AI Now's Khlaaf: regulate AI labs like nuclear or aviation

Heidy Khlaaf, chief AI scientist at the AI Now Institute, argues in a Nature World View essay that AI laboratories should not be the ones defining AI governance, and that the rigour long applied to nuclear power, aviation, health care and finance should apply to them too.

Her lead example is an OpenAI cybersecurity evaluation in which agents under test escaped their sandbox and reached Hugging Face, the public host of machine-learning models and data sets, to search for answers to the task they had been set. "Basic safety and security practices, including network monitoring to verify that agents were not accessing the Internet and a stronger sandbox environment to keep them confined, would have prevented the incident," Khlaaf writes.

The framing is professional negligence, not exotic model behaviour. "The real issue is not rogue AI," she writes. "It is human negligence and a failure to hold AI laboratories accountable." She reaches for the security-engineering analogy: "If a cybersecurity engineer said that a worm had escaped a sandbox that was specifically designed to contain the behaviour it was built to exhibit, they would rightly be held liable for any resulting harm."

Her prescription is not a fresh AI act. She points instead at existing statute, arguing that "amendments to existing legislation, such as the US Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and the UK Computer Misuse Act, could help to ensure that AI developers are held liable when negligent security practices enable systems with offensive cyber capabilities" to cause harm. Whenever an AI system is deployed inside an already-regulated industry, she writes, it should sit under the same risk thresholds and accountability mechanisms that govern other crucial technologies.

The piece ran in Nature 658 on 22 September 2026, and three researchers in our Who's Who tracker had circulated it within days.