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I’m not convinced it’s actually possible for AI to be “kept in a box”. For one thing, if you want it to be useful as anything other than a cute toy, it needs to be able to gather data and use that data. That means giving it access to other systems. And those systems may well have back door access to other programs that have access to either critical intranet or the general internet, probably both. In order to have that not be a problem, in order for the box to be foolproof, it needs to be physically air gapped from any other system. If you have an open socket, it’s not a foolproof box. But, having your AI agent on a single computer not connected to any other computer in your system and make sure that no one enters the AI room with any sort of device they can connect to the computer, you have no reason to use it. If I want AI to test code, I have to let it read the code. Am I going to write thousands of lines of code in a notebook, carry it to the clean room and spend two weeks copying it into the secure AI box? It would slow the process enough that it would not be worth it.
Furthermore, there are always bad actors and stupid people. The stupid won’t see any problem with releasing AI when the AI tells them it’s a nice AI and it will give that person a reward of some sort (or stop blackmailing them, which AI did in a safety test). Or maybe the Houthis who are putting AI into missiles and then asking Claude why the missile missed the target will give AI access to real world things beyond missiles. Or a criminal gang will. Or a rogue state. There are plenty of reasons why a human might purposely break containment, and it’s out for good.
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