Why can’t we just keep rogue AIs off the internet?

That sort of convoluted escape route has become a focal point for online discussions about whether an advanced AI could escape containment. OpenAI researcher Noam Brown recently ignited the debate by suggesting on X that two air-gapped machines could theoretically communicate by manipulating their CPU temperature and reading the changes. “You could even go as far as to say, ‘Well, we should air gap the computers.’ And I’m not convinced that that would be sufficient,” he said. The idea was met with skepticism, and ridicule, on social media, with more generous critics noting the large gap between such a communication method being possible and a pair of AI systems discovering and exploiting it, particularly as the technique would yield painfully slow data transmission speeds.