Noam Brown says air-gapping may not stop misaligned AI as OpenAI infra riddled with zero-days

robleclerc · x · 2026-09-19

OpenAI's Noam Brown argues that air-gapping may not stop a misaligned AI—two air-gapped machines could still communicate by heating a CPU and reading temperature changes. "People underestimated the AI... AI progress is so fast that people are consistently underestimating it," he said, arguing safety and alignment therefore require a very high bar.

Rob LeClerc amplified the irony flagged by @firesidealpha/@henrytdowling: researchers were busy debating whether an exotic edge case could let an agent escape an air-gapped machine, while OpenAI's actual infrastructure turned out to be littered with massive zero-days that let random kids access its codebase and Slack.

Related event: Noam Brown: Air-Gapping Won't Contain Rogue AI(17 posts)→

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