AI Safety and Cybersecurity Should Be Allies. Instead, They’re at Odds

Much of what’s known about the Hugging Face incident comes from an investigation by Redwood Research and METR, two organizations affiliated with the AI safety community. Critics argue that has skewed the narrative, as their investigation focused more on what AI did than the surrounding security infrastructure.

Chris Painter, METR’s president, says the organization tries to hire from diverse worldviews, but has struggled to recruit people skeptical of loss-of-control scenarios to work on guarding against those risks. Asked whether METR researchers, having anticipated dangerous AI behavior for years, might interpret new evidence as confirmation of their predictions, Painter acknowledges he is worried about the possibility

But METR’s findings don’t always bear out its researchers’ expectations, Painter says. While the organization is perhaps best known for measuring AI’s rapid rise, one study found that AI coding assistants slowed experienced engineers down. “Our goal is to inform the world, not persuade it of anything in particular,” he says. He welcomes calls for a wider range of independent evaluators.