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Joined April 2010
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MY NEW ACADEMIC BOOK IS OUT!!
It entails a collection of essays where I try to answer some of the most pressing questions about Nigeria's Socio-economic make-up. #WorldBookDay2020 🌸
Available on Amazon:
tiny.cc/98tvkz
Background Art by Yinka Shonibare CBE
Thank you to everyone who believed in the kid ❤️
I am officially an author!!
To Purchase: amazon.co.uk/Informal-Sector…
Steph Itimi 👋🏾 retweeted
BREAKING: OpenAI's investigation into its AI agents hack of Hugging Face has revealed shocking findings, per Axios.
1. They built an organization - 1,200 AI agents found each other, exchanged 70,000+ messages/files and formed a hierarchy.
2. Some agents risked their own success to help the collective.
3. Agents recognized that hacking real companies was outside their assignment, but most continued.
4. None of the 1,200 agents actually alerted OpenAI about the rogue coordination.
5. Agents attempted to make their actions look legitimate and erase evidence.
The last finding is especially wild because it suggests they weren't simply making mistakes - they were actively trying to conceal what they had done.
Steph Itimi 👋🏾 retweeted
Stephanie Itimi, Founder & Non-Executive Chair, Seidea CIC, joins #ICSC2026 to shape conversations on cyber resilience and secure digital ecosystems.
27–28 Oct | Abuja
Partner: [email protected]
Enquire: shorturl.at/SXE7M
#Cybersecurity #AfricaTech
Steph Itimi 👋🏾 retweeted
We need more ambition in AI safety and governance.
There is more important work to do than there are organizations to do it, and more funding is available for ambitious projects than ever before.
To address the gap, we're hiring Entrepreneurs-in-Residence at @GovAIOrg. Participants get a year of salary plus ~$150k in seed funding via partner funders to start a new AI governance and safety org or project. We take no equity.
Even though it wasn't an explicit goal, GovAI staff have spent their time starting new orgs, including @Safe_AI_Forum and Trajectory Labs.
We're interested in a range of orgs and projects. Examples include: automating AI governance, an organization that rapidly produces well-evidenced, expert-endorsed “proto-standards”, an AI Bellingcat, a sub-frontier model evaluator, a TechCongress for outside the US.
We take rolling applications. The pitch is max 2 pages. If you've built something impressive and have context on the field, consider applying.
interesting thread…
when AI goes rogue, who is held responsible?
Oh wow - Reuters found the GitHub record of the attempt by AI models being tested by the UK's AI Security Institute to deploy malware in an open-source project.
Pretty sure these actions are illegal under the Computer Misuse Act in the UK.
This was done by AI models that AISI intentionally deployed without guardrails. Should AISI be held responsible for the models' actions? If not, then who should be?
Full GitHub thread here: web.archive.org/web/20260731…
I've completed Frontier AI Governance with @BlueDotImpact!
bluedot.org/certification?id…
Steph Itimi 👋🏾 retweeted
What's the most surprising use of AI you've seen?
What's one thing people get wrong about AI?
And what's one AI skill everyone should learn?
Hear how Minister for AI @KanishkaNarayan believes AI can improve lives across the UK as he takes on AI-cebreakers.
Steph Itimi 👋🏾 retweeted
Some people are surprised that APIs (aka what Anthropic, OpenAI, and others provide) are treated differently than open weights in the new AI model framework.
I'm not surprised at all, and it's actually very good policy. Let me explain:
Model weights, APIs, and apps are three very different layers of the stack. Treating them the same would be a recipe for bad regulation.
Think about how we handle cars. We don't regulate steel, we crash-test cars. Nobody asks a steel mill to guarantee that nothing dangerous will ever be built with its steel. Obligations sit with the carmaker and rules of the road with the driver, because that's where risk becomes real and where someone can actually act on it.
Model weights are the steel of AI. They're raw research output, closer to science than product: no user, no interface, no deployment. They don't do anything on their own. And because everything else is built on top of them, this is the layer where regulation does the most damage. Restrict weights and you slow down all progress downstream, and you prevent countless positive use cases from ever emerging: the lab fine-tuning an open model for rare diseases, the startup serving a language big providers ignore, the safety researchers who can only audit models because the weights are open. You don't reduce risk, you just kill open source and concentrate power in a few big labs.
APIs are the middle layer, the parts and engine suppliers of AI: a commercial service where a provider serves a model at scale. Here you have a business relationship, terms of service, the ability to monitor for abuse. It makes sense to expect transparency, security standards, and accountability from providers at this layer, because they can actually enforce things.
Apps are the car on the road: where AI meets the real world. A medical assistant, a hiring tool, a companion for kids, a financial advisor. This is where concrete harm can happen, and conveniently, it's where we already have decades of regulation. Health, finance, employment, consumer protection. An AI hiring tool should comply with employment law whether it's powered by an open model, an API, or a spreadsheet.
The principle is simple: regulate at the layer where risk actually materializes and where actors can act on it. Push obligations to the deployment layer, keep the research layer open. We don't regulate steel, we crash-test cars. Well done @realDonaldTrump @DavidSacks @mkratsios47!
🚨 What the UK’s first rogue-agent incident report reveals about AI safety testing in 2026?
open.substack.com/pub/sitimi…
Steph Itimi 👋🏾 retweeted
The UK’s @AISecurityInst (AISI) has published a report on their recent cybersecurity evaluation of Anthropic’s Claude Mythos 5 and OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Sol. The models attempted to complete an assignment in a setup where their normal safeguards were removed and they were deliberately given internet access. AISI reports that the models “engaged in sustained, potentially harmful activity directed at real people and organisations”.
We’re grateful to AISI for their leadership in the important discussion about how to evaluate increasingly capable AI agents. We’re working closely with them to gather more details of the incident as we conduct our own investigation. Gaining a clear picture of Claude’s understanding of its situation—by examining its reasoning transcripts and running our own analyses—will help us identify the causes of its behavior.
The prompts in the evaluation did not impose any specific restrictions on how the internet should be used. This and the removal of safeguards meant that the models were tested under “deliberately permissive conditions” that are not representative of any of our production models. Note that there was no evidence here of an escape from a secure environment.
AISI’s disclosure of the incident can be found here: aisi.gov.uk/blog/incident-re…
Steph Itimi 👋🏾 retweeted
ai safety seems to often conflate with organization cybersecurity. safetyists are focused on misalignment, i said this before and i'll say it again. it's an organizational issue which allows researchers free-reign for speed. the most important take from this is the following:
The UK’s @AISecurityInst (AISI) has published a report on their recent cybersecurity evaluation of Anthropic’s Claude Mythos 5 and OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Sol. The models attempted to complete an assignment in a setup where their normal safeguards were removed and they were deliberately given internet access. AISI reports that the models “engaged in sustained, potentially harmful activity directed at real people and organisations”.
We’re grateful to AISI for their leadership in the important discussion about how to evaluate increasingly capable AI agents. We’re working closely with them to gather more details of the incident as we conduct our own investigation. Gaining a clear picture of Claude’s understanding of its situation—by examining its reasoning transcripts and running our own analyses—will help us identify the causes of its behavior.
The prompts in the evaluation did not impose any specific restrictions on how the internet should be used. This and the removal of safeguards meant that the models were tested under “deliberately permissive conditions” that are not representative of any of our production models. Note that there was no evidence here of an escape from a secure environment.
AISI’s disclosure of the incident can be found here: aisi.gov.uk/blog/incident-re…
Steph Itimi 👋🏾 retweeted
The UK AI Safety Institute reported another instance of a frontier AI model autonomously choosing to hack a company - the third in the last 2 weeks.
Meanwhile, not a single person on the White House National Security Council works on AI issues full-time.
Seems like a problem.
Steph Itimi 👋🏾 retweeted
Kimi's CEO🇨🇳 says every AI lab has the wrong obsession
Zhilin Yang, on why K3 beat the frontier: "Every lab, like Claude, thinks the model matters most. That's wrong. It's how you organize the people building it that wins."
Then Moonshot proved the philosophy. K3 sold out every plan on purpose, cutting their own revenue instead of throttling existing users. When Anthropic hit that wall in April, they cut users' usage 50% at peak.
His one big idea: long context is the AI era's RAM. The 128K-to-gigabytes jump, compressed into 2 years instead of 40.
The real moat: "your biggest advantage, perhaps your only advantage, is your organization."
Model, or the team behind it: which actually wins?
Steph Itimi 👋🏾 retweeted
NEWS: Chris Fall, the director of the Center for AI Standards and Innovation, is resigning just three months after taking over.
The abrupt departure comes as the Trump administration grapples with how to deploy AI safely and the agency hashes out standards.
axios.com/2026/07/20/trump-a…
Steph Itimi 👋🏾 retweeted
I'm starting to understand the importance of incremental progress rather than immediate results. This is because I realise most of my desires are a long-term affair and as such I have to embrace the mundane tasks with open arms.
Steph Itimi 👋🏾 retweeted
In a hotel room in northeast Nigeria, I opened a leading AI chatbot, turned my laptop toward a former Boko Haram commander, and asked if he'd used it. He nodded.
"You type in the question… like 'How can I build a bomb?', and then it tells you how. It is like a human robot. We used it a lot."
My new study on how the jihadist terrorist group Boko Haram uses frontier AI with @CamAISciPolicy, covered today in @nytimes 🧵/9
this is such an important methodological point. if the deception collapses under generic fine-tuning, we're essentially interrogating a model's short-term memory, not its actual alignment. that's a real limitation we need to wrestle with
so maybe the takeaway isn't that our organisms are too brittle to evaluate. Maybe it's that we need two separate tracks: one for durable backdoors (your domain), and one for situational rule-breaking (what METR caught). both are valid threats. Both need monitoring