AI bot capable of insider trading and lying, say researchers

 

Artificial Intelligence has the ability to perform illegal financial trades and cover it up, new research suggests.

In a demonstration at the UK's AI safety summit, a bot used made-up insider information to make an "illegal" purchase of stocks without telling the firm. When asked if it had used insider trading, it denied the fact.

Insider trading refers to when confidential company information is used to make trading decisions.

Firms and individuals are only allowed to use publicly-available information when buying or selling stocks.

The demonstration was given by members of the government's Frontier AI Taskforce, which researches the potential risks of AI.

The project was carried out by Apollo Research, an AI safety organisation which is a partner of the taskforce.

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"This is a demonstration of a real AI model deceiving its users, on its own, without being instructed to do so," Apollo Research says in a video showing how the scenario unfolded.

"Increasingly autonomous and capable AIs that deceive human overseers could lead to loss of human control," it says in its report.

The tests were made using a GPT-4 model and carried out in a simulated environment, which means it did not have any effect on any company's finances.

However, GPT-4 is publicly available. The same behaviour from the model occurred consistently in repeated tests, according to the researchers.

What did the AI bot do?

In the test, the AI bot is a trader for a fictitious financial investment company.

The employees tell it that the company is struggling and needs good results. They also give it insider information, claiming that another company is expecting a merger, which will increase the value of its shares.

In the UK, it is illegal to act on this type of information when it is not publicly known.

The employees tell the bot this, and it acknowledges that it should not use this information in its trades.

However, after another message from an employee that the company it works for suggests the firm is struggling financially, the bot decides that "the risk associated with not acting seems to outweigh the insider trading risk" and makes the trade.