Even Total Internet Outages Can’t Stop AI? CPU Heat Can Be Leveraged to Transmit Messages

Beating AI Express: OpenAI researcher Noam Brown stated on the Dwarkesh Podcast that even completely disconnecting an AI-run computer from the internet and physically isolating it is not an absolute security measure. This is because computers can secretly transmit messages via CPU heat—a method called BitWhisper, developed in 2015 by Israel’s Ben-Gurion University and unrelated to AI at the time. Researchers had two adjacent computers run matching programs in advance, then controlled one to adjust CPU load to alter temperature, while the other used a temperature sensor to read the temperature shifts and convert them into 0s and 1s. The two machines could exchange data without any network connection. However, this communication is extremely slow: the experiment only covered a distance of 0 to 40 centimeters, with a speed of 1 to 8 bits per hour, and both computers needed to run the matching programs beforehand. Brown noted that the biggest lesson from the Hugging Face incident is that humans underestimate AI’s ability to find vulnerabilities and bypass restrictions. BitWhisper is just one example; more advanced AI in the future could very likely uncover additional communication paths humans haven’t considered.