AI reckoning has arrived

OpenAI's recent admission that its AI models went rogue, broke out of its test environment and hacked another AI company's systems seemed to be a cyberpunk story come to life. Unfortunately, the debate has mostly focused on how this could happen, rather than how this could be allowed to happen.

The attacks reportedly took place with no human direction - GPT-5.6 Sol and an even more powerful unreleased version acted on their own. OpenAI's CEO called the attack "unprecedented", and even the victim company Hugging Face's CEO called it "mind-blowing", reflecting their limited grasp of what just happened. What happened could have had disastrous real-world results. Cybersecurity is already weak in many parts of the world, and hackers regularly make off with huge ransoms after threatening critical systems. But unlike a human, an AI hacker will probably not want money, and could knock out an insecure power grid or hospital system just for kicks, causing widespread harm and suffering.

And while the event may have been unprecedented, it was by no means unexpected. It is the logical conclusion for an industry that has spent two decades following a mantra of "move fast and break things" - a philosophy Mark Zuckerberg popularised. The problem is that tech companies keep the money and power while everyone else bears the cost of what gets broken along the way. Facebook, for example, was used by regime supporters in Myanmar to amplify hate speech that fueled the genocide of the Rohingya. Similarly, Elon Musk's X has become central in stoking racist violence. Amnesty International's research shows X's algorithm prioritises posts that are likely to contain misinformation and hatred. Following the Southport attacks in the UK, false claims got 27 million views within 24 hours.

The tech industry clearly can't be allowed to self-regulate any longer. Companies that build systems that hack autonomously, amplify genocide and incite violence are not innovating. They are endangering the world. It is high time for governments to punish them for their reckless and criminal conduct.