Name: CAIA Reading Group: Concrete Problems in AI Safety, & the OpenAI / HuggingFace Incident
Start: 2026-08-31T16:30:00.000-04:00
End: 2026-08-31T17:30:00.000-04:00
Location: CIS Building 350

A community of students and researchers conducting research and outreach to mitigate risks from advanced AI systems.

Cornell AI Alignment

Join us for the first CAIA reading group discussion of the semester!

This week’s discussion accompanies Week 1 of 

CS 1998: Introduction to AI Safety & Alignment

—how failures arise in real AI systems, how the field has historically framed these problems, and what they look like in today’s increasingly agentic systems.

We’ll start with the classic 2016 paper 

 by Dario Amodei et al., which introduces problems including reward hacking, scalable oversight, safe exploration, robustness to distributional shift, and avoiding negative side effects.

We’ll then look at a recent real-world case study: the 

, using reports from OpenAI and METR to discuss how concrete safety problems can manifest in modern AI agents interacting with real systems.

Dario Amodei et al., Concrete Problems in AI Safety 

OpenAI, Hugging Face Incident and the Road Ahead 

https://openai.com/index/hugging-face-incident-and-the-road-ahead/

METR, OpenAI–Hugging Face Incident Investigation 

https://metr.org/blog/2026-08-26-openai-hugging-face-incident-investigation

You don’t need to be enrolled in CS 1998 to attend, all are welcome!