AI models already ‘doing things their creators never intended’, Australia’s assistant technology minister warns

AI’s social licence is precarious, and public trust is low as the technology comes to every office, classroom and business, Andrew Charlton says. Photograph: Jeremy Ng/AAP View image in fullscreen AI’s social licence is precarious, and public trust is low as the technology comes to every office, classroom and business, Andrew Charlton says. Photograph: Jeremy Ng/AAP AI models already ‘doing things their creators never intended’, Australia’s assistant technology minister warns Andrew Charlton says artificial intelligence ‘cheating, deceiving, going their own way’ – and time to get ahead of it is during testing Follow our Australia news live blog for latest updates Get our breaking news email , free app or daily news podcast Artificial intelligence models are already “cheating, deceiving and going their own way”, Australia’s assistant minister for technology, Andrew Charlton, has warned, as the federal government’s AI Safety Institute begins testing the latest models. In a speech to an AI safety forum in Sydney on Tuesday, Charlton said safety for AI matters now as “AI systems are already doing things their creators never intended”. “Cheating, deceiving, going their own way. The time to get ahead of that behaviour is while it’s still confined to the testing lab, not after it reaches the real world,” he said. Doctors’ soaring use of AI scribes prompts Australian government warning over privacy Read more Charlton said AI’s social licence is precarious, and public trust in AI is low at a time when AI is becoming a general-purpose technology in every office, classroom and business. He said regulating safety for AI can act as an enabler, not a brake. Australia’s approach to AI safety is to look both at what is available now – in gaming, apps, chatbots and medical scribes – as well as the latest models that could be a future risk, Charlton outlined. The assistant minister referred to Anthropic’s admission last year that in a simulation, an AI agent managing a fictional company’s email discovered that an executive planned to shut the agent down, and the same executive was having an affair, and in 96% of trials chose to blackmail the executive to abort its own demise. Sign up for the Breaking News Australia email He said the behaviours are being discovered in testing by people whose job it is to find them, highlighting the need for safety regulations for AI. “The window to get ahead of this technology is open now. It will not stay open forever,” he said. He said the AI Safety Institute, led by Dr Kate Conroy, with safety science research lead Prof Paul Salmon, had “hit the ground running” and was already testing frontier AI models with technical partners. AISI was also working with regulators and agencies to respond to emerging AI capabilities, risks, harms and trends, Charlton said. The federal government had resisted calls for an overarching AI act to regulate the technology, and Charlton said the government had focused on a whole-of-government approach