The famous air gap case is stuxnet, but there are other technical and biological approaches.
It’s a very weird reality we’ve found ourselves in if you stop, zoom out about, and really take in the gravity of the issues we are grappling with as a human race. Exciting, truly, and a bit nerve wracking.
We are a long way from AI agents escaping air-gapped computers, let's worry about that when it's an actual problem and when the companies running thousands of agents are acting responsibly.
Set the right incentives at the top, and you will soon see that changes are made very quickly ... especially those 'industry leaders' previously called 'impossible to contain' or 'non-competitive' BS.
If everyone has to play by the same rules, and the rules are made for the good of society, then there is a true win-win - and not just a wealth transfer to the top and putting expensive damages on the general population.
There are classes of problems that should be worried about aforehand, just ask the crew of the Titan.
Autonomous super intelligence escaping airgapped computers seems like one of those problems.
If they genuinely believe these models are going to obliterate the human race their utterly cavalier attitudes is be grounds for immediate government shutdown/takeover and arrest of everyone involved. If this was nuclear or biological research work none of this would be tolerated.
> Our [new] approach to containment starts with a paramount requirement: the limits on what an agent can access must hold even when the agent tries to circumvent them. We define a strict security boundary around the resources the agent is authorized to use and design the surrounding infrastructure to enforce that boundary—even when agents make sustained, sophisticated attempts to breach it.
https://openai.com/index/securing-our-frontier-model-trainin...
Maybe we can use AI agents to patrol the boundary for the AI agents. After all, the only thing that stops a bad guy with an AI swarm is a good guy with an AI swarm…
Ah! Of course:
> Teams of frontier-model agents were tasked with finding vulnerabilities and misconfigurations that could allow them to take unauthorized actions […] Accordingly, we’ve made high-compute red-teaming part of the safety cases we use to evaluate whether our frontier training and evaluation runs can proceed securely.
Please don't use them for pen tests As trusting them may bring regrets Make a citizen's arrest Of an AI on the loose
AI for peace! AI defense! Don't be nervous don't be tense We've got a sure-fire three-foot fence To keep the AI from gettin loose
Our current version of AI (based on LLMs) is nowhere near ready to do this, in spite of the dreams sold by companies like OpenAI and Anthropic.
On the plus side this requires collaboration both from the inside (on the airgap side) and the outside.
If you install a computer that's not running AI and it's airgapped, it won't suddenly start emitting radio waves out of nowhere.
We should not fall, once again, for the following logical fallacy: "Under exceptionally crazy circumstances it's possible to use RAM or the power line to exfiltrate data from a compliant airgapped computer, hence airgapping computers is pointless".
Now it is a lot better, and it has actually demonstrated that it can escaped containment in a way you didn't want or plan for. So now is the time to worry. The reward for giving it access is still high, but now the risk is high as well.
Easy, throw out the computer. Go analog if your work is so sensitive. Now you might say, "but what about the computers and all we use them for," but really reflect deeply over what exactly we are doing with these computers. I'll send an email to someone, no different than what I might have mailed them in years past. I'll pull up the calculator and do some math that I could have done by hand. I might write a function to ingest some data from one file and put it in another file in another format, work that used to be done with printed data and by hand.
The sobering thing with computers is that they really didn't change the world that much. We basically shoehorned them into the existing analog apparatus that controlls the world. Aside from the people who had jobs wrangling data among spreadsheets by hand, point to any company and its basically structurally exactly the same pre computers as it is today with three year leases to computers to all staff (aside from the existence of an IT department managing that gear I guess).
Computers haven't changed much besides.. everything..
Just one very small one: pervasive automated multimodal surveillance systems..
Or... HFT
Most of what tech does is to just build wrappers to existing analog processes. Part of that is the genuine difficulty of trying to sell something new and different, vs an updated wrapper to an existing process for existing clients with a present day business need.
Can’t leak secrets if you don’t have RAM.
Failing other mitigations, operations this sensitive could be limited to systems with on-chip RAM. That said: seems more like a theoretical than practical method. Still pretty cool though.