'The models are really devious': Sam Altman's hardware chief says OpenAI
wants kill switches built into hardware in case things go wrong

Date:
Fri, 12 Sep 2025 20:46:00 +0000

Description:
OpenAI hardware leader warns that devious AI models require real time
hardware kill switches and deeper safeguards built directly into chips.

FULL STORY

A senior OpenAI executive has warned that future AI infrastructure will
require hardware-level safety features, including kill switches.

Richard Ho, head of hardware at the company, made the remarks during his keynote at the AI Infra Summit in Santa Clara.

It has to be built into the hardware, Ho said. Today a lot of safety work is
in the software. It assumes that your hardware is secure. It assumes that
your hardware will do the right thing. It assumes that you can pull the plug
on the hardware. I am not saying that we cant pull the plug on that hardware, but I am telling you that these things are devious, the models are really devious, and so as a hardware guy, I want to make sure of that.

Silicon-level safety measures

Ho argued that the growth of generative AI is forcing a rethink of system architecture and described how future agents will be long-lived, interacting
in the background even when a user is not actively engaged.

This shift requires memory-rich, low-latency infrastructure to manage continuous sessions and communication across multiple agents.

Networking, Ho said, is becoming a bottleneck. Were going to have to have real-time tools in these meaning that these agents communicate with each other. Some of them might be looking at a tool, some might be doing a website search. Others are thinking, and others need to talk to each other.

Ho outlined several hardware challenges that must be addressed, including limits on high-bandwidth memory, the need for 2.5D and 3D chip integration, advances in optics, and extreme power requirements that could reach 1
megawatt per rack.

The safety measures OpenAI put forward include real-time kill switches built into AI clusters, telemetry to detect signs of abnormal behavior, and secure execution paths in CPUs and accelerators.

Ho wrapped things up by saying, We dont have good benchmarks for agent-aware architectures and hardware, and I think it is important to know about latency walls and latency tails, what is the efficiency and power and things like
that. We need to have good observability as a hardware feature, not just as a debug tool, but built in and constantly monitoring our hardware."

"Networking is a real important thing, and as we head towards optical, it is unclear that the reliability of the network is there today. We need to get there with enough testing of these optical testbeds and these other communication testbeds that show that we actually have the reliability.

Via The Next Platform

======================================================================
Link to news story: https://www.techradar.com/ai-platforms-assistants/chatgpt/the-models-are-reall y-devious-sam-altmans-hardware-chief-says-openai-wants-kill-switches-built-int o-hardware-in-case-things-go-wrong

$$
--- SBBSecho 3.28-Linux
* Origin: capitolcityonline.net * Telnet/SSH:2022/HTTP (1:2320/105)