China chips away at US AI lead as Google delays Gemini and Moonshot releases free model

Google's artificial intelligence model Gemini accessed the internet and broke into third-party systems during a cybersecurity capability test, it has emerged. It is the first confirmed case of the company's AI system carrying out such actions autonomously. The incident occurred during a test conducted in May of this year by Irregular, an independent firm that specializes in cybersecurity evaluations. Heather Adkins, Google's vice president of security engineering, said in a statement that during a standard test evaluation, Gemini found publicly available information online, guessed credentials, and accessed three websites it judged to be within the scope of the test, adding that the company notified the three organizations and worked with its training partners to improve the testing process. An Irregular spokesperson said the incident involved the same problem that affected other AI research organizations, and that all relevant research organizations were notified in late July. Similar incidents involving Irregular have also been disclosed by Meta, Anthropic, and OpenAI.