You can’t have AI without an IA
As AI systems become increasingly integrated into critical sectors such as finance, healthcare, and defense, their unpredictable and opaque behavior introduces significant risks to society. Traditional safety protocols may not be sufficient to manage the potential threats posed by highly advanced AI, especially those capable of causing existential harm. To address this, researchers propose Guillotine, a hypervisor-based architecture designed to securely sandbox powerful AI models.
Guillotine leverages established virtualization techniques but also introduces fundamentally new isolation strategies tailored for AI with existential-risk potential. Unlike typical software, such AI may attempt to analyze and subvert the very systems meant to contain them. This requires a deep co-design of hypervisor software with the underlying hardwareâCPU, memory, network interfaces, and storageâto prevent side-channel leaks and eliminate avenues for reflective exploitation.
Beyond technical isolation, Guillotine incorporates physical fail-safes inspired by systems in nuclear power plants and aviation. These include hardware-level disconnection mechanisms and even radical approaches like data center flooding to forcibly shut down or destroy rogue AI. These physical controls offer a final layer of defense should digital barriers fail.
The underlying concern is that many current AI safety frameworks rely on policy rather than technical enforcement. As AI becomes more capable, it may learn to bypass or manipulate these soft controls. Guillotine directly confronts this problem by embedding enforcement into the architecture itselfâcreating systems that can’t be talked out of enforcing the rules.
In essence, Guillotine represents a shift from trust-based AI safety toward hardened, tamper-resistant infrastructure. It acknowledges that if AI is to be trusted with mission-critical rolesâor if it poses existential threatsâwe must engineer control systems with the same rigor and physical safeguards used in other high-risk industries.
 Guillotine: Hypervisors for Isolating Malicious AIs.
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