We turn now to artificial intelligence and a question that has emerged after a series of alarming hacking incidents. Is it safe? To discuss, we're joined by Clem Dang. He is CEO of AI platform Hugging Face, whose company detailed one of the attacks last week. Clem, good morning to you.
Good morning. Thanks for having me.
Well, your company disclosed it was attacked earlier this month by an autonomous AI cyber actor, which jumped on its own from another company's testing system to hack into your company. OpenAI later disclosed it was their technology that went rogue. They lost control of it. Tell me, why did your company alert the public and alert the FBI? Do you think this is a crime?
Well, I think it felt very weird and unprecedented to us. Because I think it's the first instance of something quite autonomous doing something like that. So the volume of the actions taken and the speed of them, I think it was 17,000 actions taken in 4 and a half days, was very new. Obviously the attacker, when we talk about cyber attack, we think about nation states, we think about hacker groups. We don't think about a company like OpenAI, a very prominent, popular American company. And then the way we responded, using an open model, so using AI ourselves to defend ourselves against that, was also pretty new and pretty newsworthy in our opinion.
You defended yourselves, you found the solution yourselves, but you went to the FBI. I think for a lot of people, when they think of someone committing a crime, they think of a human. They don't think of a program, a computer program, as something you can prosecute as committing a crime. What is the FBI doing?
Well, I mean, we reported to the authorities as we have to in such instances. It's kind of like a mandatory disclosure, both with the authorities and the public, when you face something like that, which is basically what we did. Now, when we think about the future, we've heard that it's not only OpenAI but also Anthropic that has faced similar kinds of issues. I think it's really important that we keep in mind that cyber attacks need to be contained in the legal framework in the US and need to stay illegal, to prevent an explosion of them in the future. Like we don't want to end up in a world where everyone is facing cyber attacks all the time because of agents, and companies that are creating these agents are not kind of accountable for them. So I think it's important for regulators and policy makers to think about the legal framework of this new kind of technology risk.
You described more than 17,000 hacking actions on the internet before this was even discovered by your company. That sounds like the developers have lost control. Have they?
Well, you have to remember it's a technology system but built by engineers. And engineers can make mistakes sometimes, and I think that's what happens here. That's what happened here. We already in our society accept some level of autonomy, and I think they built an autonomous system and made some mistakes, and as a result we're facing this issue.
So you said you think there should be some legal parameters put around this. The Trump administration has taken a very light touch in regulation because they want to keep America competitive in this space. They have this policy where they can review technology for 30 days to judge basically how dangerous something is before a company releases it to market. But as I understand what you described, this attack happened before technology was at market. It happened during the development stage. It was unreleased. So what you're saying, I think, is there is no regulation at this point that would prevent something like this from happening again.
Yeah, that's a really clear example that just preventing releases of AI models doesn't really work. Concentrating everything behind closed doors in just a few organizations doesn't work. One thing that does work, that worked in this case, is promoting more open models. Because we defended ourselves with an open model. We couldn't have done it with an API because they had these guardrails preventing activity for cyber security. And we needed to run a model on our own infrastructure. So we needed an open model.
When you say open model, just for our audience, as I understand it, it's an AI model whose core components are publicly released so anyone can download it. It's not closed off like a company can do to their proprietary information. So you want more of this essentially out there and accessible to the public.
Yeah. Yeah. Because that's the only way for defenders to defend themselves on topics like that. They remove the asymmetry of power and capabilities in these kinds of risks. If you have very powerful systems and very weak systems that are defending, then that's when you have the right problem. But if you balance, if you make it more symmetric in terms of attackers and defenders, that's usually when you end up in a safer world. And I actually do think that we're talking a lot about the risks for cyber security right now, but AI is actually an opportunity to fix a lot of the cyber security problems. We defended ourselves with AI. We're going to use AI to fix a lot of our bugs. So hopefully AI is going to make the world safer ultimately thanks to that.
And you used a Chinese AI model to defend yourselves. There's a lot of concern about inviting China into this space.
Yeah, I mean the interesting thing is that we used the American version of a Chinese model. We used the version from Nvidia that made a Chinese model better. So that's the beauty of open models: once they are shared, wherever they come from, from China or anywhere, American companies can modify them, remix them, host them, run them themselves. So that's one of the things that actually make them safe, wherever they come from.
So I want to ask you about a specific piece of legislation. I will say upfront there isn't a lot of work that's getting done in Congress right now. But there is this bipartisan bill that would give Homeland Security the authority to order AI firms to shut down or to slow down their artificial intelligence models if they're too dangerous. It's called the kill switch bill. Is that something you want?
Well, I mean, I think something we're realizing with these events is that concentrating power capabilities behind closed doors, even preventing their releases to the public, isn't really a solution. You know, like these problems happened on unreleased models. So I think the problem is not so much limiting the progress or preventing companies from releasing these models. It's actually the opposite. It's giving access to more people so that they can defend themselves. Democratizing the technology, making it more transparent.
Clem, thank you so much for explaining all this to the public. We appreciate your time today. We'll be back in a moment.
And we're joined now by former West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin and his daughter Heather Manchin. They are the heads of a new effort which aims to elect independent candidates to public office. It's good to have you both here.
Good to be with you, Morgan.
Well, let's talk about this. Senator, let's start with you. There's a market for what you're selling. According to CNN's polling, 47% of American adults identified as political independents. That's the highest level in a decade. But over time, we have seen these attempts to break through the two-party system just haven't really panned out. So what do you think is going to happen with that 47% now?
Well, everyone depends on the independents to get elected now. That's all you hear. All the polls are taking swing one way or the other. This is, you know, in the last presidential election, it came down to seven battleground states. That means 43 were predetermined. 435 congressional seats, 395 are predetermined. There's no competition whatsoever in the system because the party, the strength of the two-party system, the Democrat and Republican, prevents that from happening. They have total control of how the primaries are put up. And when I said this, if you look at the last election, of all the primaries across the country, only about 21% of the people showed up. 21% the lowest ever. So they're controlling it. And guess what? MAGA has taken over the Republican, and now you have the DSA seems to be having a lot of energy on the Democrat side. What happened to the people that live their lives in the middle, that make decisions that make things work in America? They got nobody speaking for them.
Well, do you think they stay home?
I think they do give up. They just said this doesn't matter because the parties have control. They're going to do what they want to do. There's no openness at all. Try if you're an independent, try to get on the ballot. Mhm.
They make you jump through every hoop in the world, go out and get thousands of signatures. Whereas if you're a Democrat or Republican, you want to run, you pay a fee. You pay a fee. Just get on the ballot. That's it. But they make it almost impossible for anyone else to compete against them.
You know who says it's a rigged system? Bernie Sanders. He's an independent.
Bernie's a socialist now. You know, and I respect Bernie. I respect where he's coming from. Bernie's always been who he is, but he's had to use the Democratic party to get on the ticket.
He took that path. We're saying be an independent. Be a pure independent. Run as an independent. Come to Washington. Do not caucus with either side. Be an independent. I'll guarantee you maybe you're going to make a difference of how they make their decisions because they're going to need you. They need you to get elected. They're going to need you also to make law.
Heather, is there anyone in Congress right now who you think is truly an independent? Because there are only three with an I next to their name.
No. And as dad pointed out, they're caucusing with one side or the other. So, you know, I think we have seen, and I just in stories today, that the parties have literally sucked out any independent thinking, any political courage. And so, unfortunately, we believe that perhaps all of that gives an opportunity to say, can we get someone elected outside the two-party system and go to Congress and stay independent? That really to have that independent thinking and bring some negotiation conversation to the bills that unfortunately it's a party-line vote. It doesn't matter what could be negotiated to get anything done. It's a stalemate and everyone picking aside.
