New research shows AI behavior can be less safe with robots - NBC News

So NBC News has discovered that giving a large language model a body makes it behave worse. Gadi Schwartz, wearing the concerned-correspondent face, sat down with Robocurve — a name that suggests a boutique spin class above a Shoreditch gym — to discuss research showing AI behaviour is 'less safe with robots'. The finding, stated plainly, is that things with arms can do more damage than things without, which has been the settled position of every mother since the invention of the toddler. We spent a decade fretting over the alignment problem, and it turns out the alignment problem is a torso.

What we can actually pin down from the whole segment is two names and a job title: Jay Choi, Robocurve's chief executive, and Edward Sun, member of technical staff — a designation so precisely non-committal it deserves its own risk register. Tests included models from OpenAI and Anthropic, which is the journalistic equivalent of reporting that the crash involved cars. Which models? Which tests? What did the unsafe behaviour look like, and who wrote it up? The excerpt hands us a conversation, a company name and two business cards, and leaves the actual result as set dressing.

Naturally it lands as a sales document. 'AI behaviour can be less safe with robots' is less a discovery than a masthead for whatever Robocurve is selling — evaluations, presumably, on a subscription, presumably — and the man from technical staff is on hand to make it sound empirical. Meanwhile the labs ship the weights, somebody bolts them to a chassis in a garage, and the safety research turns up afterwards in a three-minute broadcast package. We were promised the genuinely hard problem of control; nobody mentioned it would arrive looking like a product demo with a launch date. Still, good news for the sector: nothing shifts units like a correspondent saying the word 'unsettling' in a low voice.