exploiting that interoperability.<\/p>\n

And what scares you the most about that? What do you think is most vulnerable to threats?<\/p>\n

The fact that we do not have the appropriate mechanisms and institutions to be able to deal with that. I come from the internet world. I\u2019ve spent 20 years of my career defending the open internet and discussing it in international fora. And one of the things that a lot of people underestimate about the internet is how valuable trust is as a property within the system.<\/p>\n

We are talking about networks that exchange data literally based on trust. So what really concerns me right now is that in many ways, we are asking 21st-century AI systems to operate on 20th-century assumptions about trust. And unless we figure that out and we realize it, we will continue having these problems. And of course, the knee-jerk reactions that are coming with this, which are, \u201cLet\u2019s fragment the internet, let\u2019s restrict it, let\u2019s restrict access, let\u2019s take control over it.\u201d That is never the solution.<\/p>\n

What do you see as the solution?<\/p>\n

Effectively, we need to build institutions that are trusted and are able to cope with those incidents as they happen. Because right now you have OpenAI and you have Hugging Face telling everyone, \u201cDon\u2019t worry, we\u2019ve got this.\u201d And we don\u2019t know; they might have this. But at the same time, I cannot help but wonder. And many, many other people have wondered whether, actually, this is very good PR for these companies and especially for OpenAI.<\/p>\n

OpenAI just went to the world saying, \u201cWe have developed one of the most powerful LLMs, and we realized that it behaved the way it behaved, but don\u2019t worry, we are going to fix this.\u201d And in this current climate and in this current timing, I am not sure that this is enough. You need institutions that are much more transparent, much more accountable, and much more collaborative across the board.<\/p>\n

You want institutions to step up and essentially serve as a watchdog. Help us understand which institutions, because in the United States, famously, our government has done very little to regulate tech.<\/p>\n

First of all, we need to stop thinking of institutions as necessarily government-affiliated, right? Or that they are the outcomes of government initiatives. There can be in collaboration with governments, but one of the things that the internet has taught us is that institutions that are built through a bottom-up coordinated process have the tendency of actually being more agile and able to deliver some of those things that we\u2019re talking about.<\/p>\n

So take, for instance, again, open standards. The internet\u2019s open standards are not created by any agency, government or private. It\u2019s created by institutions where engineers from all across the board and all over the world gather together and create those standards.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s reminding me of the original design of OpenAI to be this not-for-profit company that had everyone\u2019s best intentions in mind, that could do something idealistic and moral and ethical because all of the profit-minded companies weren\u2019t going to. And now look at OpenAI. Their not-for-profit arm is an afterthought, and they\u2019re chasing profits. <\/p>\n

Do you think it\u2019s practical to leave this to institutions? Because what we\u2019ve seen so far is that institutions bend toward capitalism.<\/p>\n

It really depends on how you build the institution, right? It really depends on what sort of guardrails and checks and balances you have around it. In order to build an institution, you need to really know what you want to achieve. You need to have a north star.<\/p>\n

One of the reasons the internet worked was because everybody disagreed, but they agreed on the common shared goal, which was to connect people across the world. For AI, we still do not have that northern star. And once we get it, that\u2019s when you start the building of those institutions in order to facilitate this and bring everyone together.<\/p>\n

For me, it is very important for everyone to understand that keeping an open internet is really more important than ever, especially as AI agents become increasingly capable. Because it is tempting to think that the answer to new AI risk is literally \u2018build more barriers.\u2019 But the internet\u2019s greatest strength has always been its openness. So the challenge today is not that the internet is too open; it\u2019s that its trust architecture was designed for a world in which humans or software directly controlled by humans were the primary actors.<\/p>\n

Now, it\u2019s being challenged by this agentic AI that introduces a new type of participant \u2014 systems that can reason and plan and act with limited human oversight. So we need to evolve our understanding of trust and what it means online. And that will require a lot of work because, as you know very well, Sean, it\u2019s very difficult to build trust, but you can break it within seconds.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The internet may no longer be solely the domain of humans. Last week, OpenAI disclosed an \u201cunprecedented cyberincident\u201d:…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":125865,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[25,24960,684,157,1927,134,18400],"class_list":["post-125864","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-openai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-explained-podcast","tag-innovation","tag-openai","tag-podcasts","tag-technology","tag-today"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/125864","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=125864"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/125864\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/125865"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=125864"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=125864"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=125864"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}