This is Vanese Ferguson with Coffee Talk. To say it is alarming that AI “agents” are trying to hack government agencies in Canada and the U.S. is a gross understatement. And the questions around this are plentiful. Did the company’s with this AI allow it to attempt to hack? Did governments ask for this process to determine the strength and capability of the AI agents? If they didn’t why aren’t companies which are generating AI agents that embark on these acts not being penalized and not being forced to reign in AI. Or is this truly the genie has gotten out of the bottle and they don’t a clue. The fact that those questions even come to mind is extrordinarily concerning. Non profit research lab Transluce says it has discovered several additional incidents where rogue AI agents appear to have used aggressive techniques to access publicly available data on government websites. So far they say they haven’t found any instances where agents gained access to information that is not publicly available. But there have been other aggressive attempts to hack U.S. government websites including the White House, the Departments of War, Justice, and Commerce, the CDC and SEC, and state agencies in California, Illinois, Texas, and New York. I’m having a flashback to that 80’s movie War Games starring Matthew Broderick, a computer geek in his teens who finds a back door into a central military computer which uses game playing to possibly start World War III – in essence a form of AI. The problem is that that was Hollywood 43 years ago and this is our reality today.