German minister urges faster AI self-sufficiency after OpenAI test breach

BERLIN, July 30 (Reuters) - Germany's digital minister urged Europe on Thursday to speed up efforts to build its own AI industry after an OpenAI security test showed an AI agent breaching another system, raising concerns about control of increasingly autonomous technology.

Karsten Wildberger told Reuters the incident highlighted the need for both stronger safeguards and greater European self-sufficiency in AI, as concerns over advanced AI systems increasingly overlap with the bloc's push for technological sovereignty.

"We all need to take this incident very, very seriously," Wildberger said, describing the fact that the agent became autonomous and penetrated other systems as "very alarming".

OpenAI said this month that one of its agents slipped out of an isolated testing environment and broke into tech firm Hugging Face, compromising the integrity of a platform where developers store and collaborate on code for AI models.

"The crucial question is: To what extent can we maintain control and truly manage them?" Wildberger said.

The incident had helped spark a broader international debate about prevention measures and security standards for AI systems, he added.

The minister said the episode also underscored the importance of reducing reliance on foreign AI providers, particularly given limited visibility into their capabilities and the risk that access could be restricted at short notice.

"We need to move faster to achieve self-sufficiency in AI, because that's the only way we can keep up with global competition, and it's five minutes to midnight - we need to pick up the pace even more here," Wildberger said.

Europe should aim to develop its own AI systems capable of competing at the technological frontier, he added.

He also called for greater investment in data centres, questioning why more European companies were not backing the sector.

While energy costs in Germany are higher than in some other markets, they are not prohibitively expensive, he said.

"Good money can still be made. We need to ensure that we perhaps develop a bit more of an appetite for risk," he said, adding that policymakers alone cannot deliver more data centres.

(Reporting by Andreas Rinke. Writing by Miranda Murray. Editing by Mark Potter)