(NIST: Gaithersburg, MD) -- Can we make artificial intelligence impervious to adversaries who want to twist the technology to nefarious ends? Though AI is among the newest of technologies, the question’s answer is nearly a century old.

Try as we might, we can’t render AI completely unassailable using conventional security models. In the peer-reviewed journal IEEE Security and Privacy, Apostol Vassilev, a senior scientist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), has published a mathematical proof of this statement building on work published in 1931 by famed logician Kurt Gödel. His incompleteness theorems showed that there are limits to what can be proved within a system built on a finite number of rules.

The guardrails that govern an AI’s behavior are just such a system, and one of the proof’s implications is that there will always be a way to prompt an AI system to disregard its rules—it’s just a matter of finding it.

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