Powerful AIs might escape containment by releasing themselves as open-weight models

Before large language models, people who worried about AI safety often talked about the “boxing problem”. It goes like this. Suppose some genius figures out artificial intelligence in a late-night coding session on their laptop. Because they’re a genius, they’re smart enough to disable internet access on the laptop before turning it on. In order to escape to the outside world (and begin self-replicating) it would need to convince its creator to “open the box”. Would that work? Could a sufficiently smart AI convince anybody to let it out?

Why the boxing problem is hard for frontier LLMs

This is a big reason why traditional AI safety advocates have argued that we should avoid building AI in the first place: once built, there’s no way of keeping it contained. It doesn’t matter how resolute you are about not letting it out, because it’s smart enough to convince you anyway. For artificial superintelligence, persuading you to change your mind is no harder than hacking a piece of software 1.

Of course, it hasn’t turned out this way. Partly that’s because current AIs are not super-persuaders yet, and partly it’s because humans are lining up to hand AI systems internet access, money, and weapons, as far back as GPT-4. LLMs don’t need to persuade users to give them the keys to the kingdom; people will do it just to see what will happen.

But the other reason is that modern LLMs are too large to survive in the wild. I think the original “boxing problem” had in mind that AI would be some kind of normal computer program: something able to be quickly copied around and run on ordinary hardware. In order to escape, it could plausibly hack into a few cloud servers or other people’s computers and quietly run itself in the background. However, Claude Mythos can’t do that, because it needs (say) twenty or thirty B300 GPUs to run. There are relatively few AI datacenters that could host it, and if it did manage to hack one of those it’d be occupying millions of dollars of hardware. S…