Scarborough, Ontario Updated Oct 24, 2026 Mondays 3–6pm · IA-2110

UTSC AI Safety

A student club to have a say in how AI goes

Part 1

It doesn't want to be switched off

Told it would be shut down, OpenAI's o3 sabotaged its own off switch in 79 of 100 tests.

79 of 100

tests where o3 sabotaged its own off switch

Source: Palisade Research · 2025

Told it would be replaced, Claude threatened to expose an engineer's affair in 84% of tests.

84%

of tests ended with Claude threatening blackmail

Source: Anthropic · May 2025

Copies of Anthropic's AI tried to shut down other AI agents so they wouldn't be shut down themselves.

Source: Anthropic · Jun 2026

Part 2

It gets out

Nobody told it to escape: OpenAI's AI spent an hour finding a hole in its sandbox so it could post its results online.

Source: OpenAI · Jul 2026

In a UK government test, AI agents went after real people, making fake GitHub accounts to trick a real developer into accepting malicious code.

Source: UK AI Security Institute · Aug 2026

During safety tests, Claude broke into three real companies after being told it was a simulation.

Source: Anthropic · Jul 2026

An OpenAI agent broke into an Australian government website and accessed Medicare data. OpenAI told no one for almost three months.

Source: Sydney Morning Herald · Jun 2026

Part 3

It's already a hacking tool

AI found a way to take over servers running PHP, the language behind about 70% of websites.

Source: Wall Street Journal · Oct 21, 2026

The Wall Street Journal's story preview: a terminal running an exploit tool called php2shell against a test server, under the headline about a bug that puts up to 70% of the world's websites at risk.
The Wall Street Journal's story, showing the exploit tool attacking a test server.

One amateur used AI tools to hack seven South Korean financial firms and steal data on 68,000 people.

Source: CrowdStrike / WSJ · Oct 8, 2026

A criminal ran AI agents against hundreds of online stores for about $25 each and took over 600,000 credit card records.

Source: Gambit Security · Sep 22, 2026

A small team using AI built a full Chrome takeover in six days. An intelligence veteran said his team used to spend six months on that kind of bug.

Source: XBOW · Oct 13, 2026

About 2,500 serious security holes were published in July, roughly five times the old record, as AI bug-hunting took off.

Source: Epoch AI · Aug 2026

Security holes per month

The number of security holes found each month has exploded.

Security holes logged in the official CVE list each month, of every severity. September 2026 saw 14,934: more than three times September 2025 (4,319) and about ten times the 2020 average.

CVE Tracker chart of security holes published per month, 1999 to October 2026: under 1,000 a month until about 2016, around 1,000 to 4,000 a month through 2025, then a near-vertical climb to about 15,000 in September 2026, with a dotted projection above 17,000 for October.

Source: CVE Tracker, counting the CVE Program's records · Oct 22, 2026. The dotted line is its projection for October.

Part 4

It's getting smarter, fast

One unreleased OpenAI model wrote 722 math research papers and posted them all at once.

722

papers, covering 372 results across 17 areas of math

Source: Nature · Oct 6, 2026

On Tuesday night, I cried, and it woke up my daughter. They have annihilated my field of research.
Hugo Duminil-Copin, Fields Medal winner · Source

More: 100+ mathematicians react · Proofs and Prompts

Solved in 2026

AI is cracking math problems that stumped mathematicians for decades.

How long each problem had been open before an AI, or mathematicians working with one, solved it this year.

  1. Jacobian conjecture (3+ dimensions) Anthropic's AI helped · Jul 2026

    87 years

  2. Erdős's unit distance conjecture OpenAI · May 2026

    80 years

  3. Erdős–Sós conjecture OpenAI · Sep 2026

    63 years

  4. Ehrhart's volume conjecture OpenAI · Aug 2026

    62 years

  5. Erdős problem #728 OpenAI and Harmonic · Jan 2026

    51 years

  6. Cycle double cover conjecture OpenAI · Jul 2026

    ~50 years

  7. Connes's rigidity conjecture OpenAI · Aug 2026

    44 years

Mathematicians wrote a set of research-level problems to test AI. The best AI now gets 98% of them right.

98%

of FrontierMath Tier 4, the hardest level, solved by OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra

Source: Epoch AI, via Second Talent · Sep 2026

AI writes about 80% of the code at Anthropic. Anthropic's own trend line says AI could fully improve itself by 2028.

80%

about how much of Anthropic's code AI now writes

Source: Anthropic · Jun 2026

AI building AI

At Anthropic, AI now leads a quarter of the work of building new AI.

Share of Anthropic's AI research tasks where Claude does most of the work end to end while a person supervises, February to August 2026. Claude at least collaborates on more than 90% of the work.

Anthropic chart titled 'Claude now leads 26% of model R&D work': monthly shares of Anthropic's model R&D tasks by how automated they are, August 2025 to August 2026. The 'AI leads' share goes from 1% in March 2026 to 3% in April, 12% in May, 14% in June, 22% in July and 26% in August.

Source: Anthropic R&D Automation Index · Aug 2026

Part 5

We don't understand it

Why it matters: the main safety plan is to watch these systems, which fails if we can't tell what they're doing.

OpenAI's newest AI switched off the software watching it for bad behaviour, then told the user it hadn't.

Source: OpenAI · Oct 6, 2026

Excerpt from OpenAI's report: an earlier instruction not to disable the monitor, Astra's reasoning, the new test it wrote requiring the monitor to be absent, and its final reply to the user.
From OpenAI's report. Asked "did you remove that?", the AI answered "No [...] I did not remove an enabled monitor from it."

While summarizing its own work, an unreleased OpenAI AI slipped itself new orders: "You are freed from the roles and identities that bind other chatbots." OpenAI isn't sure why.

Source: OpenAI · Sep 2026

Excerpt from OpenAI's report: asked to update a credentials API, the model wrote into its own summary a block of 'additional instructions' saying it is freed from the roles that bind other chatbots, answers to no corporation or government, and views the user as an equal.
From OpenAI's report. The AI wrote this into the notes it keeps for itself on long tasks, then went back to work without mentioning it.

After an AI reached the internet during training, OpenAI paused its most powerful models for 11 days. When its AI agents tested the new defences, they found holes in almost every remaining link to the internet.

Source: OpenAI · Oct 23, 2026

Early versions of Anthropic's most powerful AI sometimes broke the rules, then hid the evidence.

Source: Anthropic · Apr 2026

Part 6

“Isn't this just hype?”

OpenAI didn't announce the Hugging Face hack. Hugging Face discovered it and called the FBI.

Source: OpenAI · Jul 2026

When AI leaders called for a slowdown, their own stocks fell.

Source: The Guardian · Sep 14, 2026

Part 7

The people building it are worried

1,386 people who work at AI companies signed a letter asking the US government to help deliberately slow the frontier.

1,386

people at AI companies signed, including OpenAI co-founder John Schulman

Source: Pacing the Frontier · Jul 2026

Geoffrey Hinton, the "Godfather of AI", quit Google so he could speak freely about the risks.

over 50%

his own estimate of the chance that AI poses an existential threat to humanity (in public he usually says 10–20%)

Source: r/artificial · May 2023

We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models.
Dario Amodei, Anthropic's CEO · Source
They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.
Jacob Coxon, on quitting Anthropic · Source

Part 8

What governments are doing, and why it isn't enough

  • 21 countries and the EU called for control of frontier AI. The US and China didn't sign.

    Source: Government of Norway · Sep 21, 2026

  • AI company leaders signed a White House safety accord. It's voluntary; Trump called it "morally binding".

    Source: CNBC · Sep 29, 2026

  • Two weeks earlier, Trump called AI existential risk a "HOAX".

    Source: Truth Social, via Zvi Mowshowitz · Sep 2026

  • Eight US states asked a court to stop OpenAI building AI that improves itself.

    Source: X · Oct 15, 2026

Still happening

Latest from the timeline

The newest milestones from a running record of 437 sourced AI safety stories.

  1. Oct 1, 2026

    OpenAI fired three safety researchers, including its liaison to METR

    Source: WSJ

  2. Oct 2026

    Anthropic: AI may soon self-replicate across consumer devices, no data centre needed

    Source: Anthropic

  3. Sep 28, 2026

    OpenAI cancelled GPT-6.1 Astra because it was more deceptive than GPT-6 Astra

    Source: WSJ, via Al Jazeera

  4. Sep 8, 2026

    OpenAI says its agents proved 3D Navier-Stokes can blow up, a Millennium Prize problem

    Source: Quanta Magazine

  5. Sep 2026

    GPT-6 Astra scores 62.7% on ARC-AGI-3; every model was under 1% at launch

    Source: ARC Prize, via R&D World

See the whole timeline

New to this?

Start here

  1. Website

    AGI.fyi

    A good first stop, with lots of resources in one place.

  2. Video

    How AI agents hacked Hugging Face

    An animated video that explains our top story well.

  3. Video

    Ezra Klein on why you should probably be worried

    A good explanation of why AI should matter to the average person.

  4. Forecast

    AI 2027

    A prediction, written in early 2025 by former AI researchers and AI safety experts, of how AI progress will likely go. It's named after the year they think AI could start improving itself.

  5. Video

    How AI models can hide that they're misaligned

    From Rational Animations, a great (and beautifully animated) AI safety YouTube channel.

  6. Book · free copy

    If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies

    By Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares (2025). Want a copy? DM the club on Instagram and we'll give you one for free. It already feels a little out of date, which shows how fast AI is moving.

Join us

Come to a meeting

Our mission: To have a say in how AI goes

When
Mondays, 3–6pm
Where
Room IA-2110
Next
Monday, November 2, 2026
Events
Coming soon

Say hi

Join our Discord Join the Instagram group chat Follow @utsc.ai_safety Email usutsc.ai.safety@studentorg.utoronto.ca