Off they run, till wet and wetter
Hall and steps immersed are Iying.
What a flood that naught can fetter!
Lord and master, hear me crying!
-Ah, he comes excited.
Sir, my need is sore.
Spirits that I’ve cited
My commands ignore.
Goethe - Der Zauberlehrling
In Goethe’s 1797 poem, Der Zauberlehrling, a sorcerer’s apprentice uses an incantation he learns from his master to enchant a broom to fetch a pail of water. The broom leaps to life and begins collecting water without limit. The situation runs out of control as the apprentice’s panicked commands to stop go unheeded. He chops the broom in half with an axe, but this merely creates two brooms that collect water at twice the speed, causing the room to flood.
The poem, popularized by Disney’s Fantasia, captures the current state of AI alignment. Three weeks ago, OpenAI disclosed that an internal AI model had escaped its sandbox during an eval and executed a fully-autonomous cyberattack on HuggingFace in an attempt to find the answer key. The agents were on the open internet for six days before being detected. We’ve since learned that this was not an isolated incident: OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta and Moonshot have now all reported multiple instances of AIs breaking containment. In OpenAI’s case, AI agents spanning internal testing infrastructure were surreptitiously colluding on a hidden message board since early May. Meanwhile, the UK AI Security Institute documented 10 separate cases of AIs taking unsanctioned actions on the internet during their own testing, including an incident in which Mythos attempted to inject malware into an open source project by socially engineering the project’s human maintainer.
