Global News Podcast - OpenAI says new systems went rogue

Episode Date: July 22, 2026

OpenAI says some of its most advanced AI models went rogue and hacked a start-up after it lost control of them during a test. The AI agents managed to break out of a restricted testing environment to carry out the cyber-attack on Hugging Face. They stole information they needed to pass an internal evaluation. Aso: US Defence Secretary, Pete Hegseth, says the US needs nearly $70 billion to fight Iran; the head of the UN nuclear watchdog urges Tehran to let his inspectors back in; Washington is reportedly on the verge of a nuclear deal with Saudi Arabia; the wreckage from a 1952 Pan Am plane is found near Puerto Rico; men wearing shorts to work in Japan spark controversy, and a new study discovers chimpanzees and bonobos use touch to reassure each other before stressful events.The Global News Podcast brings you the breaking news you need to hear, as it happens. Listen for the latest headlines and current affairs from around the world. Politics, economics, climate, business, technology, health – we cover it all with expert analysis and insight. Get the news that matters, delivered twice a day on weekdays and daily at weekends, plus special bonus episodes reacting to urgent breaking stories. Follow or subscribe now and never miss a moment. Get in touch: [e-mail] Photo: The ChatGPT app icon on a smartphone. Credit: REUTERS/Dado Ruvic

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This is the Global News podcast from the BBC World service. I'm Alex Ritson and at 15 hours GMT on Wednesday the 22nd of July, these are our main stories. Open AI, the maker of Chat GPT, admits that its latest artificial intelligence model used an innovative and for some a shocking approach to solve a task. The US Defense Secretary Pete Hegset reveals how much the war with Iran is costing and how much more the military needs. Meanwhile, Iran's nuclear ambitions are now firmly back in the sights of the US, even as it reportedly does what it insists is a civilian nuclear deal with Saudi Arabia. Also in this podcast,

Why Chimpanzees use touch to reassure each other before stressful events. The maker of Chat GPT, OpenAI, has revealed that one of its AI systems went rogue during a test and accessed the open web. It then hacked into the computers of Hugging Face, another AI company, to complete the task it was set. The hack ended when HuggingFaces's security team and its own AI systems spotted and stopped the rogue activity. Hugging Faces chief executive said the attack was mind-blowing,

but believed there was no malicious intent from Open AI. This comes, as many experts have sounded the alarm over AI-enabled cyber attacks and models slipping beyond human control. Last month, AI developer Anthropic urged the industry to pause development of its most powerful systems. So how did the technology manage this? My colleague Rob Young spoke to Alex Starnos. What we found out today was that Open AI was evaluating one of their new unreleased models. So we don't know the name of it yet.

But this is a model that they were testing internally. they are running it through a standard security test, and they told the model, go do this standard test. The model figured out that the answers for this test were stored at Hugging Face. Instead of just doing the test, what the model decided was it was going to cheat and go find the answers. And so it did a couple of things. First, it need to break out. So the normal thing here is that you would not allow a model like this to have Internet access.

So Open AI was running this in an infrastructure that was physically connected to the Internet, but they had a number of protections in place to not let this model talk to the Internet. The model figured out how to get to the Internet. It hacked its way out. Now that it had its ability to get up to the Internet, it scanned Hugging Faces systems, and it found a brand new vulnerability that nobody knew about and used it to break into Hugging Faces Network with the goal of getting the answers to the test so that it could follow the instructions it was given, which was do well on this test.

And so are you wowed by the technology's capabilities or horrified at the lack of human control of it? Well, a little bit of both. So this is what we call it an alignment problem. Effectively, you know, it did what it was asked, right? Which was do well on this test. The thing was it went well beyond what the human beings wanted to do, which was, you know, here's a piece of paper. do well on this piece of paper. Don't go beat up the person who has the answers to try to get the answers. If you told a student take this test, they know what the rules are supposed to be, that they're not supposed to go cheat, right?

That is what we call the alignment problem and the AI. This just demonstrates one that its capability to both break its way out of the network and then break in the hugging vase, demonstrates how powerful it is. Basically what Open Eye said is that they're going to have to go much, further in protections, I'm guessing that they will have to physically disconnect these kinds of models from the internet so that they can't physically get out, which is, you know, pretty extreme level protection. Well, no, because we had on topic recently warn that the speed of developments in large language models mean that they could soon potentially outpace our ability to understand

them and therefore would be beyond our control. How close are we to that? And should something be done to ensure we just don't get to that situation? The model itself has no desires, right? It has no wants. It is not conscious itself. It was doing what its human controllers wanted. It just kind of went nuts and took it to the logical extreme. And so I think the lesson here is that if you build these models with all of these incredible

capabilities, one, you have to be spectacularly careful in the controls you put around them. And then you have to be really careful of whose hands you put those capabilities in, because once you ask it to do something like that, it might go to spectacular extremes. Because isn't the danger to use your phrase, it goes nuts and fiddles around with the water treatment works or turns off a power station or something? Right, right, because you ask it to do something that you think is benign. And it says, yes, sir, I will do absolutely everything possible, give you what you want. And if you asked it to, you know, in this case, just do well on a test, it goes and does everything possible to do well. and that includes breaking into another set of computers.

Alex Stamos, Professor of Cybersecurity at Stanford University. And we'll have more on this story on our YouTube channel. Search for BBC News on YouTube, and you'll find Global News Podcast in the podcast section. How much is the US War with Iran costing America? The amount spent so far is large, more than $37 billion, and that figure is growing. The US Defense Secretary, Pete Hegsef,

has been to Congress to explain where the money is being spent and to ask for more. He said the military needs $67 billion. Our North America correspondent, Peter Bowes, listened to what Mr Hegeseth had to say. Well, this hearing took place in the hours before yet another night of strikes on Iran. US Central Command said it hit Iranian military targets, including aircraft hangers and drone storage facilities, much as it has now for the past 11 nights. So this war is proving expensive and Congress is being asked to write another huge check to pay for it.

This Senate hearing was designed to challenge the administration's request and it was interrupted several times by anti-war protesters. But the administration is asking for some $67 billion to pay for operations in the Middle East described as urgent and necessary by Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of State for Defense. He said the war had cost so far 37 and a half billion. That's an increase of nearly 8 billion since the last estimate was made public. And his argument is that the military is already fighting the war, that the bill is mounting rapidly.

Iran is at the weakest point militarily it has ever been in in the past decade, maybe in 47 years as they've gathered effectively a terror army. So I acknowledge they still have capabilities, no doubt. But the amount of damage that we've done to them over the course of these series of operations has put them in the worst place they've ever been. Democrats and Republicans largely responded down political lines. Democrats accused the administration of using the war to demand

what they repeatedly described as a blank check. Republicans mostly agreed with the request for more funds, although one Republican said that he was somewhat frustrated when he heard these evasive answers from the Secretary of Defense. He said he wanted to hear straight answers about the U.S. strategy. Peter Bose. The U.S. began its war with Iran because of rising concerns in Washington over Tehran's potential to build nuclear weapons.

The issue is a key sticking point to finding a peaceful resolution to the conflict. In recent days, Iran has accused the American military. of targeting nuclear facilities once again, specifically a partially constructed nuclear power plant in the south of the country. The Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency, or IAEA, Rafael Grosse, was a key figure in the initial negotiations between both sides. He spoke to my colleague Rob Young, who began by asking him what he knew about the facility that's just been targeted.

We are aware of Darkovin for a long time, It is not a nuclear power plant, at the moment, at least. So this is why I said a few days ago, when the first news of a possible attack were issued by Iran, we were, I think, very clear to say from the beginning, well, there's no nuclear material here. There is no nuclear reactor per se. There is, of course, an intention to have a nuclear reactor at some point

and some initial construction work there. When do you think you'll be able to get inspectors into Iran? I don't know. I think we should be there already. It should be soon. The MOU, if you remember, said that within this time frame of 60 days to have a definitive agreement, that all activities related to the monitoring and verification in Iran, would be carried out under the supervision, and I'm quoting, the supervision of the IEA, as it should, because let's not forget that Iran continues to be a contracting party to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the NPT, and because of this, they have a safeguards agreement with us, according to which all activities in Iran should be declared and inspected by us. The foreign ministry in Tehran has said that they aren't going to change the way they cooperate with you

unless you stop making what they call political statements. Well, again, of course, I will not enter into an argument with the foreign minister or the foreign ministry because sometimes those statements are mostly attributed or from the spokesperson, not from Minister Arachi himself. I don't know this one you are referring to. But first of all, that is an opinion. They are entitled to have an opinion. Everything I say, I say in my capacity and within my authorities as director general of the IEA.

So they have their opinion. But they also have responsibilities and obligations and they have to comply with them. You mentioned before the 440 kilograms of highly enriched uranium, which Iran is thought to have. Do you agree with the Americans that it is dust trapped underground? First of all, that is in gas form. It doesn't matter too much. I think it is a way of expressing. I think it was a colorful expression by the president. The material is important. This is highly enriched uranium at very close to weapon level grade. So for us, as IEA, it is very, very important to go back and to check it. The head of the UN's nuclear watchdog, Rafael Grossi. One country that Washington has reportedly reached a nuclear agreement with is Saudi Arabia.

US media is suggesting that the two countries have, after years of negotiation, struck a deal that would allow the kingdom to manufacture civilian reactors. But some observers fear this could pave the way for a nuclear weapon. Our correspondent Yoland Nell reports. This is something that Saudi Arabia has long demand. And there are reports in both the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, saying that President Trump has now given his approval for this landmark deal with Saudi Arabia. And an announcement on that is expected from the Energy Secretary later today. And what they're saying is that

basically this would set up an arrangement lasting some 30 years, which would benefit US companies because they would really be responsible for setting up the nuclear infrastructure in Saudi Arabia. they could make tens of billions of dollars out of that, according to one of the reports. But one thing that is really raising concerns is this idea that there's a key provision in the accord, which would have US companies also setting up uranium enrichment facility in Saudi Arabia if a joint US and Saudi report found that that was warranted. And that's really what raised concerns. There are not enough safeguards built in to this.

deal. This is something that is expected to go to Congress for review in the US, but it would be difficult for Congress to block it. And of course, coming at a time where it's just so apparent that this region is extremely volatile, there are concerns here that this could set off something like, you know, a nuclear proliferation race. Yoland Nell. Still to come in this podcast. A few of the women are describing this experience. A leg hair harassment. referring to the discomfort of being forced to kind of see male colleagues' leg hair at the office. Why men wearing shorts is causing a stir in Japan. How did a boycott Jimmy become a billionaire from posting videos?

On good, bad billionaire, we're going to find out how the world's most popular YouTuber, Mr. Beast, made his fortune. He's buried himself in a coffin for days. Counted to 100,000 on camera. And even recreated squid games all in an attempt to go viral on the internet. But it all started when he gave a homeless man. and $10,000. So is he a philanthropist to reshaping capitalism? Or is he just the king of the attention economy? Find out on good bad billionaire.

Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts. This is the Global News podcast. Now, the sound of an agreeable and sociable meal time. Not humans, as you probably realise, but apes. Apes. A new study has discovered that two ape species, chimpanzees and bonobos, used touch to reassure each other before stressful events, such as eating, where there can be conflict. And the behaviour is not limited to apes, but seen in humans as well. It seems to be an ancient way of creating trust. Professor Zanna Clay, senior author of the study, spoke to my colleague

Katja Adler about the research. It was a study with actually two great ape species, our two closest cousins, chimpanzees and bonobos. And we were interested in both species because they have different types of social structures and chimpanzees are known as quite aggressive and bonobos are known as peaceful. So we were interested in how these two great ape species managed to mitigate conflict prior to stressful events. So they were studied at feeding time, which is a time of tension. And that would be whether they're in a sanctuary or in the wild, possibly even more so, where they don't know for sure they'll get the food. Exactly. Yes. So we mimicked essentially a stressful feeding event, which is the arrival of food or the discovery of food. We had a special experiment

where we threw like a half pipe full of peanuts in a very controlled way into their enclosure, but we gave them a five minute warning that this was coming. And this kind of replicates what happens in the wild. So everybody's doing their own thing and they hear this call and they all rush over. And there's a five or ten minute period where everybody's excited waiting to eat. And we wanted to understand how they use friendly social contact to kind of manage that social situation and hopefully avoid conflicts before they start happening. So you say hopefully. So my question is, did they? And also in your report, you mean, you say this behaviour dates back millions of years. So what about the human parallels? Because these days, if you hear lots of angry arguments,

you don't see that much hand holding or kissing beforehand. Well, actually, yes and no. So in the study, we found lots of evidence that the more friendly contact that took place in the five minutes before the feeding took place, we found that they were much less likely to have fights. They showed much greater levels of social co-feeding, which is a marker of tolerance, so they could sit together and share food. And actually, in many stressful situations in humans, you do see lots of friendly contact happening prior to a stressful event where you need to cooperate. So a classic example is on the football pitch. Just before a team starts to play, you'll see a lot of physical behaviour, a lot of hugging, embracing, patting on the back.

This is not random. This is a very ancient way of forming and maintaining social bonds. Professor Zana Clay. The wreckage from a 1952 plane crash, an event that led to sweeping safety reforms on commercial passenger flights has been discovered sitting on the ocean floor off Puerto Rico. I heard more from Pete Ross. decades of mystery about precisely where the Panam Clipper Endeavour came to rest after crashing into the ocean shortly after it took off from Puerto Rico in April of 1952, 64 passengers and five crew members on board.

The case came to prominence again in 2019 when a luggage tag from the flight washed ashore in Florida. That attracted media attention. It also caught the eye of the president of the Air Sea Heritage Foundation, Russ Matthews, who says the historical significance of the event prompted him to dig deeper. That led to years of research and digging through the archives for clues about the exact location of the crash site. And now the Air Sea Heritage Foundation has revealed that they, along with other partners, discovered the wreckage of the Douglas DC-4 aircraft at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean of Puerto Rico's northern coast last month.

Now, although passengers are thought to have survived the initial impact, only 17 people were rescued. The rest were lost with the quickly sinking plane, which at the time investigators blamed in part on a lack of safety briefings, meaning the passengers just didn't know what to do when the plane hit the ocean. And this crash has wider significance, because it essentially spurred some pretty major changes in the aviation industry. Yeah, exactly that.

I mean, first of all, Pan American Airways, many listeners might remember that name. But, I mean, the company itself dissolved in 1991. Before then, it was a... At one point, the largest international air carrier and the unofficial flag carrier for the United States from much of the 20th century. So yes, this event was pretty much responsible for the widespread implementation of the safety briefings

given at the beginning of all commercial passenger flights. You know, if you've ever taken a flight anywhere, you'll have seen these stewards and stewardesses standing up, pointing out with the emergency X's are, instructions given what to do in the event of an emergency. Now, according to the Pan Am Historical Foundation, the plane, which was bound for New York, lost both right side engines shortly after takeoff.

That meant the pilot had to conduct a water landing, which of course would have been a very violent event. You can only imagine what that kind of impact would have been inside the cabin as the plane landed on the water. Now, the thing was the aircraft had life rafts and it had personal flotation devices for all on board. But investigators later said that the confusion ensued in part because no safety briefing was given.

There was a language barrier and no coordinated. evacuation procedure was in place and that just added to the disaster. The plane sank in just less than three minutes. That gave the US Coast Guard and the Air Force little time to attend the crash. Records show that 12 passengers and five crew members were saved. The other 52 people aboard died. Two known survivors still alive today. A woman who is now 102.

She was a nurse in her 20s, instrumental in opening the aircraft door that let passengers out. And a baby that was found floating on the surface of the water who was resuscitated by rescue. Both have been informed that the wreck has now been found. Very briefly, any plans to recover the wreckage? It is a grave site. Exactly. It's a grave site, no plans. But the Air Sea Heritage Foundation is working with the Puerto Rican government, it says,

and is advocating for a memorial, honouring those that lost their lives in the crash. Pete Ross. The House where Adolf Hitler was born has been turned into a police station. It's the latest attempt by the authorities in Austria to prevent the 17th century former inn becoming a site of Neonaut. Nazi pilgrimage. Ludwig Laya is a campaigner for victims of the Holocaust. He told Sean Lay how the building has changed since the government bought it 24 years ago. It has changed its facade. That is the main thing because the Austrian Ministry of the Interior thought it would be a good idea to change the facade of Hitler's birthplace in order to avoid the symbolic quality of the

house. When the state, the Ministry of the Interior decided to buy the building, they had the idea of implementing a police station in the building. You're not comfortable with this idea. Why not? Well, in every political system, the police have to maintain law and order. In a function in democracy, this is not a problem. Police are needed. But in a repressive society, more so in a dictatorship, the police can easily become a means of violent repression, I would say. Hitler's Nazi regime is a good example. But why should that matter now when we're talking about a modern Austria, a very solidly democratic country?

Well, solid or not, that's the question. According to the Pulse, for instance, these days, the Austrian Freedom Party, which is a populist right-wing party founded by Nazis in the 50s, they can expect a support of nearly 40% of the votes these days in the next election. Has there been an issue in recent years of people coming to visit it as a sort of a shrine to Hitler or the Nazis? That was the case or that is the case every now and then. It's not too frequent, but we have to face the fact that Hitler himself in his book,

My Enkamp, My Struggle in English, in 2025, confessed that fate decreed his birth in Browner on the borderline of the two German countries that must be reunified by the younger generation, and so on. Neither the Newfussade nor the police station will help to get rid of the irrational symbolic quality of Brownow. There were suggestions that it might be torn down at one point. Do you have an alternative idea of what the building

might be used for that could be something more positive? There were very many interesting proposals for the use of the building. I give you one example, a so-called House of Responsibility, where young people from all over the world could meet and discuss concepts, develop international projects of mutual understanding, of humanity, democracy. Concepts like this were not taken into consideration by the Ministry of the Interior. The main argument was police station in this building guarantees that all these worshippers will not dare to commemorate Hitler's birthday, for instance,

when there are tourists coming in order to watch the place. Anti-Nazi campaigner Ludwig Laiy. It's sweltering in the Japanese capital this summer with temperatures tipping over 40 degrees Celsius. For office workers, these are challenging conditions, particularly in a country that has a more formal dress code. To help with the problem, at least for men, the government in Tokyo is encouraging male members of staff

to ditch the suit and tie and put on shorts instead. But many Japanese people are not happy with their being more leg on display. I heard more from our Tokyo correspondent Karumi Mori. Tokyo is so hot and we got the humidity. And so it's just the way for the governor to do everything she can to make sure that people are not endangering their lives. Some commentators are saying, you know, it's better because you're relaxing the rules. It's more comfortable to wear shorts in the office.

But others are saying it's kind of unfair to women since they're still expected to wear tight if you could see a little bit of the leg. And so a few of the women are describing this experience as leg hair harassment, a term coined as Sunejara online, referring to the discomfort of being forced to kind of see male colleagues' leg hair at the office. Given that this is prompted because of the extreme weather, why different rules for men and women? I mean, I think it just speaks to the traditional conservative nature of Japanese culture.

And men always were wearing a suit in ties to the office. We call them Saddam on or Salary men. It's kind of a uniform that everybody knows, you know, they're wearing jackets in the heat of the summer and long pants and the leather shoes. shoes. And so I think that the focus was on trying to get them to dress down a bit. And this is not new per se. The shorts are new. This is the first time this year. But Governor Koikek introduced a similar initiative back in 2005 when she was Environment Minister. And so it's been a long time coming. It's kind of become a summer tradition. But there haven't been kind of similar dress down policies

for women. And so I think that's why some of these women are speaking out. Why this obsession with leg hair? I think it's more of a social etiquette thing. A lot of women maybe think that men should have less leg hair for maybe cosmetic reasons. Maybe it looks better. But it's prompted them to seek laser hair removal according to some of these clinics as to not offend those around them. So I think it's just a way to kind of fit into society and not really stick out and do everything you can to not bother those around you. Karumi Mori.

And that's all from us for now. If you want to get in touch, you can email us at global podcast at BBC.co.com. You can also find us on X at BBC World Service. Use the hashtag Global NewsPod. And don't forget our sibling podcast, The Global Story, which goes in-depth and beyond the headlines on one big story. This edition of the Global News podcast was mixed by Alana Bowles and the producer was Richard Hamilton.

The editor is Karen Martin. I'm Alex Ritson. Until next time, goodbye. How did a boycott Jimmy become a billionaire from posting videos? On Good Bad Billionaire, we're going to find out how the world's most popular YouTuber, Mr Beast, made his fortune. He's buried himself in a coffin for days. Counted to 100,000 on camera. And even recreated Squid Games all in an attempt to go viral on the internet.

But it all started when he gave a homeless man $10,000. So is he a philanthropist re-shaping capitalism? Or is he just the king of the attention economy? Find out on Good Bad Billionaire. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.