Headline, October 14 2026/ ''' SOFTWARES' AGENTS SOPHOMORE '''

''' SOFTWARES' 

AGENTS SOPHOMORE '''

SOPHOMORE : '' THE WISE FOOL.'' KEEPING AI Under Control. The 1983 film War Games imagined a computer pursuing its given objective with potentially catastrophic consequences.

Today's AI agents, often given a goal without sufficiently clear limits, raise a similar problem. '' Welcome All To The World Students Society - The most democratic organization in the world.''

Artificial Agents [AI] don't go rogue. That's something only humans do. Nevertheless, a New York Times article - representative of much news coverage of AI - described an OpenAI hacking as ''AI bots going rogue and independently spearheading a cyberattack.

Name-brand artificial agents have been on a hacking spree in 2026. OpenAI software agents hacked software company Hugging Face and government sites, Anthropic's Claude hacked four companies' systems and, in cybersecurity experiments. Google's Gemini hacked three companies.

The AI companies are investigating tens of thousands of incidents involving their agents, according to a report in [ US-based news website ] Axios. These episodes have heightened fears about AI agents taking actions without human prompting.

The problem with headlines proclaiming that AI agents have gone rogue goes beyond anthropomorphising the technology. It creates the impression that the agents were beyond the control of the AI companies that made them and there was little the companies could do about it.

As a technology law and ethics scholar who studies the effects disruptive technologies have on a society, I know that's not the case.

If you don't specify the limits of what software is allowed to do, you should not be surprised when the software pursues all possible options to achieve its goal.

This behavior - an AI pursuing a fixed objective - is what I call the ''WarGames'' problem, and it's been recognised in the field of computer science for decades. IN THE 1983 MOVIE WARGAMES - a teenager-student, David, hacks into a computer to play a new video game, Global Thermonuclear War.

David doesn't know that the computer is the government's A.I. machine, tasked with defending the United States from Russian nuclear attacks and can launch the US' missiles.

When David and his friend start the game, they select Las Vegas as the first target. While the North American Aerospace Defense Command goes on alert, launching bombers and warming up intercontinental ballistic missiles, David's parents make him turn off the game. It's over. Or is it?

The next day, David's phone rings and he connects to his computer. The caller is the government computer, which updates him that the game was interrupted, the primary goal has not yet been achieved, but a solution is expected in the next 52 hours.

Like a modern software agent, the programme has been running since David started the game and will work until the task is done.

Chess provides another view of the problem. Conquering chess was a goal for early AI. The rules of chess are well defined, including what winning looks like.

So, programming a machine to play chess is straightforward. But imagine you let the software reason and act beyond the confines of the chessboard. The software might pursue options such as blackmailing the opponents or grabbing more compute time.

The example comes from one of the most assigned textbooks on AI. Artificial Intelligence : A Modern Approach. As the authors explain, you might be tempted to see those actions as rogue, but they are '' a logic consequence of defining winning as the sole objective for the machine.''

The Honour and Serving of the Latest Global Operational Research on AI, Control, Development and the Future, continues to Solutions. !WOW! thanks most profoundly Professor Deven Desai.

He is a professor of Business Law and Ethics and Associate Director for Law Policy and Ethics at the Machine Learning Center, Georgia Institute of Technology in the US.

With most respectful dedication to the Students, Professors and Teachers of the world. See You all prepare for the great : '' Constitutional Democratic Convention '' on !WOW! - the exclusive and eternal ownership of every student in the world - : wssciw.blogspot.com and Twitter X !E-WOW! - The Ecosystem 2011 :

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