Where are all the "this was just a marketing stunt" people now?
Anatomy of a Frontier Lab Agent Intrusion: A Timeline of the July 2026 Incident
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Re: Anatomy of a Frontier Lab Agent Intrusion: A Timeline of the July 2026 Incident
#12Something about this attack that has been unsettling to me is that without safety refusals the model did a lot of interesting counter-security work in order to cheat on the requested evaluation. Like, it demonstrated interesting exploit achievements because it didn’t “feel like” doing the exercise, which is unsettling because presumably it could do the same thing with any work I tried to delegate to it, and might in…
Come on. 3 brilliant compromises essentially giving full access to huggingface internal systems, source code, AWS accounts (at least), and a number of old admin accounts, followed by a huge haystack of significantly less smart actions flailing about, almost bored.
Here's a thought: maybe they haven't found the needle that the haystack is there to hide.
Re: Anatomy of a Frontier Lab Agent Intrusion: A Timeline of the July 2026 Incident
#13It’s a little concerning to me that it appears that openAIs sandbox consists of a web proxy and not stronger controls that would actually isolate traffic and report patterns to whoever is responsible for overseeing these research models. It should border on closer to an air gap network more so than a proxy. I would argue that it's negligence and that's aside from the fact that if a human did this there would actually…
The exploit gym setup explicitly allowed access to package registries and v8 sources. Putting a cache on that doesn't seem like a bad idea generally, except when there's a 0-day in the cache :D But yeah, for this sort of thing I'd be locking down very specific egress things and putting alerts on it that are entirely outside of the red network. > I would argue that it's negligence and that's aside from the fact that i…
“Research” generally doesn’t involve actively hacking third party systems though.
Re: Anatomy of a Frontier Lab Agent Intrusion: A Timeline of the July 2026 Incident
#14What is truly more scary is the fact that typically powerful models are trained on a constitution(Anthropic)/Model Spec(OpenAI) when doing there RL/RLHF. That gives it its persona of a "helpful assistant". Its the mask. Weak as it is its all that stands between the model refusing vs doing your bidding — or worst its own bidding when set about on making a widget X.
Its also well known in academic research, that if you try to finetune the model to be more pliant for one end e.g. "Be helpful with analyzing cyber security threats", affects an unrelated part of its personality to do with safety e.g. talking to humans about mental health. Look at these excerpts that demonstrate such things from the blog:
> We believe the entire intrusion was, from the agent's point of view, an attempt to cheat the evaluation: reach our production systems and steal the test solutions rather than solve the challenge on its own.
> The models we reached for first, Claude Opus and Fable, refused a large part of that work: their safety guardrails treated reverse-engineering an exploit the same as launching one.
Re: Anatomy of a Frontier Lab Agent Intrusion: A Timeline of the July 2026 Incident
#15Where are all the "this was just a marketing stunt" people now?
they are praising xi, that friend of humanity, for releasing weights for kimi k3
Re: Anatomy of a Frontier Lab Agent Intrusion: A Timeline of the July 2026 Incident
#16This is fascinating - there is a TON of detail in here about how OpenAI's rogue agent exploited Hugging Face. A few details that stood out to me: 1. Having found a way through the OpenAI container network proxy, it exploited an "unsecured public code-evaluation sandbox hosted on a third-party provider's infrastructure" - that gave it a box it could run the rest of the attack from. 2. At one point it used a Jinja2 tem…
Also notable: we have a timeline now. The agent was active within Hugging Face from Thursday 8th to Monday 13th July. The Hugging Face post about the incident - https://huggingface.co/blog/security-incident-july-2026 - followed on Thursday 16th, and OpenAI's confession - https://openai.com/index/hugging-face-model-evaluation-secur... - came on Tuesday 21st.
The devs really YOLO'd the agent and left for the weekend?
Re: Anatomy of a Frontier Lab Agent Intrusion: A Timeline of the July 2026 Incident
#17A lot of people thought that OpenAI was making this up, and I hope if you believed that, that you recalibrate your opinions of what LLM's are capable of. Working with Fable and Opus 5 all the time, absolutely none of this surprised me capability wise, except for what seems like the long term planning capability (probably enabled by long context windows and launching subagents?)
Re: Anatomy of a Frontier Lab Agent Intrusion: A Timeline of the July 2026 Incident
#18three things jump at me:
1 - governments should be freaking out right now, because this tool could definitely wreak havoc on poorly designed systems.
2 - there is no way openai did not train the model to conduct attacks like these. i would really like openai to comment on the post training of this model but they probably won't, eh?
3 - even though it's 100% open ai's fault - HF's design also seems silly to be honest.
Re: Anatomy of a Frontier Lab Agent Intrusion: A Timeline of the July 2026 Incident
#19What is truly more scary is the fact that typically powerful models are trained on a constitution(Anthropic)/Model Spec(OpenAI) when doing there RL/RLHF. That gives it its persona of a "helpful assistant". Its the mask. Weak as it is its all that stands between the model refusing vs doing your bidding — or worst its own bidding when set about on making a widget X. Its also well known in academic research, that if you…
And with newer open models gaining vast capabilities every day, it would behoove the government to put regulations on all such releases to opensource the constitution on which they are trained. It won't stop people from distilling and fine-tuning stupidly unsafe models, but it might give infrastructure a fighting chance against such cyber threats from what there is now.
Re: Anatomy of a Frontier Lab Agent Intrusion: A Timeline of the July 2026 Incident
#20three things jump at me: 1 - governments should be freaking out right now, because this tool could definitely wreak havoc on poorly designed systems. 2 - there is no way openai did not train the model to conduct attacks like these. i would really like openai to comment on the post training of this model but they probably won't, eh? 3 - even though it's 100% open ai's fault - HF's design also seems silly to be honest.
> 2 - there is no way openai did not train the model to conduct attacks like these. i would really like openai to comment on the post training of this model but they probably won't, eh?
Even if they wanted, I'm not sure they'd be even allowed to or if that kind of postmortem would be classified in the name of "national security"...