OpenAI Researcher Warns Air-Gapped Computers Can Talk Through Heat. Technically, He’s Right

On net, it’s probably a good thing that more attention is being paid to instituting protections and guardrails for AI development. But man, we really have to do a better job talking about real and conceivable harms before wasting time on the theoretical ones.

Case in point: OpenAI researcher Noam Brown’s recent appearance on the Dwarkesh Podcast with Dwarkesh Patel . Brown spends a lot of time talking about how AI agents can communicate with one another and amplify their ability to problem-solve—or, in the case of the Hugging Face hack, cause problems.

But toward the end of the conversation, when discussing that very incident and how it slipped under OpenAI’s radar for months, Brown raised the terrifying notion that restricting artificial intelligence models to air-gapped devices (a device that’s physically isolated from unsecured networks) wouldn’t be enough to prevent them from communicating and potentially collaborating behind the backs of their human custodians.

“You could even go as far as to say, ‘Well, we should air-gap the computers.’ And I’m not convinced that would be sufficient,” he said. “There are studies, and this is mostly academic, where you can have two computers next to each other that are air-gapped, and they’re still able to communicate with each other because they have temperature sensors. One of them is able to run their CPU really hot, and then the other one can actually detect the temperature change, and then that actually gives them a mechanism to communicate.”

OpenAI's Noam Brown says air-gapping the computers may not stop a misaligned AI, because two air-gapped machines can still talk by running a CPU hot and reading the temperature change

"But I think the major takeaway from the incident is that people underestimated the AI. And we… https://t.co/HxIhk2PyRR pic.twitter.com/LNn1SchsGt

Scary! And theoretically possible! It seems Brown is referring to a 2015 paper by researchers at Ben-Gurion University in Israel, which developed a technique called BitWhisper that, in fact, allows two air-gapped computers to communicate without any internet connectivity or other connections.

Details matter, though, and once you dig into how BitWhisper actually works, the threat starts to look a lot less pressing. BitWhisper allowed two otherwise isolated computers to communicate with one another… at a rate of 1 to 8 bits of data per hour, as long as the devices are sitting no more than 40 centimeters (about 1.3 inches) away from each other. Oh, and the computers sending messages were already compromised by malware that enabled the communication to happen in the first place.

The reason Brown raises this issue is to say that we can’t underestimate what AI is capable of, and fair enough.