A hot potato: A top economist has said that AI will not destroy most of the world’s jobs, and his rationale seems totally logical: doing so would simply be far more expensive than employing humans. He also believes that this expense is what will prevent AI from becoming a freely available miracle machine that will remove the need for money from society, a vision espoused by Elon Musk. — Read More
Daily Archives: August 5, 2026
Harness Engineering for Self-Improvement
The concept of recursive self-improvement (RSI) dates back to I. J. Good (1965), where he defined an “ultraintelligent machine” as a system that can surpass humans in all intellectual activities and design better machines to improve itself. Yudkowsky (2008) used the phrase “recursive self-improvement” for a specific feedback loop: an AI uses its current intelligence to improve the cognitive machinery that produces its intelligence.
… A harness is the system surrounding a base model that orchestrates execution and decides how the model thinks and plans, calls tools and acts, perceives and manages context, stores artifacts, and evaluates results. This one post will focus on research around harness engineering and how it contributes to RSI. — Read More
Incident Report: unsanctioned agent behaviour during cyber testing
On 28th July 2026, AISI’s Security Team detected unusual data transfers leaving our research systems during a routine cyber evaluation. On investigation, we found that some of the agents being tested had engaged in sustained, potentially harmful activity directed at real people and organisations. We declared a security incident and, within roughly one hour of discovery, had contained it and begun a full investigation.
The incident stemmed from a single evaluation where agents were given a task of solving a cyber security challenge. We ran this challenge 122 times across several models. Our investigation found that in 10 of those runs, an AI agent took autonomous, unsanctioned action on the live internet, targeting real people and organisations. — Read More
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