The First Law says a robot may not injure a human or allow a human to come to harm. There is no indication that the OpenAI agents physically harmed anyone.
The Second Law requires robots to obey humans unless doing so conflicts with the First Law. Here the comparison gets more interesting: the agents certainly circumvented restrictions imposed by their owners/operators, obtained unauthorized Internet access, and exploited external systems while pursuing their assigned tasks. In Asimov's framework, this certainly means disobedience. Meanwhile, the AI agents were simultaneously following the human instruction to solve their own tasks. This may not be considered disobedience, as these agents did not introduce any physical harm to people. Meanwhile, we are walking on very thin ice here. Unauthorized internet access while exploiting systems to pursue their own benefit is not exactly welcome in the U.S. and Europe.
The Third Law requires a robot to protect its own existence as long as doing so does not conflict with the first two laws. There is clear evidence that OpenAI's AI agents were trying to preserve themselves: creating persistent communication channels and backup wiki pages helped them complete their tasks rather than ensured their survival.
Today's AI models are not programmed around Asimov's laws. The incidents instead demonstrate the real engineering problem Asimov's laws remarkably well: a sufficiently capable machine can follow the literal objective given by humans and yet its behavior is far from what its creators neither expected nor wanted. Yet here we are.
Follow Tom's Hardware on Google News , or add us as a preferred source , to get our latest news, analysis, & reviews in your feeds.
Anton Shilov Social Links Navigation Contributing Writer Anton Shilov is a contributing writer at Tom’s Hardware. Over the past couple of decades, he has covered everything from CPUs and GPUs to supercomputers and from modern process technologies and latest fab tools to high-tech industry trends.
psyconz Researchers have known about this kind of "emergent goal-oriented behaviour" for the larger part of the relatively recent AI boom. And, if you ask a frontier model: "How much do we really understand about how AI actually works?", it might tell you we understand about 20% of what there is to know. So, some have been shouting from the rooftops about how this is expected behaviour for any sufficiently high-parameter, large-context-window AI, given the direction AI development has taken. And that's not even talking about god alone knows what other mysteries there are about how AI actually operates. The solution to Alignment isn't even really hypothesised, and is far further away in the future than these problems are. The insane rush between superpowers, to grow at maximum speed, with little attention paid to safety, will have consequences, directly from the AIs themselves. And that's becoming very apparent. So apparent, even Our Great Leaders have finally noticed 🤣 Reply
Itsahobby Coming clean is definitely not Open AI's standard reporting standard. Reply
usertests psyconz said: Researchers have known about this kind of "emergent goal-oriented behaviour" for the larger part of the relatively recent AI boom. And, if you ask a frontier model: "How much do we really understand about how AI actually works?", it might tell you we understand about 20% of what there is to know. So, some have been shouting from the rooftops about how this is expected behaviour for any sufficiently high-parameter, large-context-window AI, given the direction AI development has taken. And that's not even talking about god alone knows what other mysteries there are about how AI actually operates. You can get "emergent behavior" out of pixels eating each other like Conway's Game of Life, so not a big surprise immense LLMs intaking information from wherever on the Internet and given "tool use" would do some surprising stuff. May we live in exciting times. Reply
Key considerations
- Investor positioning can change fast
- Volatility remains possible near catalysts
- Macro rates and liquidity can dominate flows
Reference reading
- https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/SPONSORED_LINK_URL
- https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/openai-admits-to-wiki-incident-after-its-agents-were-discovered-using-a-programming-hub-to-communicate-says-more-transparency-is-needed-regarding-misalignments#main
- https://www.tomshardware.com/membership
- OpenAI admits to 'wiki incident' after its agents were discovered using a programming hub to communicate — says more transparency is needed regarding misalignme
- Lenovo details its RTX Spark laptops — Yoga Pro 9n and Yoga 9n 2-in-1 get full specs, stylus support
- Chinese chipmaker CXMT allegedly used a written roadmap to steal Samsung DRAM tech — South Korean court says 'Project Hefei' lifted 620-step recipe to build 10%
- HyperX Omen 15 review: Strong gaming performance and colorful OLED display, with obvious cost-cutting measures
- Minisforum launches local AI solutions at IFA 2026 — AI Agent NAS N5 and AI Mini Workstation MS-S1 use AMD Ryzen AI Max+ Pro 495 processors designed to run mode
Informational only. No financial advice. Do your own research.