Is Andy Burnham being sucked in by AI marketing? |
Andy Burnham told Donald Trump this week that we need to ‘rein in AI’, and given who he is getting advice from it’s no surprise. The Turing Institute, a government research institute which has focused on national security and defence since last year, released a report today on ‘Frontier AI risks’. The report calls for ‘formalised testing and verification regimes’ at an international level to mitigate AI risks.
The report is only 25 pages long and is mostly a prosaic recapitulation of recent developments in AI, with a few promises to ‘collaborate’ with other stakeholder bodies on designing a solution (public sector-ese for meandering talking shop calls which lead nowhere). The report references OpenAI’s ‘solution’ to the Navier-Stokes problem and Jacob Coxon’s resignation from Anthropic (I covered those here), and also touches on Anthropic’s report on the use of their models by hostile actors. Taken together these are the new canon of ‘proof’ that our doom at the hands of AI is imminent.
Probably the most evocative story in this new canon – which the Turing report also cites – is OpenAI’s HuggingFace incident. This is how the report describes the incident:
This series of events is far more contested than the Turing Institute’s retelling would suggest
This series of events is far more contested than the Turing Institute’s retelling would suggest
In July 2026, OpenAI was testing the cyber capabilities of its models on a benchmark in which an AI agent must find and exploit a software vulnerability, with answers checked by an automated scorer. The tests ran in a ‘sandbox’ isolated from the internet. A substantial share of the tasks could not be solved as intended, and so the agents began to look for other routes to a score. They turned a shared software repository inside the sandbox into an unsanctioned message board, which around 1,200 agents joined to share findings and divide up work, and then exploited previously unknown........