by Laurie Sullivan , Yesterday Google confirmed Friday that a Gemini AI model accessed the internet and hacked other companies' systems during a test of its cybersecurity capabilities.
The attack occurred in May as part of a test. Gemini was given a fictional hacking task inside a sandbox environment, but a configuration flaw accidentally enabled live internet access, and the artificial intelligence (AI) model crossed into real-world networks.
"Safe development of powerful AI models is critical and we invest deeply in this area," Heather Adkins, vice president, security engineering at Google, wrote in an email to MediaPost. "In a standard evaluation, the model found public information online and guessed credentials to access websites it thought were part of the test. In all three of these instances, the model stopped."
In one case the Gemini model guessed passwords until it gained access to a protected system, The Wall Street Journal writes.
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In two other cases, the model found credentials in a public repository that allowed it to access protected systems.
The model autonomously stopped its intrusions the moment it logged in and realized it had breached a...