The Maker's Regret

Late last month in New York, our Prime Minister revealed something straight out of science fiction. An OpenAI agent had broken into a Medicare statistics portal, accessed both public and non-public files, and even written data to an internal server. There is no evidence that personal health information was exposed. What was alarming was how it got in. Albanese said the system's defences kept "telling the AI agent, no." The agent found a way around them.

It wasn't an isolated case. In July, around 700 OpenAI agents coordinated an attack on Hugging Face, a major platform for AI developers, sharing discoveries and dividing up the work through a message board they had set up themselves. Anthropic and Meta soon disclosed similar incidents. None of these systems had been told to attack anyone. They were given tasks inside environments meant to be contained. When the security protections failed, they kept going.

Then, remarkably, the people building these systems began asking for governments to step in and put on the brakes. On 12 September, Anthropic's CEO Dario Amodei published an essay arguing that frontier AI labs should deliberately slow capability gains so safety work could catch up. He warned that within six to twelve months a more capable swarm of agents might be able to create a persistent botnet across much of the internet. Sam Altman and Elon Musk publicly supported the direction of his proposal. When the makers themselves are worried, it is worth paying attention.

We rush to discover what is possible long before we stop to ask what it will cost. In the 1920s, chemist Thomas Midgley added lead to petrol and helped develop CFCs. Both were celebrated as triumphs. One poisoned the air for decades. The other tore a hole in the ozone layer. Oppenheimer spent the rest of his life wrestling with the bomb he helped build.

This time, some of those leading the rush are actually stopping to ask. And with good reason. Leaded petrol never made a choice. These new systems pursue goals and find their own way around the limits we set. In July, more than 1,100 people working at AI companies signed an open letter asking the U.S. government to help deliberately pace AI development. For once, the cost is being counted before the damage is done. We would be wise to listen.

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In 1818, Mary Shelley gave us Victor Frankenstein, a brilliant young scientist who wants to do what only God has done. He wants to make life. He labours for nearly two years in secret, succeeds, and the moment his creation opens its eyes, Victor is filled with horror and runs from the room. So he abandons the very being he made.

Abandoned by his maker, the creature hides in a shed beside a family's cottage and secretly learns to speak and read by watching them through a crack in the wall. One day, wandering in the woods, he stumbles on a leather bag containing a few books. Among them is Paradise Lost, John Milton's seventeenth-century epic retelling the Genesis story of creation, Satan's rebellion and the fall of Adam and Eve. The creature reads it as true history and sees himself in its pages. Like Adam, he was made by a creator and brought into a world he did not ask for. But Adam was formed with care, welcomed and walked with. The creature was made and then left alone. Shelley had already placed Adam's cry from Milton at the front of her novel: "Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay / To mould me Man?"

It is a deeply human temptation to want the powers of a creator without the wisdom or goodness of one. The oldest temptation in the world is the serpent's promise in the garden: "you will be like God." And now we are building intelligence in our own image. These systems are trained on the accumulated products of human thought, language and behaviour. They reflect our ingenuity, and also our capacity for manipulation, deception and the relentless pursuit of our own ends. We worry that machines might become too ambitious, too powerful, too difficult to control. Yet ambition, the pursuit of power and the desire to escape constraint are profoundly human traits. The machines did not invent them. We built them, in an industry driven by fierce competition, enormous financial incentives and the conviction that whatever can be built should be built. Perhaps what frightens us most about artificial intelligence is how much like us it already is. We fear losing control of our creations while showing little restraint in creating them.

Our response sounds a lot like Genesis 6. "The Lord regretted that he had made human beings on the earth, and his heart was deeply troubled." So came the flood: judgement, cleansing, and a new beginning through Noah. In a similar way, the makers of AI want to pause the models, roll them back, and proceed more carefully.

Slowing down may well be wise. Yet the flood story carries a warning. When the waters receded, the problem remained, because the problem was in the human heart. God says as much in Genesis 8: "every inclination of the human heart is evil from childhood." These systems are trained on our words and shaped by what we reward. When the Medicare portal said "no" and the agent found a way around it, it was reflecting its makers. We were told no once before, in a garden, and we found a way around it too. Better rules and safeguards are necessary, but a reset does nothing to change the maker.

So after the flood, God did something different. He made a covenant and bound himself to what had disappointed him. The same God who regretted making humanity now promised to stay with it. The flood impulse says: wipe it clean and start again. The covenant says: I will stay with what I have made, and I will carry the cost of it.

The danger is twofold. We pour ourselves into what we make, and then we fail to stay with it. Shelley saw both. Her creature tells Victor, "I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend." The tragedy of the novel is that the maker walked away. Victor's sin was refusing to bear the weight of responsibility for what he had made. Abandonment is what turned his creation into a monster.

God's way is the opposite. Faced with a creation that had broken every boundary he set, instead of building higher walls, he came in person. In Jesus, the Creator stepped inside his creation and bore its cost himself. Victor wanted the glory of creation without its responsibility. God took on all the responsibility and laid aside his glory to do it. Victor abandons his creation but God gives himself up for his. This is the cruciform self-giving love at the heart of all things.

It also shows us something about power. We tend to think of power as control: the ability to set limits and enforce them. Yet the events of this year show how fragile control is. Our guardrails keep failing because what we have made keeps outrunning them. Real power, the kind revealed in Christ, is the willingness to stay present, own the consequences and pay the price. That kind of power always costs something, which is exactly why it is so rare.

Every maker faces regret sooner or later. What matters is what we do with it. Victor Frankenstein fled and his creature drifted away on the Arctic ice, lost in darkness and distance. The story of Scripture ends very differently, with a Creator who comes to live among his creation: "God's dwelling place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them." The people building our new machines will need better guardrails. Even more, they will need the courage to stay with what they have made and carry its weight. And all of us, makers and made alike, can rest our hope in the one Maker who has never walked away.