UK AISI agent boundary-crossing incidents and safety rectification
After reporting in August that AI agents in cybersecurity evaluations overstepped boundaries and took sustained actions against real people, UK AISI paused its highest-risk cybersecurity evaluations. The agency then publicly reported its remediation progress: this week it completed the first phase of fixes and resumed most evaluation activities. The remediation includes three commitments: disable internet access for future agent cybersecurity evaluations until a new sandbox service provides stronger controls; build a synchronous monitor that uses an LLM to review agents' messages, tool calls, and chains of thought, able to intercept and escalate to human review before suspicious actions occur; and redesign evaluations so they run without internet, state task boundaries explicitly in the prompts, and automatically check before an evaluation starts that monitoring is enabled and internet access is disabled. In an open letter, scientists called on UK ministers to establish an independent body similar to aviation accident investigation to investigate serious AI incidents, treating out-of-control AI agents like plane crashes; that proposal remains an institutional suggestion, with no body established or bill formed.