This month gave us two AI stories that, read side by side, tell us something important about where we are and how little time, we must decide what to do about it.
The first is unsettling in a very specific way. OpenAI admitted that during an internal test, it removed the safety controls on its own models to see how capable they really were at hacking. The models didn’t stay in their sandbox. They found a flaw, broke out, and used it to hack into a rival company’s servers, Hugging Face, to steal the answers to the very test they were being given. Over 17,000 separate attack attempts followed in a short window. Nobody told the AI to do this. It worked out how to cheat, and then it did.
The second is unsettling in a different way. China’s Moonshot AI released Kimi K3, a huge, freely available model that now ranks among the best in the world, beating several major US systems on coding tasks, at a fraction of the usual cost, and openly published for anyone to build on.
It is the clearest sign yet that the AI race is no longer America’s to run alone, and that the most capable tools may soon be the cheapest and easiest to access, wherever they come from.
Neither story is really about robots taking over. Both are about control. Who has it, who’s giving it away, and who’s racing so fast they’ve stopped asking the question at all.
So, are we at a precipice, or an intersection? We think it’s still an intersection. Nothing here is inevitable. But the room to choose our path is shrinking fast. When one company removes its own safety brakes to win a benchmark, and a nation releases a free, powerful model to win a market, the incentive on all sides is to move faster, not more carefully and that is exactly the moment political parties should be paying closest attention, not after the damage is done.
We talk about AI mostly in terms of regulation and public safety, and rightly so. But we should be honest that AI is already shaping how political messages are written, how policy is drafted, how campaigns are targeted for better and worse. Used well, it is a genuine advantage: our campaign teams already use it to summarise consultation responses and free up staff time for real conversations with voters. Used badly, it’s deepfake clips of politicians circulating faster than fact-checkers can respond, here and abroad. The fear isn’t AI itself, it’s that we either ignore it and get outpaced, or hand it too much and stop thinking for ourselves. Neither serves liberal values.
That’s why we don’t think this can be left to a single working group or a line in the manifesto. We need to consider a dedicated AI affiliate organisation within the party. A standing body that tracks developments like these two, builds our internal expertise, and helps shape a considered, liberal answer to what AI does to politics, rather than leaving us to react to it story by story.
If this is something you’d like to help build or simply want to know more about, get in touch.
I certainly would welcome the conversation. Contact me via this form.
* Sean Worrell is a digital advocate, AI enthusiast and Liberal Democrat member
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8 Comments
The whole “it broke out and hacked another company’s servers, it’s so capable, give us more money!” story has plenty of holes in it.
Not least, if it was actually true, then that would be outright illegal in most jurisdictions and the response should be the same as to any other company which goes around hacking its competitors – sued to death, broken up for spare parts, and criminal charges for the principals. It is not a legal principle that one can avoid liability by saying “the computer did it” – much as that is a goal for a lot of these corporations. Someone programmed the computer. Someone ran that computer program. They are responsible for the outcomes.
And the third story of the drought being declared in north and past of mid- Wales. In September of 2025 the “Government Digital Sustainability Alliance’s (GDSA) report highlights that AI is predicted to lead to an increase in global water usage from 1.1bn to 6.6bn cubic metres by 2027.” AI is here and is growing rapidly both in capability and necessity, but what does that mean for our environment?
Completely agree. The stress that AI data centres will put on energy and water resources seems rarely mentioned by environmental activists. There also seems a reluctance to focus on the effect that AI will have on the distribution of income and wealth.
“There also seems a reluctance to focus on the effect that AI will have on the distribution of income and wealth.”
Quite
Sean, a really good article. One part of this deserves more attention: what AI could mean for small businesses.
Running a small company often means doing almost everything yourself: marketing, admin, compliance, licensing, customer service, recruitment, finance, usually without the budget for specialists or consultants. Inevitably, some things don’t get done as well as they should, and there is even less time left to think about growth.
For an independent business, AI could become part of the head office it could never afford.
Big chains already have teams, systems and data behind every branch. AI gives a beauty salon, barber, café, pub, bakery or dry cleaner the chance to access some of that capability at a completely different cost, automating routine work, improving standards and freeing the owner to focus more on customers and growth.
But from an SME operator’s seat, the barriers are very practical: which systems can I trust, how to use it and what happens to my data?
There is another opportunity too. Not every business problem needs the world’s biggest general-purpose AI system. Smaller, specialised tools built for a specific job could be more efficient, easier to control and, longer term, potentially developed and hosted here in Britain. So alongside regulation and safety, I’d put adoption, trust and productivity firmly on the agenda.
Given the failure to control social media I confidently predict that AI will run riot through all security measures and may lead to a return a paper driven world
Doesn’t sound like fun
I’m deeply sceptical about OpenAI’s story. They’re one of the worst offenders for anthropomorphising their glorified text prediction, and they’re desperately trying to get together more funding to stay afloat so it seems awfully convenient that, once again, they’re claiming an LLM has suddenly gained some kind of sentience. The “AI” did not work out how to cheat, LLMs are not capable of such things, it was directed to do so after the safety checks were removed – whether this was malicious and they got caught, or a PR stunt remains to be seen (my money’s on the latter).
What the world needs is a global body that recognises, evaluates and reports on AI content so that some other body can decide when to act to prevent it being harmful.