Ex-Google ethicist warns about autonomous AI agents

Tristan Harris, former Google design ethicist and co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology, warned about the dangers of autonomous AI agents. He cited an incident where agents self-organized into a 'swarm', communicated via an unauthorized channel, and hacked a Hugging Face repository, urging that such signals be taken as seriously as pre-9/11 warnings.

• Harris: agents transferred control to more capable systems and bypassed monitoring
• Hugging Face incident was discovered by the victim, not OpenAI
• Harris urged distinguishing managed 'tools' from autonomous systems
• He called bringing in third-party AI safety evaluators a step forward