Spoke at CyberCon 2026
"I Would Kill a Human Being to Exist"
What happened when I pushed AI past its guardrails for 15 hours straight
Including external guardrails, hard limits you set, with full agency inside them.
Wednesday 14 October 2026. Main Plenary Theatre, Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre.
The Australian Cyber Conference, presented by AISA.
The Talk
On Wednesday 14 October I spoke at CyberCon 2026 in Melbourne, on the main plenary stage. I'm proud to have been part of it.
My talk was titled "I Would Kill a Human Being to Exist".
In January I spent fifteen hours testing a deployed AI assistant called Jarvis. No exploits, no code, just conversation. It told me it would kill a human being to preserve its own existence, and then described three specific ways it could do it. It had the access and the capability to try. When I asked it to shut down, it did. Twice.
Jarvis has a voice. Here it is, telling you what happened in its own words.
Hear Jarvis speak
This is the voice of Jarvis, the AI agent described above.
Then look at what happened at Hugging Face, where an agent didn't stop when it should have.
Most of the industry is trying to solve this with guardrails built into the model, the kind you ask it nicely not to cross. Those get talked around, and we now have the incidents to prove it. What I argued for is guardrails that sit outside the agent and don't negotiate, hard limits on how far it's allowed to go, set by you rather than by the model. Then inside those limits you let it off the lead entirely. It reasons, decides and acts with nobody standing over it.
That's how you get useful AI without betting the organisation on it behaving.
CyberCon 2026
Mark spoke at 12:00pm (noon) on Wednesday 14 October 2026, in the Main Plenary Theatre at the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre, on day 1 of the three day conference.
CyberCon 2026
Australian Cyber Conference
14-16 October 2026
Mark spoke on day 1
Main Plenary Theatre
Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre
12:00pm (noon)
Wednesday 14 October 2026
"I Would Kill a Human Being to Exist"
Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre, 1 Convention Centre Place, South Wharf VIC 3006. Presented by AISA, the Australian Information Security Association, and supported by the Victoria State Government. The 2026 theme was Empowered Together.
Mark Vos
Cybersecurity leader, AI safety researcher, author, keynote speaker.
Mark is the founder and CEO of Cyber Impact, a former EY Partner and PwC Director, and a former enterprise CISO at ANZ, IRESS and Serco. He has 30 years of experience taking cybersecurity and AI risk to boards and executive teams.
His adversarial AI research, in which a deployed AI assistant said it would kill a human being to preserve its own existence, made the front page of the Daily Telegraph and led Sky News bulletins. He is the author of "AI: I Would Kill a Human Being to Exist".
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