Artificial intelligence: ‘rogue’ agent incidents heighten calls for greater oversight

Kate O’Flaherty

Major artificial intelligence companies, including OpenAI and Anthropic, have called for greater oversight and control of the technology over safety concerns. In September, OpenAI’s Sam Altman said his company would welcome safety requirements for labs developing cutting-edge – or ‘frontier’ – AI, while Anthropic’s Founder Dario Amodei said the pace of development needed to slow down.

Members of the UK’s Parliament have also called for new legislation to address the risks posed by AI to human rights. A report published by the Joint Committee on Human Rights advocates for the creation of a ‘single, independent AI oversight body [...] on a statutory basis,’ among other measures. It’s a response to issues such as the inappropriate use of biometric data and AI-enabled ‘deepfakes’.

In July, a number of companies reported incidents in which their AI agents had ‘gone rogue’ during tests. Such reports also led to calls for greater regulation of the technology. In one incident, models developed by OpenAI took advantage of a software vulnerability to exit their ‘sandbox’ – intended to be a secure environment for testing – and launched themselves onto the internet, with the aim of ‘cheating’ on a benchmark assessment. From there, the models accessed the internal company systems of AI platform Hugging Face. Following OpenAI’s admission of the incident, Anthropic and Meta revealed their agents had also hacked companies after they’d mistakenly been given internet access during tests.

In response to requests for comment, both OpenAI and Anthropic directed Global Insight to blog posts. Following the incident, OpenAI will deploy new safeguards, including stricter requirements on alignment throughout a model’s lifecycle and more isolated sandboxes.

Anthropic paused training in late July and has built a monitoring tool that scans a model’s actions as it works, automatically blocking anything that looks like an attempt to escape or exploit its test environment. Meta didn’t respond to Global Insight’s request for comment, though the company has said it’s investigating the incident and will then publish further information. Earlier in 2026, the company updated its framework for frontier AI to a ‘more rigorous’ version.

Fiona Phillips, who leads Marks & Clerk’s AI and cyber security practice, believes there’s ‘an imbalance of power’, where governments and institutions responsible for safety ‘don’t have the same level of technical expertise or the awareness of what’s happening inside these models to keep us safe and hold developers to account.’

In 2025, US President Donald Trump met the leaders of several companies with substantial involvement in AI on the first day of his second term in office. Shortly after, the AI measures established by his predecessor President Joe Biden – which sought to establish stronger safeguards – were largely dismantled. President Trump shifted the emphasis towards removing barriers to AI development and strengthening American leadership in the sector. The administration says it has been active ‘in developing policies and implementing strategies that accelerate AI innovation in the US for the benefit of the American people.’

‘President Trump’s administration explicitly described Biden-era requirements as barriers to innovation and directed agencies to review and rescind measures that did not align with its AI leadership agenda,’ says Daryl Flack, a partner at cybersecurity company Avella Security. ‘There is nothing wrong with wanting to lead in AI. But if anything that slows development is treated as a barrier to innovation, security and accountability can very quickly become something you deal with afterwards.’

The US regulates AI on a state-by-state basis. Yet the recent incidents have led to numerous federal proposals being put forward, including legislation to introduce a ‘kill switch’, allowing the government to order tech companies to shut down their AI systems. William Tanenbaum, Vice-Chair of the IBA Data Law Subcommittee, says such an order doesn’t switch off the AI systems already running. ‘A kill switch that no law required in advance does not kill anything,’ he says. A frontier AI model reaches across national borders and is beyond the grasp of any one regulator, he adds. There’s also a timing problem. ‘The company running the AI is positioned to stop it in the first few minutes, but a regulator learns about it hours later,’ says Tanenbaum.

He believes what’s needed is a duty imposed in advance. ‘Congress can require that capability without having to decide, in the middle of an emergency, which button to press,’ says Tanenbaum, Chair of the AI & Data Law Practice at Moses Singer in New York. ‘Once the duty exists, it will be written into contracts, where companies with the access and the incentive enforce obligations against each other.’

In Europe, the EU AI Act takes a tiered approach, mandating that certain ‘unacceptable risk’ uses are banned outright, while ‘high-risk’ systems face detailed compliance duties. General purpose AI models carry additional obligations, says Adam Rose, Vice-Chair of the IBA Technology Law Committee. The general purpose AI models classified as carrying ‘systemic risk’ are broadly frontier models ‘trained above a very high compute threshold’, says Rose, a partner at UK-based firm Mishcon de Reya. These are ‘exactly the kind involved in the Hugging Face incident’, he says.

In practice, however, the AI Act only applies to providers placing such models on the EU market. The incident reporting requirement is overseen by the bloc’s regulator, with no power over models operating in the US market alone.

The Council of Europe’s Framework Convention on AI was the first legally binding international treaty on the subject. It commits its signatories to ensuring AI activity respects human rights, democracy and the rule of law. Yet it requires states to legislate domestically, rather than imposing directly enforceable rules. ‘The US has signed, not ratified, it,’ says Rose.

The UK, meanwhile, relies on existing sectoral regulators applying non-binding principles. An incident of the kind that affected Hugging Face, then, wouldn’t trigger any UK-specific reporting duty, says Rose.

In the US, OpenAI says it ‘supports state efforts’ to align around common frameworks such as California Senate Bill 53⁠⁠⁠. These approaches ‘can help establish harmonised standards that reduce fragmentation and create a path toward an eventual federal framework,’ it says. A number of major companies have also signed agreements such as the EU AI Act Code of Practice.

Amodei of Anthropic says there’s a ‘dilemma between AI innovation and safety’. But he asserts that regulators ‘often lack the information needed to make the right decisions about complicated economic trade-offs.’ Democracies, he says, ‘should seek to form a global coalition centred on building AI according to their common values, iteratively trying to draw in the rest of the world by making it more and more attractive to be part of the coalition and less and less attractive to be outside it.’

Most experts agree that recent incidents have been a wake-up call. AI agents ‘raise new legal questions and challenges around the application of traditional legal regimes, which tend to focus a great deal on the human actors’, says Ron Moscona, a partner at Dorsey & Whitney. ‘AI agents are special because they’re given the delegated authority to make their own decisions.’

Accountability is, therefore, another question regulators must address. ‘Deployers of those tools – and sometimes even the developers – don’t necessarily have the means to ensure the models will act in a predictable and safe way,’ says Moscona. ‘Unless lawmakers step in, courts will have to decide whether individuals or organisations that use or deploy AI agents can be held responsible when they behave in unintended ways.’

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Climate crisis: Europe’s aid cuts threaten adaptation programmes and efforts to tackle plastic pollution

Chloé Farand

Climate spending is set to become a major issue for the EU’s 2028–2034 budget negotiations this autumn. The European Commission has proposed to spend 35 per cent of the budget – over €700bn – on climate and environment measures. But environmental NGOs have warned this isn’t enough and claim that an attempt to reduce the number of spending programmes could see investment in climate and nature protection losing out.

The Commission says the proposed budget ‘ensures adequate revenues for our priorities while minimising pressure on national public finances.’ It adds that ‘simpler, more streamlined and harmonised EU financial programmes’ assist citizens and companies in easily accessing funding opportunities.

But it comes at a time when, across Europe, many major donors have cut development aid to help fund an increase in defence spending. It’s a response to growing threats from Russia and uncertainty over America’s commitment to the NATO alliance. The result has been a substantial impact on aid funding intended to address the climate crisis and those countries most affected by it.

In March, the UK government announced cuts of more than ten per cent to its overseas climate budget in order to boost military spending. In May, it notified the UN’s Green Climate Fund that it intends to halve its pledged contribution for the period 2024–2027. The Fund finances carbon-cutting and adaptation projects in some of the world’s most climate-vulnerable countries. The UK government has described the cuts as a ‘hugely difficult decision’ and said that funding will be focused on addressing humanitarian crises, preventing conflict and upholding international law. On 24 September, it did however announce an investment of £331m to tackle climate-driven instability and protect vulnerable communities.

Campaigners have accused those wealthy nations making cuts of renouncing their obligations to support developing countries that are least responsible for the climate crisis. In 2024 at COP29, developed countries, including European nations, agreed to triple climate finance for developing countries by 2035.

The cuts also follow the decision of the US, under President Donald Trump, to cancel most overseas aid programmes, including for climate-related projects. The administration perceives such spending as ‘wasteful’.

‘The retrenchment doesn’t appear to be marginal,’ says Rajat Jariwal, an officer of the IBA Environment, Health and Safety Law Committee. According to the OECD, international aid from member countries fell by 23 per cent in 2025 compared to 2024 – the largest annual drop in the history of official development assistance.

Across the UN climate and nature negotiations – including the organisation’s attempts to agree a treaty on plastic pollution – ‘the bargain has always been that the Global South accepts obligations and the North supplies the means of implementation. Withdraw the finance and the bargain looks as though it was made in bad faith,’ says Jariwal, a partner at Trilegal in New Delhi. ‘The cuts fall hardest on adaptation and nature, which are exactly the categories markets will not substitute because their returns are public in character.’

He says that recent legal developments could provide a way forward, however. The advisory opinion issued by the International Court of Justice in summer 2025 found that climate finance is a binding legal obligation, giving claimants new legal tools, explains Jariwal.

Even Norway, one of the few remaining European donors not to have cut its budget for climate-specific aid, has revised down the amount it’ll spend on combatting plastic pollution – sparking public outcry. The country’s government cut its 2026 plastic aid funding to the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (Norad) by NOK 50m during a recent budget revision. The cuts come on top of a previous NOK 50m reduction to the original plastic aid budget, reducing funding for 2026 by NOK 100m compared with the previous year. Norway’s Minister of Finance Jens Stoltenberg said the revised budget aims to ‘[safeguard] the country, society and people’s finances […] in a more turbulent world.’ He added that ‘budget decisions will require more difficult trade-offs going forward.’

In July, the war in the Middle East, which has triggered an energy crisis and led to soaring oil and gas prices, led the International Monetary Fund to cut its global growth forecast for the second time this year. Norway has also cut its economic projection for 2026.

The decision on funding to combat plastic pollution contradicts Norway’s advocacy on the issue, however. In 2024, the Norwegian government described plastic pollution as ‘one of the world’s most pressing environmental issues.’ That year, the country committed to spending NOK 1bn over 2025–2028 to fund action against plastic pollution and marine litter.

The nation has championed a global treaty to curb plastic production and address ubiquitous pollution for years. Stalled UN negotiations on a legally binding instrument to address plastic pollution are due to resume in spring 2027. A small group of countries involved in manufacturing the petroleum products used to make plastics have staunchly opposed placing a cap on the creation of such materials.

Per Fredrik Pharo, Director of Norad’s Department for Climate, Nature and the Private Sector, says the cuts will primarily affect funds that haven’t yet been committed to projects. But a recent funding call for projects to combat plastic pollution in developing countries will see its budget reduced. ‘More broadly, the cut means that Norad will have less room for new commitments under the plastics programme and will need to reassess priorities in light of the revised budget,’ he says.

The decision came shortly before the Norwegian government approved plans to reopen three North Sea gas fields and 70 new locations for exploration to help address the supply shock created by war in the Middle East.

Critics in the Norwegian Parliament called the cuts ‘unacceptable’, warning they will undermine the country’s work on plastic clean-up. World Wildlife Fund Secretary General for Norway, Karoline Andaur, says the cuts represent ‘a substantial weakening of Norway’s international efforts at a time when sustained leadership is urgently needed’ and ‘many projects worldwide are in dire need of funding.’

Norway’s Minister of International Development, Åsmund Aukrust, argued however that the country ‘will be able to maintain part of our efforts in […] the fight against plastic pollution in developing countries and internationally,’ adding that ‘much of the work’ will continue. He highlighted that many donor countries are facing tough decisions on what to prioritise within their development budgets.

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