Insights from table-top exercises in Europe on AI safety and cyber misuse

RAND Europe sat senior officials in Berlin, The Hague and Paris around a Cabinet table, together with the UK AI Security Institute and Mila, and handed them FlowGPT: a fictional, state-backed frontier model that criminals were using to find vulnerabilities and run phishing at scale. The second turn introduced PieAI, an equally capable model possibly cloned from FlowGPT’s exfiltrated weights, whose safeguards could not merely be evaded but simply removed, taking away whatever leverage the government had left. The full report is more candid than the summary: acting against a “national AI champion” the state had funded meant admitting a governance failure, officials had no way to evaluate the model except the developer’s own possibly biased assessment, and without pre-agreed escalation thresholds they “spent time debating what they were facing rather than responding to it”. It is also honest about scope (three two-hour sessions, about 55 players, all European), which is worth remembering before anyone quotes it as how governments will behave.