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MANIFOLD
Will there be a warning shot before October 20, 2026?
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Oct 21
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The spirit of the question is whether there occurs some singular event that directly causes multiple major AI capabilities organizations to simultaneously sharply change direction and focus substantially more effort on AI alignment. It is not intended to include multiple smaller events that cause cumulative changes in attitudes, or multiple events that only cause single organizations to change course. It is also not intended to restrict to only warning shots that successfully cause coordination across all AGI labs; even if only a small subset of (but more than 2) labs pivot sharply, this question resolves Yes.

A warning shot is an event that demonstrates compellingly that alignment considerations should be taken more seriously, typically a catastrophic failure or a compelling demonstration of the possibility of dangerous failure.

In particular, it should include at least two of the following organizations:

  • OpenAI

  • DeepMind

  • Meta AI Research

  • Google

  • Microsoft

  • BAAI

The kinds of things that would qualify as "sharply changing direction" include:

  • An announcement or public statement describing the event in question as a "warning shot" or similar, and announcing a shift in priorities, cessation of capabilities research publishing, etc.

  • A sudden shift in research priorities or strategic behavior that indicates taking alignment a lot more seriously than before, as observed through published output after an event that is broadly accepted as a "warning shot"

If there is any ambiguity, as usual, I will exercise my judgement to resolve in the spirit of the question.

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Having both Google and DeepMind on the list is problematic and seems to greatly increase the chance of Yes, as they are likely to respond in the same way, so a single event then cross the “two” threshold with just them.

"this is a pivotal moment both for our company as well as the AI industry as a whole. We are numerous teams dropping everything to enhance our security prevention, detection and response techniques ... we're consciously slowing down research to enhance security and to update the security principles and foundation of our environment, and dramatically scaling up the monitoring of our AI agents ..."

https://youtu.be/87DyyMV0kCY?si=ExUalT7DcWUMkTBD&t=1798

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman Discusses Next AI Model With US Lawmakers

Rogue OpenAI agent that hacked startup tried to attack other firms

OpenAI and Hugging Face partner to address security incident during model evaluation

"I mean there could be, yeah."

More Than ​​1,100 AI Workers Call for US to Pace Tech Growth

New details are being uncovered; apparently, the agent hacked more companies ("four accounts on four services as part of the Hugging Face incident (and a few accounts accessed as part of other evaluations)") and the exact number of victims isn't even known yet. It's already sending major waves throughout the industry with major labs changing their tune toward "pacing" themselves and, as in OpenAI's case, getting in talks with the government to help them to that end.

Also a distinctly new wording from a recent update to OpenAI's blog post on the matter:

Following the incident, we deactivated, encrypted, and restricted it from research access.

This is as clear of a warning shot as we were going to get.

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