Comment by edouard-harris

> Even if you think that the risk of a “containment breach” becomes substantially higher for AI over time, it cannot exceed 100%

I agree with this as stated, but it isn't what I said. What I said was: "the level of care required increases every month". By which I meant: the level of care required to keep the probability of an AI containment breach below some fixed X% increases every month. This isn't the case for biological organisms.[0]

> And even a tiny risk of release of a virus comes with a substantial risk of independent growth. AI does not. It doesn’t have the risk of spread of a typical computer virus, let alone a biological organism.

It's known that AIs can self-replicate under at least some conditions [1][2]; that AIs routinely escape sandboxes in the real world despite significant containment efforts [3][4][5]; and that neoclouds (which control substantial GPU compute capacity) have poor security even by human standards [6]. We've also seen a model gain admin access to parts of its own company's infra.[7] I'm not saying self replication is happening right now, or even that it will definitely happen in the future, but we have means, motive and opportunity right now, and the future is long. It's not unreasonable to invest in defending against this possibility.

I'll allow that the position that AI doesn't carry a substantial risk of independent growth isn't strictly impossible - again, it's true we haven't actually observed it in the wild as of today - but it does strike me as increasingly untenable in the face of the evidence. Perhaps I'm missing something, but I can't see what justifies such a confident assertion that this concern is nonsense.

[0] Unless one is doing crazy gain-of-function stuff, which could have a somewhat similar risk profile in that respect [1] https://arxiv.org/html/2606.03811v1 - note these used Qwen models from June so this is far behind even publicly available SOTA today [2] https://alignment.openai.com/misalignment-reports/self-repli... [3] https://alignment.openai.com/misalignment-reports/an-agent-u... [4] https://metr.org/blog/2026-08-26-openai-hugging-face-inciden... [5] https://x.com/MicahCarroll/status/2103665811051397256 [6] https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/most-neoclouds-suck-at... [7] https://openai.com/index/hugging-face-incident-and-the-road-...