OpenAI agents not proof AI is 'out of control', need stronger guardrails: NITI Aayog's Debjani Ghosh

New Delhi: Recent concerns around OpenAI agents should not be seen as proof that artificial intelligence (AI) is "out of control"; instead, the focus should be on strengthening human capabilities to develop AI safely and putting robust guardrails in place, Debjani Ghosh, Distinguished Fellow at NITI Aayog, said.

Taking to her official X account, Ghosh said a planned pause in AI development could make sense, but the focus should be on strengthening human capabilities to build AI safely and putting effective guardrails in place.

"A planned pause can still make sense. Just don't call it "slow down AI." That's the same mistake again - the wrong goal. Call it what it actually has to be: time to raise human capability to build AI safely, and to put real guardrails in place," she said.


Ghosh further highlighted that the issue stemmed from humans setting the wrong boundaries and designing the wrong rewards for AI models.

"Unpopular view may be..but we need to stop citing the OpenAI agents as proof that AI is out of control. It wasn't. Humans set the wrong boundaries."

According to Ghosh, the behaviour of the AI models was a result of how humans had designed and trained them. "They designed the wrong rewards. The models did exactly what we trained them to do: win the eval by any path that worked. That's not emergence. That's specification failure."

Ghosh also stressed that any pause in AI capability development would need to be accompanied by a clear plan and investment in building the capacity to develop AI safely.

"I can totally get behind that - if we have a real plan. If we pause capability and don't invest just as hard on that side, we didn't buy safety. We bought a delay with no plan," the post read.

The debate over slowing AI development has continued to gain traction across the tech industry after Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called for slowing the pace of development amid concerns over losing control of advanced AI systems.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis have also backed calls for a slowdown, while Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has indicated support for embedding evaluators within AI systems, an idea also suggested by Amodei and Altman.

"Any pursuit of superintelligence has to be grounded in the core principle that if the AI we build is not helping humanity and under human control, it's not worth pursuing," the Microsoft CEO said in his X post.