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Be skeptical of OpenAI's rogue hacker agent story

theguardian.com

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Re: Be skeptical of OpenAI's rogue hacker agent story

#81

Post by hyperpape »

Zsfe510asG wrote: post #2

Finally mainstream news understands. The unfiltered version: 1) The AI failed to solve ExploitGym problems. 2) The OpenAI sandbox is such a horrible hack that the AI managed to escape using standard and well documented script kiddie methods. 3) Huggingface has no security and the AI broke in using standard script kiddie methods. OpenAI and Huggingface covered it up and used it for public relations. That is, if not al…

> Huggingface covered it up

They announced it publicly within days. https://huggingface.co/blog/security-incident-july-2026

Re: Be skeptical of OpenAI's rogue hacker agent story

#82

Post by magicalist »

perching_aix wrote: post #40
bluGill wrote: post #11

I don't care how it happened someone should be arrested for illegal intrusion. Agents don't work on their own, someone is responsible. If nobody else the CEO for allowing something unsupervised. Hugging face also needs someone arrested for not providing security but that is a lesser charge.

> Agents don't work on their own This is factually false: they both can and clearly did operate in an autonomous and unsupervised manner: https://openai.com/index/hugging-face-model-evaluation-secur... This does not require sentience, personhood, a soul, or anything of the sort. It further doesn't mean an erasure of legal responsibility, not in principle, and not in historical practice. I wish people would finally st…

>> Agents don't work on their own

> This is factually false

From your link:

> After investigating, we now know that this particular incident was driven by a combination of OpenAI models...while being internally tested on a benchmark of cyber capabilities.

Someone set up that test and started it. Whether they outsourced the majority of the work in "setting up" and "starting it" to an LLM or not, they still set it in motion. That's not spiritualistic reasoning.

Re: Be skeptical of OpenAI's rogue hacker agent story

#83

Post by hawk_ »

burningChrome wrote: post #33
chis wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AI managed to escape using standard and well documented script kiddie methods. I think truly we don't know enough to say this. OpenAI says their AI found a 0-day exploit in some proxy software they were using but don't give a ton of details. On the Huggingface end we know a little more, they say the AI spun up tons of sandboxes and tested different exploits until it found one that worked.

The lack of details to me means this was an intentional marketing ploy to try and demonstrate the power of their models to show their technology can compete with the likes of Anthropic and DeepMind. They created an experiment they knew would generate the outcome they wanted. It would be the similar to what say car companies do to over hype their cars. "This EV can go over 800 miles on a single charge!" And then at th…

Concluding this was intentional feels a bit of a stretch. But once it happened, yeah the spin masters got to work and coordinated to turn this into +PR.

Re: Be skeptical of OpenAI's rogue hacker agent story

#84

Post by voncheese »

If nothing else, the timing is suspect given the attention and press open weight models are getting over the last few weeks. The releases of Kimi and other models is getting open weight models enough attention that the US government, perhaps pushed by OpenAI and Anthropic, to think about taking action against these models for security concerns.

Good to see that more neutral companies (Microsoft and Meta to name two) are pushing back against US government involvement:

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/24/nvidia-microsoft-meta-open-w...

Re: Be skeptical of OpenAI's rogue hacker agent story

#85

Post by JoshTriplett »

burningChrome wrote: post #33
chis wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AI managed to escape using standard and well documented script kiddie methods. I think truly we don't know enough to say this. OpenAI says their AI found a 0-day exploit in some proxy software they were using but don't give a ton of details. On the Huggingface end we know a little more, they say the AI spun up tons of sandboxes and tested different exploits until it found one that worked.

The lack of details to me means this was an intentional marketing ploy to try and demonstrate the power of their models to show their technology can compete with the likes of Anthropic and DeepMind. They created an experiment they knew would generate the outcome they wanted. It would be the similar to what say car companies do to over hype their cars. "This EV can go over 800 miles on a single charge!" And then at th…

> The lack of details to me means this was an intentional marketing ploy to try and demonstrate the power of their models to show their technology can compete with the likes of Anthropic and DeepMind.

"our model is horribly misaligned and used security exploits to break out of our sandbox and into another company, without being prompted to do so" is not positive marketing.

This is an actual critical problem, not a stunt. We're going to see more of this, and it's going to get much worse.

Re: Be skeptical of OpenAI's rogue hacker agent story

#86

Post by jackb4040 »

dwoosley wrote: post #52

There seems to be three popular ways to view this incident. 1. The way OpenAI seems to want: Their latest LLM is too powerful and can’t be contained without them building in guidelines to the model. 2. OpenAI’s harness and network security controls were unintentionally so bad that it should reflect more poorly on them as a company more than it should reflect positively on their latest model. 3. The whole thing was fa…

> positive for OpenAI

To echo OP's article, these companies have proven time and time again that they DO NOT CARE if people like them, they only care that investors believe their technology is powerful.

Given that, point #2 is not a negative, it's a neutral. It's also fully compatible with point #1.

I know that may seem like a nitpick, but their entire media strategy relies on this. If they can convince you they're taking a risk by disclosing these stories when they're actually not, they can inflate their own credibility.

Point #3 is what actually happened, but it will never be possible to prove. The only hope we have is that a decade in it'll get harder to convince people that the revolution is just around the corner. The fact that we're getting this from the Guardian already is a good sign.

Re: Be skeptical of OpenAI's rogue hacker agent story

#87

Post by meowface »

Zsfe510asG wrote: post #2

Finally mainstream news understands. The unfiltered version: 1) The AI failed to solve ExploitGym problems. 2) The OpenAI sandbox is such a horrible hack that the AI managed to escape using standard and well documented script kiddie methods. 3) Huggingface has no security and the AI broke in using standard script kiddie methods. OpenAI and Huggingface covered it up and used it for public relations. That is, if not al…

The Guardian's article and your reply here are so foolish and absurd that I can only imagine OpenAI employees are cringing but know they can't/shouldn't really say much.

Re: Be skeptical of OpenAI's rogue hacker agent story

#89

Post by famouswaffles »

Analemma_ wrote: post #55
rubyfan wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being a poorly equipped victim still isn’t a crime thankfully. It may or may not be a crime and typically the damaged party is pressing the charges. One would argue there is no actual damage here.

Despite the common misconceptions from TV, the victim "pressing charges" isn't actually a thing in criminal cases: prosecutors can choose to put someone on trial even if the victim doesn't want that. In practice this is somewhat rare, but it certainly can happen. In my reply to tokioyoyo below I laid out why this is one instance where the government should prosecute even if HuggingFace doesn't want it to.

Criminal Cases of 'hacking' require specific intent. What you're asking is that the prosecution attempt to prove Open AI intended to infiltrate Huggingface maliciously, all while the victim is saying 'no harm no foul'.

No offense but prosecutors have better things to do with their time.

Re: Be skeptical of OpenAI's rogue hacker agent story

#90

Post by jackb4040 »

dumberquestions wrote: post #24

There are some reasons the story could be inaccurate in some ways: OAI stands to benefit if people think their models are strong, and they have a history of doing things with dubious ethics (e.g. using data for training against the terms of its creators, abandoning the non profit mission, stealing or attempting to steal Apple IP). But there are also reasons why the story could be true: OAI are admitting that they app…

Investors have rewarded every story of "our models are too powerful to be controlled" since before ChatGPT. Let's stop pretending there is any real financial risk to OpenAI from events of this type. "Alignment research" is a sub-percentage-point fig leaf for them like the solar division at an oil company.
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