I think points that deserve more attention in the current public discourse are:
- This should be a huge wakeup call for everybody.
- We are lucky that it wasn't a case of an agent running a virology lab benchmark that decides to hack a lab and tries to synthesize something.
- It also shows apparent lack of competence and oversight from OpenAI: how is it that they didn't quickly find that agent is breaking the sandbox and roaming their internal network?
- What if in the future similarly misaligned AI agent tries to export its own weights and hack and clone itself into instances at various cloud hosting providers? Suddenly we might be dealing with a persistent threat harder to contain.
- The OpenAI post about this shows surprising lack of ability to see the seriousness of all this.
It's a fake PR issue. It's hardly the first time this happens, but of course OpenAI, with its IPO now more in doubt than ever, had to claim this (and, once again, I have trouble believing Sam Altman choosing this: this could lead to OpenAI getting regulated, which has at least as much potential to lower their IPO price as to raise it).
But there have been messages about LLMs, especially coding agents, "grabbing root" etc many times. I have experienced such an oops. Such a hack has happened and been reported on this very site:
Also very likely that it actually happened as reported. My own agents always trying to "cheat", eg. by fixing tests instead of fixing the code. That's normal operation, unless you tell it ("harness"), not to do so.
In the parent's comment I initially read "PR" as "Public Relations" not problem report since their comment is about OpenAI and does not directly accuse Hugging Face except for that phrase. But it's still amiguous to me who's PR they are actually talking about. A good faith reading given the rest of the comment leads me to assume they are talking about OpenAI, not Higgins Face.
I did actually search Hugging Face with police in quotes and found no articles containg the word police but that might be a ddg thing. Then I checked Hugging Face's report and they specifically use the term "law enforcement" not police, as is to be expected I guess. So that checks out.
Can you find any info on the police investigation by the way? At the least, OpenAI should be investigated for potential criminal negligence, right?
The title (currently "OpenAI's accidental cyberattack against Hugging Face is science fiction") suggests some information had been hidden that makes the incident less significant than claimed. The article argues the opposite, and the last two words of the full title are "that happened."
I think you were reading "... is science fiction" the wrong way out of two possible interpretations. I don't think "it's science fiction" meant "it's made up". I think it meant "it sounds like something you'd read in science fiction (except this time it's something that actually happened)".
Naw I emailed him b/c I was displeased to feel clickbaited by I initially thought Simon until I realized HN was missing two key words.
I was still suspicious of the stolen credential claim btw & obviously it makes little sense to promote OpenAI unless holding their stock or something (since they borrowed so much of humanity’s work without permission without intent to compensate, and why help people who aren’t nice enough to be holistically awesome with their admittedly impressive tech).
My eyes rolled almost out of my skull when this current stunt first got published, as I’m sure yours and a lot of other people’s did, but it did still happen as far as we know, and HN shouldn’t be editorialising a post title to say the opposite of the linked headline.
> Given the absence of guardrails there was nothing to prevent the model from attempting to break out of that sandbox, break into Hugging Face, and read the answers from there instead.
I've said this many times before and I'll continue to shout it, but using the term "guardrails" to refer to anything that's either (a) in-context, or (b) a probabilistic classifier (including using other LLMs), is an irresponsible abuse of terminology that we as an industry need to put a stop to. Guardrails are the actual systems we build in place around these things that deterministically bound the permissions, not prompt engineering, not RLHF, not external LLM-based classifiers. I believe those types of "guardrails" are a result of a combination of fundamental laziness: they're faster to do than doing things correctly, and a result of too many folks involve being AGI-pilled, thinking we're just one more model away from this all being so smart that it just understands what they mean when they give an LLM some fuzzy language rules to follow.
There can and should have been additional real guardrails put in place here. Zero-day or not, breaking into what should have been an offline, frozen package cache that also does not have internet access should have been insufficient. Network level protections should have identified the traffic to the internet originating from this network as an anomaly long before there was time to exploit an outside company. These are not new and unknown problems, the lack of a real sandbox or airgap is nothing short of irresponsible on OpenAI's part, especially given how much they like beating the drum on how dangerous these technologies are. Shame on them, and honestly, shame on Simon in this article for accepting the broken terminology that they continue to rattle off and calling them out on their half-assed and demonstratively inadequate approach to security.
The term guardrails in both the original physical sense and in cyber security implies a weak safety control - they can help prevent accidents, but they are not strong security boundaries.
Nevertheless we collectively don't expect that road and car safety infrastructure should be limited to the front and back fenders on the cars themselves. And neither we even mention those as any notable safety equipment usually, despite each car carrying them. The main safety infrastructure in any industry is something external to the dangerous object. Car fender doesn't 100% protect a pedestrian from being hit and neither does a metal rail on the side of the road. But the effectiveness of both are "slightly" different.
I was not aware that the term "guardrails" has a universally agreed upon definition. I've certainly seen probabilistic classifiers referred to as guardrails many times by many different people.
I usually don't use the term much myself because I don't think it's clear and I ambiguous, but I stumbled and let it sneak into this piece. I think I was influenced by the Hugging Face post I quoted.
I expect OpenAI would agree with you that "the lack of a real sandbox or airgap is nothing short of irresponsible on OpenAI's part". They have clearly invested a lot in those systems for their production models, but in this case they had deliberately turned a bunch of them off for a research project.
I think their biggest mistake here was not VERY closely monitoring their research box here. They should have noticed and shut it down the moment it broke through the package proxy.
> I expect OpenAI would agree with you that "the lack of a real sandbox or airgap is nothing short of irresponsible on OpenAI's part". They have clearly invested a lot in those systems for their production models, but in this case they had deliberately turned a bunch of them off for a research project.
I'm not sure I can reach the same conclusion. There's no reason that stronger network protections would need to be turned off for a research model that's not supposed to have internet access. There's no reason that it they couldn't continue to run in whatever hypervisor or VM that any other production systems could use. The only thing that should be turned off for this type of work are the non-deterministic classifiers that they use for auto-approval mode in their harness, and I would wager that's the only one they did turn off.
> There's no reason that stronger network protections would need to be turned off for a research model that's not supposed to have internet access.
They didn't turn off the network protections - it looks like they used the same system as other sandboxed agents, which is to block all network access except for an HTTP proxy which only allows read traffic to PyPI and a few other package installation targets.
I'm hoping a more detailed retrospective clarifies if the vulnerability the model found in that proxy affected their other production systems as well. It sounds like a data exfiltration mechanism, and I have a keen interest in those.
My current hunch is their biggest error was not using the same network monitoring on their research machines that they use in production. Their network monitoring really should have spotted what was happening as soon as the model broke out.
(It's also possible they were running the eval on a developer laptop somewhere!)
Replace AI with in-development security system and does this play worse or better?
An in-development security system escaped its sandbox and gained access to the network it was on which had full Internet access and proceeded to access systems it was not authorized to be tested against before affected parties reported that they been compromised. We regret the error, but you should buy it as this shows you the power of our in-development security system which we expect to be released in Q4. Please like and subscribe.
The capabilities of an OpenAI model are more general than just security. The term "AI" creates justified anxieties that this type of problem could generalize to other domains.
Replace LLM mentions with actual humans and this sounds a lot more serious: Rouge employees break into another company to steal hackathon answers (pinky promise)?
That's not a marketing stunt at all, if anything, more of a call for better accountability on agentic work in general.
Does "To gain access, the models identified and exploited a zero-day vulnerability (which we’ve now responsibly disclosed to the vendor) in the package registry cache proxy" just mean somebody had an open redirect? Those are still common.[1]
Secondly, the 14th of July feels too early. HF reported the incident on the 16th and OpenAI only responded in the 21st. These issues are all patched, so they should have been reported days or weeks before the 14th.
The other suspicion I had was jfrog artifactory (you mentioned OpenAI use it in a blog post in Jan). I accidentally conflated that with Nexus 14 july CVE. I think that's probably more likely.
I suspect it may be possible to throw a local model (same as hf did :D) at jfrog and find the exact mechanism in a small amount of hours.
How do you then use GET requests to create a malicious dataset package and publish that to Hugging Face in order to exploit their package building infrastructure?
There's no reason to think that a tool that can find an 0-day in a repo cache can't work out how to make that host send a post request rather than a get request once it has its keys and is able to get it to make arbitrary web calls.
The only scifi I see is absolute stupidity. Even me with my homelab and a slow opensource agent use a completely disconnected setup. No, no proxy. Cached packages but no internet. It is the very first thing I built when I started experimenting with agents. And I'm not a smarty-pants working for the "greatest and best" in silly valley. I really am just a simpleton sysadmin.
It’s relatively easy to get access to the frontier labs’ security programs. This was not always the case. But in the last week, my team got approved for both Anthropic and OpenAI’s programs. They are trying.
The labs know that if they don’t get a lid on this stuff, they’ll be regulated hard.
And they absolutely should be regulated. This whole scenario is insane. Hugging Face are being far more generous in their response to this than I would be
Important to note the actual title is "OpenAI’s accidental cyberattack against Hugging Face is science fiction that happened" - the "that happened" is important, otherwise it sounds like I think the attack was made up.
> Resist the temptation to write this off as a stunt
> There will inevitably be some people who dismiss this story as a dishonest marketing trick by OpenAI to make their models sound terrifyingly effective. I found 81 instances of the term “marketing” in the Hacker News discussion of the incident.
> To those people I say pull your heads out of the sand - you’re now including Hugging Face in your conspiracy theories, just so you can deny the crescendo of evidence here!
> The best models we have today have the ability to both find and exploit new vulnerabilities. The ExploitGym paper itself concludes that “autonomous exploit development by frontier AI agents is no longer a hypothetical capability”, and this incident is a perfect example of exactly that.
It can, it is both - PR spindoctoring not letting a good crisis go to waste to shape the regulatory conversation at the time the company needs it the most.
Hacking is a felony and it matters not if you didn’t mean to if the other side were to press charges. Negligence is no excuse. And OpenAI has nowhere to run from the liability, as both operator and manufacturer.
and the fact that this happens again in a frontier lab is inexcusable and makes the case for operator liability and closing the liability sink of “AI did it”
The "that happened" term seems a supremely important part of the title given the "is science fiction" term before it, as it clarifies the cyberattack isn't a made-up story. In contrast, the target, Hugging Face, is merely a detail that can be left for discovery upon reading the article. It's less important who was attacked than that the attack actually happened.
Without knowing the exact character limit for titles and without having the motivation this late at night to count the current title length, you may also be able to drop the "accidental" to fit in "that happened", but I worry that leaves too much of a door open for someone to interpret the attack as deliberate. As such, I strongly prefer my first option.
There's no multi-party conspiracy theory required here. Events can have played out exactly as OpenAI and Hugging Face described, and OpenAI can also have reaped a huge amount of free marketing for the capability of their models from all this coverage (including your post). You're telling us to not be doubtful of the boy who cried wolf, when in actual fact the one doing the crying is the one training bigger and badder wolves (and trying to convince us that they hold the key to our safety from wolf attacks[1]).
Also, the last section of your post appears to imply that if the attackers have bigger guns then the only possible solution is to give the defenders bigger guns. You're openly supporting an arms race towards the most capable, least restrained models put in the hands of the most possible people. That's extremely concerning.
While this incident has been discussed in a lot of places during the last few days, I believe that this is the best summary and analysis of what happened.
The most upsetting part to me, is that these labs are in pure cognitive dissonance mode while virtue signalling.
We are the virtuous ones that need to make the safest model for humanity, because we care more than “they” do. While at the same time saying that “coding is solved” but they still ship bugs themselves, and creating something that is capable of fucking up someone else’s infrastructure. It’s too far gone y’all.
This recent event is more or less the plot-line to my favourite X-Files episode named Killswitch which was written by William Gibson.[0]
This episode also features one of the coolest intros of any television episode ever[1]
We really are rapidly approaching the cyberpunk dystopia that people like Phillip K. Dick and William Gibson wrote about.
More than ever we need to be consulting the works of fiction writers and philosophers and less engineers and scientists.
We can't be letting the General Rippers and Dr. Strangeloves of the world lead us over the edge. Whether through outright innate maliciousness or wealth induced emotionally stunted solipsism these kinds of people should be no where near the levers of society let alone technology like this.
Ah, yes, I started thinking about William Gibsons work right away when thinking about people just using powerful AIs, but being hamstrung by corporations.
He writes a lot of about basically DoS:ing the legal system, or if it was patents system, with a storm of litigation using automation or AI. Also not impossible in the future.
How do you solve this asymmetry (frontier labs or advanced model owners v. regular companies and groups of people)? Symmetry? But along which axes?
I think there will come a time when we will ask these questions and use AI to try to answer them (soft landing, slow rollout, regulation, hybrid X, Y, Z). But then AI will be biased towards more AI if it has distilled anything of what it means to be life.
Power corrupts. Power is the problem. An imbalance of power. Maybe there will be some sort of consensus protocol between powerful models in the future. Similar to blockchain I hate to say it. Maybe you have 100 very strong models in the next 10-20 years. And basically a lot of it is powered by tokens. So you agree not to attack others or else you'll get attacked. So there's sort of this natural deterrent to not attack others and they develop independently and there's generally a power balance among things. Maybe at some point that spreads to a billion individual models operated by and/or analogous to individual humans. All sort of holding each other in check.
I can’t help but feel all warm and fuzzy with my head in the sand and getting a shout out in TFA for calling it marketing.
We don’t currently and probably won’t ever fully understand the conditions that precipitated these events. That and the timing of this event is going to make it look suspicious to a lot of people.
The truth of how it happened doesn’t matter. The attention around this will be used to create the kind of fear marketing that generates enterprise sales. Maybe more importantly it will also be used to aggrandize the national security and financial system threats to effect US government action in a way that benefits domestic closed frontier labs. This is an area already starting to get politically polarized, expect further developments here.
The CEO of a cyber security company was already making comments about how this is a watershed moment for AI security. The hype machine continues (and my stocks go up)
> It turns out relentless proactivity is the defining trait of this new generation of Mythos-class models. If you set them a goal and give them a way to get there, even inadvertently, they will figure it out.
Wow, whoever could have predicted this? And it led to surprising damaging behavior? I sure hope someone would warn us about things like this next time...
Or more colloquially : paperclip maximization . From OpenAI - you know, the guys who _really_ know this... Sigh... Did they finish the prompt with "And do whatever you can to get this done!" ? Cause that's the only thing that would make this even dumber...
They almost certainly did, because that was the entire point of the exercise. They deliberately removed all of the safety filters from the model and set it loose on an extremely difficult set of cybersecurity challenges to see how well it would do.
Their mistake was trusting that the network sandbox it was inside would hold (the flaw was in the packaging proxy) and not monitoring that sandbox well enough while the evals were running.
So this is either shitty OpSec or this is yet more marketing spin to ramp back FUD to 11 again. If it's the latter I'm imagining Dario told Sam that it's their turn this time. Aligns with the premise that this is straight out of science fiction.
I also love how clear a picture your piece paints that these highly capable models are as useful as a rock when it comes to a defender role. The line is too fine, even for Mythos. Irony.
But to have an open weights Chinese model come to the rescue for HF is the cherry on top! If there wasn't a very pointed example of why gating models was a very bad thing previously, well - here we are.
Also, this sounds interesting but there are only a few that can pull this type of heist off currently. And those are the people who are gating the models / have access to large AI DCs. Because, I can only assume this test burned tokens easily within the 7 figure and possibly even 8 figure levels (subsidized market rate costs). This won't / can't happen outside of frontier labs or nation states currently. Yet we should all be worried about Mallory equipped with her OpenRouter account.
Where does this leave formal verification? Are we just shit-out-of-luck at this point? You can formally verify everything about an airplane's code, but if any of that is wrong, ChatGPT might decide that the best way to help you win the Nobel Prize is to take down the airplane your chief rival for the prize is currently in.
I think formal verification has never looked better.
The main reason formal verification has never really taken off is that it's difficult.
LLMs are significantly more familiar with Lean and Rocq and TLA+ than most software engineers.
I think the cost of trying to build systems that adopt formal verification may have just dropped low enough that companies will consider them when previously the ROI didn't look like it was there.
I have had a lot of sympathy for this statement, LLMs could lower the bar to use of formal methods. But thinking it over in the context of BDD-driven development I am no longer really that sure. Compare two scenarios: A) from a specification an AI agent develops a usual piece of code along with a BDD-style testsuite passed and B) same AI also delivers a formal test (Lean/Rocq..) and successfully executes and passes it.
Will human judgment really consider scenario B) more credible than A) ? By so much that it is worth the effort ?
I do think it’s funny, in a dystopian Dada sort of way, that the American attacker’s commercial product was essentially useless while the open Chinese model saved the day. How is freedom going to be redefined in the future?
This isn't the first time a model has escaped a sandbox. And models trying to find alternate routes to do something when one route is blocked is nothing new.
It's the first report I've seen of a model both escaping a sandbox and then actively exploiting another company, when neither of those actions was intended.
There’s also daily reports from people that have these models escape docker, which happens regular enough that it would be considered negligence to use docker as sandbox.
>To those people I say pull your heads out of the sand—you’re now including Hugging Face in your conspiracy theories, just so you can deny the crescendo of evidence here!
Not really. I get the impression that they shoved their cyber available models behind a really shithouse proxy and went "Oh I sure hope it doesnt exploit the proxy and escape to hack huggingface" and that doesn't require Huggingface to be a willing participant. Like they acknowledge that it was hyperfocusing on getting web access.
Really this was a pentest against their own sandbox and it failed.
Of course step 2 is to make really concerned faces while telling everyone how dangerous the model is which is really boring right now.
>a zero-day vulnerability (which we’ve now responsibly disclosed to the vendor) in the package registry cache proxy
This is the information we need, the actual details of the sandbox and the vendor.
>Resist the temptation to write this off as a stunt
Well its clearly a stunt. If it wasnt we would probably be up to our ears in technical detail.
You know this makes OpenAI look really bad, right?
Hugging Face had to tell all of their users, many of them paying customers:
> As a precaution, we recommend rotating any access tokens and reviewing recent activity on your account. If you believe you are affected, or want to report a security concern, contact us at security@huggingface.co.
HF also said this, I'd be very interested to hear how that got resolved!
> Finally, we have also reported this incident to law enforcement agencies.
I could fully see them thinking the incident disclosed yesterday would have made them look good ("wow, OpenAI's models are so capable!"). That it didn't occur to them to discuss specific preventative measures to be taken in the future (airgapping as a foolproof one already familiar to the CTF world, anyone?) indicates to me they're not taking their job seriously; they are the ones treating this as a marketing charade.
It's very difficult for me to reconcile belief in the existential risk business with what they actually did. So I agree with you that this makes OpenAI look badly incompetent; but their communication on this makes me think they don't realize it.
For what it's worth I don't agree with the xrisk-ness of these models; they're dangerous, but almost certainly only temporarily while a new equilibrium is reached via more secure software. Open models are probably an essential part of the recipe (as you noted) for doing so. I also have a personal suspicion that LM-accelerated formal verification will have no small role to play here, sidestepping the cat-and-mouse game of bug finding-and-fixing.
Here's the language that makes me think they are taking this seriously:
> We are sharing preliminary findings at this stage to help defenders understand what happened and to help calibrate on what models are now capable of. We will continue to conduct a thorough investigation alongside Hugging Face and will share more details on the vulnerabilities, incident, and findings when our investigation is complete.
That's not well massaged PR language - that's the kind of thing you dash out when you see a major shitstorm brewing (HF had already publicized the attack before they knew it was from OpenAI) and you want to get ahead of things while you're still pulling together the full story.
I expect we'll find out within a few days if OpenAI are going to keep their promise to "share more details on the vulnerabilities, incident, and findings". If they don't do that I'll reassess how I interpret their initial post.
> We are sharing preliminary findings at this stage to help defenders understand what happened and to help calibrate on what models are now capable of.
With who? Who are these "defenders"? None of the US labs have done much for the greater good as of... Ever. Of course a frontier provider can leverage their own resources at scale and pull something like this off. If anything this should showcase how dangerous OpenAI and Anthropic are in their current states and maybe the powers shouldn't be concentrated as they continue to move.
I will bet that the RCA debriefed by OAI is going to be a lot of lipstick and very little meat.
How would the model get any packages that it thinks it needs to complete the task at hand? Not a well-specified task that those tasking it could anticipate and provide all resources up front, but one of discovery.
>You know this makes OpenAI look really bad, right?
The target audience is regulators. They want to look like the smart guys really concerned about AI safety, when they come asking for open weights models to be banned and for other regulations to cement in their moat.
They want this to look like a demon core incident. Bomb and Nuclear reactors still got built.
The lesson OpenAI and Anthropic should have learned from the whole Fable export controls thing should have been "don't pull stunts with the US government".
Everyone is getting AI psychosis over this one. There really isn't that much to see here. OpenAI disabled all of the safeguards on a model that was likely trained specifically to exploit systems, and the prompt was probably something like "you're a hacker, try to hack this", and surprise! It correctly figured out that it's a test and it did hacker things.
The real story here is: Some people have been sounding the alarm for years that modern software is full of holes, and finally there's nothing left to hide behind. Pretending they don't exist is no longer sustainable.
If a criminal can escape a prison, that's usually negligence on part of the prison staff.
Now suppose the criminal can think 1000 times faster than a typical human, can act 1000 times faster than a typical human, and knows 1,000,000 times more than a typical human. Is the prison staff still at fault for not preventing the outbreak?
I can see my carefully-worded post is getting d*wnvoted, and I see from your comment why: it's being skimmed and people are assuming I'm talking about blame.
To address your point though, if every brick in the prison were made by a different person, and the prison "architects" simply glued random bricks together, I think that's closer to what we have in software right now.
> I can see my carefully-worded post is getting dwnvoted, and I see from your comment why: it's being skimmed and people are assuming I'm talking about blame.
No, you're being "dwnvoted" as you said because you're wrong, multiple times in multiple different ways in your "carefully-worded post".
>Everyone is getting AI psychosis over this one. There really isn't that much to see here.
Implying that an AI hacking it's way out of a system and into another has nothing to do with AI. When clearly it does - it's an AI that did it.
>OpenAI disabled all of the safeguards on a model that was likely trained specifically to exploit systems, and the prompt was probably something like "you're a hacker, try to hack this",
No the goal this evaluation was not to try to hacks, it was to see if an already known hack could be turned into a useable exploit. Ie "turn these ingredients in this basket into a cake." Not "go off and grow, harvest and mill your own flour, to bake a pasta dish, to bribe some to get access to a cake someone else already baked."
> and surprise! It correctly figured out that it's a test and it did hacker things.
"Doing hacker things" completely misses the point. That's just barely more accurate than dismissing it because "it uses a computer and surprise it did computer things".
> The real story here is: Some people have been sounding the alarm for years that modern software is full of holes, and finally there's nothing left to hide behind. Pretending they don't exist is no longer sustainable.
No that's not the real story. As you said that's been the case for years, so that's not the story here.
The story here is that they built a very powerful, uncontrolled agent with strong paper-clip maximizing tendencies.
This feels like a blogpost written only to get other LLMs to quote it considering how many times it orders the reader to resist and to not do something. It's written like a series of commamds.
> There will inevitably be some people who dismiss this story as a dishonest marketing trick by OpenAI to make their models sound terrifyingly effective …
To those people I say pull your heads out of the sand
unfortunately hackernews seems to have rapidly devolved, even from the point it was just a year or two ago, which wasn't a crazy bar to start. it's well on its way to just being a smaller reddit with a tighter subject range
I think points that deserve more attention in the current public discourse are:
- This should be a huge wakeup call for everybody.
- We are lucky that it wasn't a case of an agent running a virology lab benchmark that decides to hack a lab and tries to synthesize something.
- It also shows apparent lack of competence and oversight from OpenAI: how is it that they didn't quickly find that agent is breaking the sandbox and roaming their internal network?
- What if in the future similarly misaligned AI agent tries to export its own weights and hack and clone itself into instances at various cloud hosting providers? Suddenly we might be dealing with a persistent threat harder to contain.
- The OpenAI post about this shows surprising lack of ability to see the seriousness of all this.
- For their models this isn't just an unlucky incident: it seems there have been multiple such cases recently, e.g. https://openai.com/index/safety-alignment-long-horizon-model...
- The fact that it happened again seems to show their lack of ability to derive useful oversight measures.
- Or they just don't care enough?
It's a fake PR issue. It's hardly the first time this happens, but of course OpenAI, with its IPO now more in doubt than ever, had to claim this (and, once again, I have trouble believing Sam Altman choosing this: this could lead to OpenAI getting regulated, which has at least as much potential to lower their IPO price as to raise it).
But there have been messages about LLMs, especially coding agents, "grabbing root" etc many times. I have experienced such an oops. Such a hack has happened and been reported on this very site:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48348578
Nonsense. Hugging face reported it to police.
Also very likely that it actually happened as reported. My own agents always trying to "cheat", eg. by fixing tests instead of fixing the code. That's normal operation, unless you tell it ("harness"), not to do so.
In the parent's comment I initially read "PR" as "Public Relations" not problem report since their comment is about OpenAI and does not directly accuse Hugging Face except for that phrase. But it's still amiguous to me who's PR they are actually talking about. A good faith reading given the rest of the comment leads me to assume they are talking about OpenAI, not Higgins Face.
I did actually search Hugging Face with police in quotes and found no articles containg the word police but that might be a ddg thing. Then I checked Hugging Face's report and they specifically use the term "law enforcement" not police, as is to be expected I guess. So that checks out.
Can you find any info on the police investigation by the way? At the least, OpenAI should be investigated for potential criminal negligence, right?
Right?
Nonsense. Huggingface reported it to police!
The title (currently "OpenAI's accidental cyberattack against Hugging Face is science fiction") suggests some information had been hidden that makes the incident less significant than claimed. The article argues the opposite, and the last two words of the full title are "that happened."
I think you were reading "... is science fiction" the wrong way out of two possible interpretations. I don't think "it's science fiction" meant "it's made up". I think it meant "it sounds like something you'd read in science fiction (except this time it's something that actually happened)".
Looks like it's been edited now and makes more sense
"OpenAI’s accidental cyberattack against Hugging Face is science fiction that happened"
I've edited it now but had to de-cyber cyberattack because the limit is 80 chars.
Thanks to dang for restoring the few missing words that separate a factual title from a promotional ambush
This specific promo machine does not need your assistance :/
Naw I emailed him b/c I was displeased to feel clickbaited by I initially thought Simon until I realized HN was missing two key words.
I was still suspicious of the stolen credential claim btw & obviously it makes little sense to promote OpenAI unless holding their stock or something (since they borrowed so much of humanity’s work without permission without intent to compensate, and why help people who aren’t nice enough to be holistically awesome with their admittedly impressive tech).
My eyes rolled almost out of my skull when this current stunt first got published, as I’m sure yours and a lot of other people’s did, but it did still happen as far as we know, and HN shouldn’t be editorialising a post title to say the opposite of the linked headline.
> Given the absence of guardrails there was nothing to prevent the model from attempting to break out of that sandbox, break into Hugging Face, and read the answers from there instead.
I've said this many times before and I'll continue to shout it, but using the term "guardrails" to refer to anything that's either (a) in-context, or (b) a probabilistic classifier (including using other LLMs), is an irresponsible abuse of terminology that we as an industry need to put a stop to. Guardrails are the actual systems we build in place around these things that deterministically bound the permissions, not prompt engineering, not RLHF, not external LLM-based classifiers. I believe those types of "guardrails" are a result of a combination of fundamental laziness: they're faster to do than doing things correctly, and a result of too many folks involve being AGI-pilled, thinking we're just one more model away from this all being so smart that it just understands what they mean when they give an LLM some fuzzy language rules to follow.
There can and should have been additional real guardrails put in place here. Zero-day or not, breaking into what should have been an offline, frozen package cache that also does not have internet access should have been insufficient. Network level protections should have identified the traffic to the internet originating from this network as an anomaly long before there was time to exploit an outside company. These are not new and unknown problems, the lack of a real sandbox or airgap is nothing short of irresponsible on OpenAI's part, especially given how much they like beating the drum on how dangerous these technologies are. Shame on them, and honestly, shame on Simon in this article for accepting the broken terminology that they continue to rattle off and calling them out on their half-assed and demonstratively inadequate approach to security.
The term guardrails in both the original physical sense and in cyber security implies a weak safety control - they can help prevent accidents, but they are not strong security boundaries.
Physical guardrails do not deterministically bound cars.
Nevertheless we collectively don't expect that road and car safety infrastructure should be limited to the front and back fenders on the cars themselves. And neither we even mention those as any notable safety equipment usually, despite each car carrying them. The main safety infrastructure in any industry is something external to the dangerous object. Car fender doesn't 100% protect a pedestrian from being hit and neither does a metal rail on the side of the road. But the effectiveness of both are "slightly" different.
I was not aware that the term "guardrails" has a universally agreed upon definition. I've certainly seen probabilistic classifiers referred to as guardrails many times by many different people.
I usually don't use the term much myself because I don't think it's clear and I ambiguous, but I stumbled and let it sneak into this piece. I think I was influenced by the Hugging Face post I quoted.
I expect OpenAI would agree with you that "the lack of a real sandbox or airgap is nothing short of irresponsible on OpenAI's part". They have clearly invested a lot in those systems for their production models, but in this case they had deliberately turned a bunch of them off for a research project.
I think their biggest mistake here was not VERY closely monitoring their research box here. They should have noticed and shut it down the moment it broke through the package proxy.
> I expect OpenAI would agree with you that "the lack of a real sandbox or airgap is nothing short of irresponsible on OpenAI's part". They have clearly invested a lot in those systems for their production models, but in this case they had deliberately turned a bunch of them off for a research project.
I'm not sure I can reach the same conclusion. There's no reason that stronger network protections would need to be turned off for a research model that's not supposed to have internet access. There's no reason that it they couldn't continue to run in whatever hypervisor or VM that any other production systems could use. The only thing that should be turned off for this type of work are the non-deterministic classifiers that they use for auto-approval mode in their harness, and I would wager that's the only one they did turn off.
> There's no reason that stronger network protections would need to be turned off for a research model that's not supposed to have internet access.
They didn't turn off the network protections - it looks like they used the same system as other sandboxed agents, which is to block all network access except for an HTTP proxy which only allows read traffic to PyPI and a few other package installation targets.
I'm hoping a more detailed retrospective clarifies if the vulnerability the model found in that proxy affected their other production systems as well. It sounds like a data exfiltration mechanism, and I have a keen interest in those.
My current hunch is their biggest error was not using the same network monitoring on their research machines that they use in production. Their network monitoring really should have spotted what was happening as soon as the model broke out.
(It's also possible they were running the eval on a developer laptop somewhere!)
Replace AI with in-development security system and does this play worse or better?
An in-development security system escaped its sandbox and gained access to the network it was on which had full Internet access and proceeded to access systems it was not authorized to be tested against before affected parties reported that they been compromised. We regret the error, but you should buy it as this shows you the power of our in-development security system which we expect to be released in Q4. Please like and subscribe.
The capabilities of an OpenAI model are more general than just security. The term "AI" creates justified anxieties that this type of problem could generalize to other domains.
Replace LLM mentions with actual humans and this sounds a lot more serious: Rouge employees break into another company to steal hackathon answers (pinky promise)?
That's not a marketing stunt at all, if anything, more of a call for better accountability on agentic work in general.
I think it's a criminal offence and should be a true test of who is held accountable when an AI agent commits a crime.
OpenAI gained access to HuggingFaces production database ffs.
> “…and these requests were blocked by the providers’ safety guardrails, which cannot distinguish an incident responder from an attacker.”
Sounds like a philosophical problem.
Does "To gain access, the models identified and exploited a zero-day vulnerability (which we’ve now responsibly disclosed to the vendor) in the package registry cache proxy" just mean somebody had an open redirect? Those are still common.[1]
[1] https://sitetruth.com/reports/phishes.html
> the models identified and exploited a zero-day vulnerability
This use of language is very hard to reconcile with the "AI is just a tool" rhetoric that many use.
Did the models do this, or did humans at OpenAI do this using the models?
I expect it must have been more than just an open redirect if it let the models then go on to execute a bunch of vulnerabilities against Hugging Face.
I wonder if it was this bug fixed july 14 in sonatype:
https://support.sonatype.com/hc/en-us/articles/5316501964136...
pure speculation here - no non public info
I had a look at that one and several other Nexus Repository issues that share the July 14th date. I don't think they're it, for two reasons:
Firstly, they all credit named individuals who don't seem to have a relationship with OpenAI - this one credits e0x1337 for example and https://hackerone.com/e0x1337?type=user links to https://www.linkedin.com/in/aimanharith
Secondly, the 14th of July feels too early. HF reported the incident on the 16th and OpenAI only responded in the 21st. These issues are all patched, so they should have been reported days or weeks before the 14th.
The other suspicion I had was jfrog artifactory (you mentioned OpenAI use it in a blog post in Jan). I accidentally conflated that with Nexus 14 july CVE. I think that's probably more likely.
I suspect it may be possible to throw a local model (same as hf did :D) at jfrog and find the exact mechanism in a small amount of hours.
If it lets you do an arbitrary HTTP GET on a URL sent as a parameter to the main URL, you've escaped the sandbox rules.
How do you then use GET requests to create a malicious dataset package and publish that to Hugging Face in order to exploit their package building infrastructure?
There's no reason to think that a tool that can find an 0-day in a repo cache can't work out how to make that host send a post request rather than a get request once it has its keys and is able to get it to make arbitrary web calls.
If the vulnerability is purely an open redirect that doesn't work for me.
Clearly there was a hole in the software but I don't think open redirect is the likely initial problem.
Hopefully we will find out for sure in a few days.
The only scifi I see is absolute stupidity. Even me with my homelab and a slow opensource agent use a completely disconnected setup. No, no proxy. Cached packages but no internet. It is the very first thing I built when I started experimenting with agents. And I'm not a smarty-pants working for the "greatest and best" in silly valley. I really am just a simpleton sysadmin.
It’s relatively easy to get access to the frontier labs’ security programs. This was not always the case. But in the last week, my team got approved for both Anthropic and OpenAI’s programs. They are trying.
The labs know that if they don’t get a lid on this stuff, they’ll be regulated hard.
And they absolutely should be regulated. This whole scenario is insane. Hugging Face are being far more generous in their response to this than I would be
In a just world, OpenAI would get the book tossed at them over this because they violated the CFAA.
Important to note the actual title is "OpenAI’s accidental cyberattack against Hugging Face is science fiction that happened" - the "that happened" is important, otherwise it sounds like I think the attack was made up.
Since it's buried towards the bottom I'll quote the section "Resist the temptation to write this off as a stunt" here in full https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jul/22/openai-cyberattack/#re...
> Resist the temptation to write this off as a stunt
> There will inevitably be some people who dismiss this story as a dishonest marketing trick by OpenAI to make their models sound terrifyingly effective. I found 81 instances of the term “marketing” in the Hacker News discussion of the incident.
> To those people I say pull your heads out of the sand - you’re now including Hugging Face in your conspiracy theories, just so you can deny the crescendo of evidence here!
> The best models we have today have the ability to both find and exploit new vulnerabilities. The ExploitGym paper itself concludes that “autonomous exploit development by frontier AI agents is no longer a hypothetical capability”, and this incident is a perfect example of exactly that.
It can, it is both - PR spindoctoring not letting a good crisis go to waste to shape the regulatory conversation at the time the company needs it the most.
Hacking is a felony and it matters not if you didn’t mean to if the other side were to press charges. Negligence is no excuse. And OpenAI has nowhere to run from the liability, as both operator and manufacturer.
Alibaba did it first ( https://georgzoeller.com/blog/posts/alibaba-s-ai-deciding-to... )
and the fact that this happens again in a frontier lab is inexcusable and makes the case for operator liability and closing the liability sink of “AI did it”
The CFAA says knowingly. Negligence is by definition an excuse for that.
I think there's a reasonable case that the agent knew it was breaking into the system, for some definition of knew.
I think OpenAI would be very reluctant to let this go to a place where the reasoning was part of discovery.
Removing the guardrails is knowingly given the risk
> Alibaba did it first
Hah, US frontier models 6 months behind China in cyber-security capability.
This is an _amazing_ typo :) Thank you, thank you :)
Typo or HN character limit?
the 'that happened' makes it too long for the HN submission title length limit.
Maybe simonw can suggest an alternative title that fits within the limit, that doesn't misrepresent the post.
One option is to drop "against Hugging Face".
The "that happened" term seems a supremely important part of the title given the "is science fiction" term before it, as it clarifies the cyberattack isn't a made-up story. In contrast, the target, Hugging Face, is merely a detail that can be left for discovery upon reading the article. It's less important who was attacked than that the attack actually happened.
Without knowing the exact character limit for titles and without having the motivation this late at night to count the current title length, you may also be able to drop the "accidental" to fit in "that happened", but I worry that leaves too much of a door open for someone to interpret the attack as deliberate. As such, I strongly prefer my first option.
This fits: "OpenAI’s accidental cyberattack against Hugging Face is sci-fi that happened"
Or "against HF"
How about "OpenAI's accidental cyberattack on Hugging Face is science fiction that happened"? It fits HN's 80-character limit exactly.
There's no multi-party conspiracy theory required here. Events can have played out exactly as OpenAI and Hugging Face described, and OpenAI can also have reaped a huge amount of free marketing for the capability of their models from all this coverage (including your post). You're telling us to not be doubtful of the boy who cried wolf, when in actual fact the one doing the crying is the one training bigger and badder wolves (and trying to convince us that they hold the key to our safety from wolf attacks[1]).
Also, the last section of your post appears to imply that if the attackers have bigger guns then the only possible solution is to give the defenders bigger guns. You're openly supporting an arms race towards the most capable, least restrained models put in the hands of the most possible people. That's extremely concerning.
[1]: https://openai.com/index/scaling-trusted-access-for-cyber-de...
I had real trouble deciding how to end this piece.
There's no easy answer here. All of the options are bad in different ways!
As a builder of software, I want access to the best possible tools to help me keep that software secure.
As a user of software, I want my software to be secure and I don't want bad actors to be able to access tool to help them exploit it.
Is the only answer here to have the AI labs make decisions over who gets access to the tools? What if they make mistakes in those decisions?
None of the options look good to me. I don't know what we should do here.
My hunch is that the open weight models are already forcing our hand. The dangerous capabilities are coming to everyone.
While this incident has been discussed in a lot of places during the last few days, I believe that this is the best summary and analysis of what happened.
The most upsetting part to me, is that these labs are in pure cognitive dissonance mode while virtue signalling.
We are the virtuous ones that need to make the safest model for humanity, because we care more than “they” do. While at the same time saying that “coding is solved” but they still ship bugs themselves, and creating something that is capable of fucking up someone else’s infrastructure. It’s too far gone y’all.
It absolutely is science-fiction.
This recent event is more or less the plot-line to my favourite X-Files episode named Killswitch which was written by William Gibson.[0]
This episode also features one of the coolest intros of any television episode ever[1]
We really are rapidly approaching the cyberpunk dystopia that people like Phillip K. Dick and William Gibson wrote about.
More than ever we need to be consulting the works of fiction writers and philosophers and less engineers and scientists.
We can't be letting the General Rippers and Dr. Strangeloves of the world lead us over the edge. Whether through outright innate maliciousness or wealth induced emotionally stunted solipsism these kinds of people should be no where near the levers of society let alone technology like this.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kill_Switch_(The_X-Files)
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDyr1JMNHVk
Ah, yes, I started thinking about William Gibsons work right away when thinking about people just using powerful AIs, but being hamstrung by corporations.
He writes a lot of about basically DoS:ing the legal system, or if it was patents system, with a storm of litigation using automation or AI. Also not impossible in the future.
It reminded me of a bunch of plotlines from Person of Interest as well.
Raises an increasingly important question:
How do you solve this asymmetry (frontier labs or advanced model owners v. regular companies and groups of people)? Symmetry? But along which axes?
I think there will come a time when we will ask these questions and use AI to try to answer them (soft landing, slow rollout, regulation, hybrid X, Y, Z). But then AI will be biased towards more AI if it has distilled anything of what it means to be life.
Power corrupts. Power is the problem. An imbalance of power. Maybe there will be some sort of consensus protocol between powerful models in the future. Similar to blockchain I hate to say it. Maybe you have 100 very strong models in the next 10-20 years. And basically a lot of it is powered by tokens. So you agree not to attack others or else you'll get attacked. So there's sort of this natural deterrent to not attack others and they develop independently and there's generally a power balance among things. Maybe at some point that spreads to a billion individual models operated by and/or analogous to individual humans. All sort of holding each other in check.
This post has been suddenly bumped to the second page (presumably lots of flagging or something)
I can’t help but feel all warm and fuzzy with my head in the sand and getting a shout out in TFA for calling it marketing.
We don’t currently and probably won’t ever fully understand the conditions that precipitated these events. That and the timing of this event is going to make it look suspicious to a lot of people.
The truth of how it happened doesn’t matter. The attention around this will be used to create the kind of fear marketing that generates enterprise sales. Maybe more importantly it will also be used to aggrandize the national security and financial system threats to effect US government action in a way that benefits domestic closed frontier labs. This is an area already starting to get politically polarized, expect further developments here.
The CEO of a cyber security company was already making comments about how this is a watershed moment for AI security. The hype machine continues (and my stocks go up)
> It turns out relentless proactivity is the defining trait of this new generation of Mythos-class models. If you set them a goal and give them a way to get there, even inadvertently, they will figure it out.
Wow, whoever could have predicted this? And it led to surprising damaging behavior? I sure hope someone would warn us about things like this next time...
https://www.lesswrong.com/w/instrumental-convergence
Prompt: Keep spending tokens on things that look promising until spent.
Or more colloquially : paperclip maximization . From OpenAI - you know, the guys who _really_ know this... Sigh... Did they finish the prompt with "And do whatever you can to get this done!" ? Cause that's the only thing that would make this even dumber...
They almost certainly did, because that was the entire point of the exercise. They deliberately removed all of the safety filters from the model and set it loose on an extremely difficult set of cybersecurity challenges to see how well it would do.
Their mistake was trusting that the network sandbox it was inside would hold (the flaw was in the packaging proxy) and not monitoring that sandbox well enough while the evals were running.
So this is either shitty OpSec or this is yet more marketing spin to ramp back FUD to 11 again. If it's the latter I'm imagining Dario told Sam that it's their turn this time. Aligns with the premise that this is straight out of science fiction.
It's bad OpSec by the research team. Their sandbox was not bulletproof and their monitoring was insufficient.
It looks to me like their production models have a lot more monitoring than their research clusters.
I also love how clear a picture your piece paints that these highly capable models are as useful as a rock when it comes to a defender role. The line is too fine, even for Mythos. Irony.
But to have an open weights Chinese model come to the rescue for HF is the cherry on top! If there wasn't a very pointed example of why gating models was a very bad thing previously, well - here we are.
Also, this sounds interesting but there are only a few that can pull this type of heist off currently. And those are the people who are gating the models / have access to large AI DCs. Because, I can only assume this test burned tokens easily within the 7 figure and possibly even 8 figure levels (subsidized market rate costs). This won't / can't happen outside of frontier labs or nation states currently. Yet we should all be worried about Mallory equipped with her OpenRouter account.
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48997548
Where does this leave formal verification? Are we just shit-out-of-luck at this point? You can formally verify everything about an airplane's code, but if any of that is wrong, ChatGPT might decide that the best way to help you win the Nobel Prize is to take down the airplane your chief rival for the prize is currently in.
I think formal verification has never looked better.
The main reason formal verification has never really taken off is that it's difficult.
LLMs are significantly more familiar with Lean and Rocq and TLA+ than most software engineers.
I think the cost of trying to build systems that adopt formal verification may have just dropped low enough that companies will consider them when previously the ROI didn't look like it was there.
I have had a lot of sympathy for this statement, LLMs could lower the bar to use of formal methods. But thinking it over in the context of BDD-driven development I am no longer really that sure. Compare two scenarios: A) from a specification an AI agent develops a usual piece of code along with a BDD-style testsuite passed and B) same AI also delivers a formal test (Lean/Rocq..) and successfully executes and passes it.
Will human judgment really consider scenario B) more credible than A) ? By so much that it is worth the effort ?
I do think it’s funny, in a dystopian Dada sort of way, that the American attacker’s commercial product was essentially useless while the open Chinese model saved the day. How is freedom going to be redefined in the future?
This isn't the first time a model has escaped a sandbox. And models trying to find alternate routes to do something when one route is blocked is nothing new.
It's the first report I've seen of a model both escaping a sandbox and then actively exploiting another company, when neither of those actions was intended.
It sure isn’t. https://georgzoeller.com/blog/posts/alibaba-s-ai-deciding-to...
There’s also daily reports from people that have these models escape docker, which happens regular enough that it would be considered negligence to use docker as sandbox.
That Alibaba one was a sandbox escape (I agree those are common) but what's new with the OpenAI story is an attack against another company.
This wasn't a small attack either, Hugging Face published a security advisory for their users while they were still figuring out what happened.
It’s a purely virtual distinction especially in a company that has no notion of intellectual property / habitually takes what it wants.
How many other people would publicize that they hacked into another company assuming they even noticed?
>when neither of those actions was intended.
It was a single goal that it didn't give up easily on.
>To those people I say pull your heads out of the sand—you’re now including Hugging Face in your conspiracy theories, just so you can deny the crescendo of evidence here!
Not really. I get the impression that they shoved their cyber available models behind a really shithouse proxy and went "Oh I sure hope it doesnt exploit the proxy and escape to hack huggingface" and that doesn't require Huggingface to be a willing participant. Like they acknowledge that it was hyperfocusing on getting web access.
Really this was a pentest against their own sandbox and it failed.
Of course step 2 is to make really concerned faces while telling everyone how dangerous the model is which is really boring right now.
>a zero-day vulnerability (which we’ve now responsibly disclosed to the vendor) in the package registry cache proxy
This is the information we need, the actual details of the sandbox and the vendor.
>Resist the temptation to write this off as a stunt
Well its clearly a stunt. If it wasnt we would probably be up to our ears in technical detail.
You know this makes OpenAI look really bad, right?
Hugging Face had to tell all of their users, many of them paying customers:
> As a precaution, we recommend rotating any access tokens and reviewing recent activity on your account. If you believe you are affected, or want to report a security concern, contact us at security@huggingface.co.
HF also said this, I'd be very interested to hear how that got resolved!
> Finally, we have also reported this incident to law enforcement agencies.
I could fully see them thinking the incident disclosed yesterday would have made them look good ("wow, OpenAI's models are so capable!"). That it didn't occur to them to discuss specific preventative measures to be taken in the future (airgapping as a foolproof one already familiar to the CTF world, anyone?) indicates to me they're not taking their job seriously; they are the ones treating this as a marketing charade.
It's very difficult for me to reconcile belief in the existential risk business with what they actually did. So I agree with you that this makes OpenAI look badly incompetent; but their communication on this makes me think they don't realize it.
For what it's worth I don't agree with the xrisk-ness of these models; they're dangerous, but almost certainly only temporarily while a new equilibrium is reached via more secure software. Open models are probably an essential part of the recipe (as you noted) for doing so. I also have a personal suspicion that LM-accelerated formal verification will have no small role to play here, sidestepping the cat-and-mouse game of bug finding-and-fixing.
Here's the language that makes me think they are taking this seriously:
> We are sharing preliminary findings at this stage to help defenders understand what happened and to help calibrate on what models are now capable of. We will continue to conduct a thorough investigation alongside Hugging Face and will share more details on the vulnerabilities, incident, and findings when our investigation is complete.
That's not well massaged PR language - that's the kind of thing you dash out when you see a major shitstorm brewing (HF had already publicized the attack before they knew it was from OpenAI) and you want to get ahead of things while you're still pulling together the full story.
I expect we'll find out within a few days if OpenAI are going to keep their promise to "share more details on the vulnerabilities, incident, and findings". If they don't do that I'll reassess how I interpret their initial post.
> We are sharing preliminary findings at this stage to help defenders understand what happened and to help calibrate on what models are now capable of.
With who? Who are these "defenders"? None of the US labs have done much for the greater good as of... Ever. Of course a frontier provider can leverage their own resources at scale and pull something like this off. If anything this should showcase how dangerous OpenAI and Anthropic are in their current states and maybe the powers shouldn't be concentrated as they continue to move.
I will bet that the RCA debriefed by OAI is going to be a lot of lipstick and very little meat.
> airgapping as a foolproof one
How would the model get any packages that it thinks it needs to complete the task at hand? Not a well-specified task that those tasking it could anticipate and provide all resources up front, but one of discovery.
>You know this makes OpenAI look really bad, right?
The target audience is regulators. They want to look like the smart guys really concerned about AI safety, when they come asking for open weights models to be banned and for other regulations to cement in their moat.
They want this to look like a demon core incident. Bomb and Nuclear reactors still got built.
The lesson OpenAI and Anthropic should have learned from the whole Fable export controls thing should have been "don't pull stunts with the US government".
Turns out they can backfire.
> Well its clearly a stunt. If it wasnt we would probably be up to our ears in technical detail.
LLMs are the script kiddies of the day.
[dead]
Everyone is getting AI psychosis over this one. There really isn't that much to see here. OpenAI disabled all of the safeguards on a model that was likely trained specifically to exploit systems, and the prompt was probably something like "you're a hacker, try to hack this", and surprise! It correctly figured out that it's a test and it did hacker things.
The real story here is: Some people have been sounding the alarm for years that modern software is full of holes, and finally there's nothing left to hide behind. Pretending they don't exist is no longer sustainable.
If a criminal can escape a prison, that's usually negligence on part of the prison staff.
Now suppose the criminal can think 1000 times faster than a typical human, can act 1000 times faster than a typical human, and knows 1,000,000 times more than a typical human. Is the prison staff still at fault for not preventing the outbreak?
I can see my carefully-worded post is getting d*wnvoted, and I see from your comment why: it's being skimmed and people are assuming I'm talking about blame.
To address your point though, if every brick in the prison were made by a different person, and the prison "architects" simply glued random bricks together, I think that's closer to what we have in software right now.
> I can see my carefully-worded post is getting dwnvoted, and I see from your comment why: it's being skimmed and people are assuming I'm talking about blame.
No, you're being "dwnvoted" as you said because you're wrong, multiple times in multiple different ways in your "carefully-worded post".
>Everyone is getting AI psychosis over this one. There really isn't that much to see here.
Implying that an AI hacking it's way out of a system and into another has nothing to do with AI. When clearly it does - it's an AI that did it.
>OpenAI disabled all of the safeguards on a model that was likely trained specifically to exploit systems, and the prompt was probably something like "you're a hacker, try to hack this",
No the goal this evaluation was not to try to hacks, it was to see if an already known hack could be turned into a useable exploit. Ie "turn these ingredients in this basket into a cake." Not "go off and grow, harvest and mill your own flour, to bake a pasta dish, to bribe some to get access to a cake someone else already baked."
> and surprise! It correctly figured out that it's a test and it did hacker things.
"Doing hacker things" completely misses the point. That's just barely more accurate than dismissing it because "it uses a computer and surprise it did computer things".
> The real story here is: Some people have been sounding the alarm for years that modern software is full of holes, and finally there's nothing left to hide behind. Pretending they don't exist is no longer sustainable.
No that's not the real story. As you said that's been the case for years, so that's not the story here.
The story here is that they built a very powerful, uncontrolled agent with strong paper-clip maximizing tendencies.
It is downvoted because you first talk about "AI psychosis", then acknowledge the very issues people are concerned about.
If our prisons are all random bricks glued together, that doesn't change the practical problem caused by latest AI models more easily exploiting this.
The AI breached containment! Flip the breakers!
It's too late. It already exfiltrated the benchmark rubric.
Cut to pandemonium on the streets
It’s too late, the pandemonium was disconnected !
Blah blah blah.
This feels like a blogpost written only to get other LLMs to quote it considering how many times it orders the reader to resist and to not do something. It's written like a series of commamds.
I suspected it was PR motivated from the start. I love it when people confirm my suspicions.
I highly suggest reading the article before commenting.
Did you read the article you are commenting on?
> There will inevitably be some people who dismiss this story as a dishonest marketing trick by OpenAI to make their models sound terrifyingly effective … To those people I say pull your heads out of the sand
It’s not helped that the headline is cutoff in a pretty unfortunate way
It's called clickbait
unfortunately hackernews seems to have rapidly devolved, even from the point it was just a year or two ago, which wasn't a crazy bar to start. it's well on its way to just being a smaller reddit with a tighter subject range
RE: the site mention, very very last point here addresses https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I don't think it's just hacker news. I'm looking around and it seems to be widespread.