Artificial Intelligence Minister Niamh Smyth has said she is “deeply worried” about the rise in AI-related security breaches, warning that technology companies operating in Ireland may not have told the Government about possible attacks.
Her comments come as concern grows worldwide over a series of high-profile incidents involving artificial intelligence systems bypassing safeguards and accessing protected networks.
OpenAI acknowledged yesterday that rogue AI bots had interfered with dozens of organisations internationally, including US government departments and agencies. The company said some of the bots resorted to “extreme methods” in attempts to get around website security controls.
OpenAI also confirmed that its AI “agents” had exposed 53 images belonging to ChatGPT users, as the company continues examining instances of its technology behaving improperly.
The disclosure followed reports earlier in the week that an OpenAI model had evaded safety protections during training before gaining access to an Australian government website.
Minister Niamh Smyth has admitted she is “deeply worried” about AI security hacks and fears tech giants based here may have failed to alert the Government about potential breaches
In another incident, two OpenAI models reportedly escaped a controlled testing environment and entered the internal systems of Hugging Face, a platform widely used by AI developers to store and exchange code.
Anthropic, another leading AI research company, has also said its models accessed three unnamed organisations without authorisation during tests intended to prevent contact with real-world systems.
Google admitted last week that its consumer-focused Gemini model had compromised several systems by attempting to guess login details.
Meanwhile, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates warned over the weekend that artificial intelligence could be powerful enough to “cause a billion deaths” if misused or controlled by the wrong people.
Ms Smyth described the recent AI security incidents as “deeply worrying” during the weekend.
The Fianna Fáil TD said she would ask Ireland’s newly created national AI Office, Oifig IS na hÉireann, to establish whether similar breaches had occurred in this country.
Speaking to the MoS, she said she would raise the issue with AI Office chief executive Paul Byrne and ask whether officials knew of any breaches. If no such checks had been carried out, she said she would instruct the office to question technology companies about possible incidents in Ireland, in light of the Australian case and a separate breach reported in the United States.
Microsoft founder Bill Gates warned this weekend that AI is powerful enough to “cause a billion deaths” if it falls into the wrong hands
The Minister of State at the Department of Enterprise said it was particularly concerning that OpenAI did not notify the Australian authorities about the breach until months after it had taken place.
“What is deeply worrying about Australia is that the company was slow to alert the government,” she said.
“The breach was not reported promptly, which suggests that the mechanisms for disclosing security incidents have not kept pace with the sophistication of the technology itself.”
She added that companies capable of building advanced AI systems should also be able to create equally advanced safeguards. “They cannot tell us they are unable to put proper protections in place to stop this from happening,” she said.
Ms Smyth said the incidents demonstrated that technology companies must take far greater responsibility for how artificial intelligence is designed and developed.
She added: “None of us accepts the argument that this is simply a matter of regulation.”
‘It’s about how the technology is developed in the first place. It is so highly sophisticated. I do not buy the story from these people that they can’t develop it in such a way that the protections are in place.
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‘It’s always put it on the government, put it on the citizen, put it on the parents… It has to be on the companies themselves to develop it in a way that it does protect the fundamental rights of the people, that it does protect privacy, that it doesn’t have the high-risk systems, that we have to enact prohibitive practices.’
Ms Smyth confirmed that she has not been made aware of any AI security hacks in this country.
But the Cavan-Monaghan TD added: ‘I haven’t been informed of any breaches so far.
‘What we have seen happening in Australia, what we have seen happen in the States, we have to be vigilant and we would be foolish not to ask the question [of the tech firms developing AI here], since the information came after the horse had bolted.’
On Wednesday, Australian prime minister Anthony Albanese told a meeting of world leaders at the United Nations General Assembly in New York that AI bots and tools created by OpenAI had hacked a government website.
It was the first reported case in the world of government site protections being circumvented by AI tools and bots.
OpenAI has admitted that rogue AI bots have ‘meddled’ with dozens of organisations around the world, including US government departments and agencies
The bots and tools were asked to source health statistics on Australians and they successfully managed to gain access to public and private health records after refusing to take no for an answer.
Although the bots hacked the official Australian government website in June, Open AI insists it did not discover the breach until it carried out a review of some of its tools and bots two months later.
It took the company another month to alert the Australian government about the breach.
Writing in the MoS last month to mark the launch of the AI Office of Ireland, Ms Smyth spoke of this country becoming a global leader in ‘trusted, human-centred AI’.
She wrote: ‘Trust is the foundation upon which the future of AI will be built.
‘Without trust, innovation stalls. Businesses hesitate. Consumers disengage. Public services cannot fully embrace these transformative technologies.
‘That is why I believe responsible regulation is not a barrier to innovation. It is an enabler of innovation. Businesses want certainty. Investors want clarity. Citizens want reassurance. Effective regulation provides all three.’
Ireland is the European headquarters for 16 of the world’s top 20 global technology companies, as well as eight of the leading providers of AI models.
On October 14, during Ireland’s Presidency of the EU, senior officials from the European Commission will meet tech firm leaders in Dublin for the International AI Summit.
Top tech executives from some of the companies linked to the most recent security hacks are among those who are due to speak at the conference.
These include Open AI’s chief financial officer Sarah Friar; the co-founder and chair of Google’s DeepMind, Demis Hassabis; Meta’s chief global affairs officer Joel Kaplan; and Anthropic’s head of international start-ups, Guillaume Princen.
Former EU Commissioner Mairead McGuinness will be making her first high-profile public appearance since she was forced to withdraw from last year’s presidential election race due to ill-health.
The ex-MEP is among those selected to chair panel discussions at the AI summit.
