“It’s the first thing I read every morning.” — Annie Lamont, venture capitalist.
1. Is your money safe?
The world’s leading economies have stepped up efforts to guard against a major cyber attack targeting the financial sector and global markets, planning “emergency drills” as concerns mount over the risks posed by frontier AI models. G7 finance ministers in Bangkok this week discussed holding simulated drills and “tabletop exercises” to prepare against future attacks, as bankers and government officials gathered in Thailand for the annual meeting of the IMF expressed rising fears of “unknown unknowns”. “The G7 finance deputies had been discussing the idea of doing tabletop exercises on frontier AI,” said Japan’s finance minister Satsuki Katayama. The G7’s decision to simulate an attack scenario and stress-test responses came amid calls for greater co-operation to deal with the rising cyber threat. (Source: ft.com)
2. Anne Boden:
Today, when banks talk about adopting AI, they are mostly talking about efficiency and trimming costs. Depending on your perspective, it will improve productivity or hollow out a call center. What banks should be thinking about is agents because the new world is being built around agentic AI. Agents can research products, compare prices, organise our diaries, send emails, book travel and perform multi-stage tasks on our behalf. Anyone who has bought into this new lifestyle will not be going back to the old way of doing things. Customers are embracing agents at a rapid rate too. Meta’s Muse, aka a “human concierge”, secured more than 6.6 million downloads and topped the US app charts within two weeks of launching on September 8. (Sources: ft.com. penguin.co.uk)
3. Anthropic has granted external evaluators “employee-like access” to assess the risks of its models, following through on a commitment to increase safeguards over concerns the technology could run catastrophically out of control. METR, a non-profit that has worked with leading labs including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Meta, now has a team embedded in the Claude maker’s office with access to its hardware and internal systems. A greater role for third-party evaluators is among the main concrete steps the labs have proposed in response to rising concern about the dangers more capable AI systems could pose to the economy, cyber security and humanity at large. (Sources: ft.com, metr.org. A recent METR report on the “Hugging Face hack” is terrifying and worth reading in full.)
4. The Wall Street Journal:
A string of artificial-intelligence safety incidents is exposing a gaping hole for the fast-growing industry: the lack of available insurance.
Rogue agents have hacked into websites. AI chatbots have been accused of encouraging suicides and murders. An agent submitted fake unsolved murder tips. The latest episodes add to existing lawsuits AI companies face alleging chatbot harm and copyright violations when models are trained.
