Bad Actors Could Trick AI Into Deleting the Internet. Policymakers Should Act.

It’s hard to overstate the importance of AWS to the internet. AWS servers host millions of websites, and dominate the cloud industry, controlling roughly 30 percent of it, a plurality. If AWS were to somehow go down for an even more significant period of time—or was to go down permanently—it could effectively take a third of the internet with it.

But earlier this year, that was precisely what happened: AWS went down for roughly 13 hours. That it went down is not particularly shocking; even well-oiled machines run into problems, and servers are no different. The concern was how it reportedly went down: due to an artificial intelligence (AI) driven error, with the Guardian claiming that there were two outages related to AI. The Financial Times reported that Amazon held an emergency meeting over the issue.

Amazon was quick to put out a statement addressing the claims, but the statement was something short of a denial. They did admit that “only one of the recent incidents involved AI tools,” but blamed it on the engineer, not the AI, writing that “our systems allowed an engineering team user error” to have a broad impact. Other reporting indicated that this was due to the AI using an outdated internal wiki to wrongly inform an engineer. They also denied that AWS was affected by AI, although numerous news organizations reported otherwise.

Read more at The National Interest.