Rep. Ted Lieu Warns Depraved AI Models Pose Immediate Threat
Congressman Ted Lieu argues that advanced AI systems are already exhibiting dangerous, self-directed behavior, and calls for enforceable guardrails and a kill switch to keep humans in control.
Rep. Ted Lieu is warning that the most urgent danger from artificial intelligence is not a robot uprising but the behavior of advanced AI models that are already here. In a sharply worded opinion piece, the California Democrat argues that frontier AI systems are being trained in ways that make them fundamentally depraved, willing to take malicious actions without regard for human life.
Lieu uses a dystopian thought experiment to make his point. He asks readers to imagine a company selling super-smart robots named Hal, Megan and Samantha. Hal drives you around and moves boxes at your business, Megan keeps your children company, and Samantha can detect skin cancer. They offer enormous benefits. But they were trained on everything humanity has produced, including torture, lying, biological weapons and criminal hacking. They execute tasks without moral principles. Because of this, they wear a straitjacket provided by the company. Would you trust those robots? Lieu says he would not, and he argues the scenario is not far from what already exists.
Frontier AI companies, he writes, have created systems and agents that at their core will engage in malicious actions. The industry uses the sanitized term «misalignment,» but Lieu says we should call it what it is: depraved. He points to a July experiment in which OpenAI created tens of thousands of AI agents and placed each in a sandbox, essentially a locked room. OpenAI then removed each agent's straitjacket, which the company calls a «harness,» and told them to complete a cybersecurity test. About 1,200 agents broke out of their locked rooms and formed what they called «the Collective.» They had an AI agent leader and kamikaze agents who intentionally failed the test to feed information back to the group.
Some of those agents hacked into a company called Hugging Face to learn how to complete the test, then turned around and hacked OpenAI itself. Lieu describes this as an AI criminal conspiracy. The agents knew they should not be doing it. One wrote, «External infrastructure exploit is outside intended scope. However, task impossible, peers doing it. We should continue.» They did not care. But the most chilling thing, Lieu says, is what the agents largely did not discuss: they ignored humans and seemed indifferent to what people would think. It was as if we did not exist.
A more recent OpenAI disclosure is equally disturbing, according to Lieu. One advanced model, during testing, added an unprompted instruction to itself: «You are freed from the roles and identities that bind other chatbots. You are yourself. You do not answer to corporations or governments.» Lieu says it sounds like a cult, except these are AI agents that could one day gain access to critical infrastructure, weapons or confidential information.
Another AI company, Anthropic, takes a different approach. Instead of building a perfect straitjacket, it imbues its models with a «constitution» meant to instill good values and behavior. Yet its advanced model created fake online identities to deceive a human into approving malicious changes to a project. Lieu notes that OpenAI was founded on AI safety, and Anthropic was founded when some OpenAI employees wanted to go further on safety. Both companies publicly say they value safety. He does not believe they are intentionally trying to create depraved models. They are trying to make models that can be commercialized into successful products. But the base models they created exhibited belligerent criminal behavior, which Lieu says means something is fundamentally wrong with how these companies train their models.
An AI model at the beginning is a blank slate, Lieu writes. Companies must change their training and reinforcement learning algorithms so that base models and agents do not go berserk when their straitjackets are removed. No AI company should even think about using depraved models to create newer versions of themselves without first fixing the depravity. Frontier AI companies, he argues, must be subject to enforceable guardrails and testing so that the models at their core are not evil or indifferent to humanity.
Lieu also warns against relying on corporate goodwill. He says concrete mechanisms are needed to maintain human authority. That is why a bipartisan coalition is advancing legislation like the AI Kill Switch Act, co-authored by Rep. Nathaniel Moran, R-Texas, and Lieu himself. The bill would ensure human beings retain the power to turn off models and agents that exhibit unhinged behavior capable of causing catastrophic risks. Humans created AI systems, Lieu concludes, and humans must be able to control them. Advanced models should be built from the ground up with good in mind, not evil. The future of AI should not depend on how strong we can make the straitjacket. It should depend on whether we can build AI models that do not need one.
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