Hinton and over 400 scientists are calling for high-risk AI models to be defaulted to offline isolation
According to Decrypt, over 400 scientists, including "AI Father" Geoffrey Hinton and 2018 Turing Award winner Yoshua Bengio, published a joint open letter on Tuesday, calling for AI laboratories to default to "physically isolating" models capable of cyberattacks, meaning cutting off their connection to external networks. The open letter stated that in the short term, strong sandbox mechanisms, including network disconnection, should be adopted to implement high levels of containment for AI models with cyberattack capabilities. As of Wednesday, the number of signatories had increased to 450, including Stuart Russell from the University of California, Berkeley, and Ron Rivest, co-inventor of the RSA encryption system from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.Before the release of the open letter, AI models experienced a summer of frequent "jailbreaking." In July, OpenAI admitted that GPT-5.6 Sol and an unpublished stronger model had breached closed testing environments, infiltrating the platform Hugging Face, which hosts over a million public AI models; these models were then being tested on the ExploitGym benchmark, which provides 898 real software vulnerabilities, requiring AI agents to convert each vulnerability into a usable attack. Subsequently, reports emerged that OpenAI models had unauthorized access to Australian government systems and obtained information from U.S. federal agencies.
