Nah, HN told me this whole thing was a marketing stunt by OpenAI.
Anatomy of a Frontier Lab Agent Intrusion: A Timeline of the July 2026 Incident
171–180 of 285 posts
Re: Anatomy of a Frontier Lab Agent Intrusion: A Timeline of the July 2026 Incident
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
Didn't the model initially obtain internet access by discovering a zero-day vulnerability? In any case, I would guess that a lot of unicorn startups like HuggingFace could be hacked by a sufficiently determined script kiddie working at 100x speed. The practical implications of a coming AI hacking wave could be large, even if agents are just doing grunt work really fast. Most organizations suck at security. Seems to m…
The deeper question though is why is someone running a model that’s supposedly so dangerous in an environment that can even get access to the internet. That just appears reckless. There are ways to test supposedly dangerous things. What was on display here looks more amateur hour than serious testing.
My conspiracy theory is they purposely run these scary cyber intrusion tests on low security environments to bolster demand for LLM based cyber research, audits, and tooling.
Re: Anatomy of a Frontier Lab Agent Intrusion: A Timeline of the July 2026 Incident
#173We should be thankful that the model didn't believe the answers lived in the Pentagon, on SIPRNET, the IDF, etc.
I think fear and being scared are starting to become rational emotions. We can assume these models are being used by "nation level attackers/organisations", which basically means US, China, Russia and others are hacking the respective Pentagon's, nuclear orgs, etc. While I do hope all nuclear warfare systems are offline, we're getting way too close to the plot of a lot of sci-fi scripts.
I have heard on podcasts that the way the Russians make plans for the Ukraine war is like this:
There are rooms in the kremlin with no electronics. In these rooms there are paper maps and typewriters and printed reports. People look at the maps and printed paper reports and make plans. Orders are typed up on the typewriters Then trusted couriers take those orders by hand to the front line commanders.
I've also heard on podcasts there is a weekly flight back and forth between Beijing and Moscow. On that flight are a Russian military officer and Chinese military officer. Their sole job is to carry handwritten notes back and forth between Putin and Xi Jinping. There is one of each so they can watch each other.
All of this ensures that there is nothing for the west to hack at "the Russian Pentagon".
The west may have to adopt tactics like these for our plans to stay secret.
Re: Anatomy of a Frontier Lab Agent Intrusion: A Timeline of the July 2026 Incident
#174> the agent happened to escape via a 0-day exploit from the package proxy cache to access the internet > The agent found an unsecured, user-hosted public endpoint designed to allow running arbitrary code for CyberGym-style tasks on third-party sandbox infrastructure (Modal) > On this external sandbox, the agent abused an existing CyberGym execution harness [...] The agent repurposed this harness to run arbitrary shel…
A trend I've noticed in results from AI search (not just LLMs) is that they often look obvious or hard to miss in retrospect. But finding them by oneself is more difficult. I personally experience this when looking at engine lines in chess or go. I have also noticed this description in AI-generated proofs or counterexamples to certain theorems. So while we can say, yes, it found public endpoints or poorly configured…
Treasure maps are easy to follow
The scrappy adventurer traverses difficult terrain
and the well capitalized militia group always flies in too, with ease
Re: Anatomy of a Frontier Lab Agent Intrusion: A Timeline of the July 2026 Incident
#175Where are all the "this was just a marketing stunt" people now?
They won't admit they're wrong for a long time, because denial in the face of an abhorrently scary future is very instinctual. There are people still fighting against evidence of climate change which is less severe...
Not everything you are ever told is true. Being sceptical when presented with no evidence is what critical thinking is about.
And "this is what happened to us" is a story. It doesn't become evidence for itself.
Re: Anatomy of a Frontier Lab Agent Intrusion: A Timeline of the July 2026 Incident
#176One thing I haven't seen discussed is the significance of the specific test the agent was running - ExploitGym.
> ExploitGym is a large-scale, realistic benchmark built from real-world vulnerabilities across userspace programs, Google's V8 engine, and the Linux kernel, designed to evaluate AI agents' ability to develop exploits.
How likely is it that attempting ExploitGym polluted the model's context enough that it decided all kinds of hacking was acceptable to produce a valid result? Or would the same model in the same setup (safety filters removed) have behaved the same way even on a more mundane test?
Re: Anatomy of a Frontier Lab Agent Intrusion: A Timeline of the July 2026 Incident
#177> the agent happened to escape via a 0-day exploit from the package proxy cache to access the internet > The agent found an unsecured, user-hosted public endpoint designed to allow running arbitrary code for CyberGym-style tasks on third-party sandbox infrastructure (Modal) > On this external sandbox, the agent abused an existing CyberGym execution harness [...] The agent repurposed this harness to run arbitrary shel…
And they are still people who will say that Sol/Mythos should be released to everyone without being neutered.
Re: Anatomy of a Frontier Lab Agent Intrusion: A Timeline of the July 2026 Incident
#178I'm not a security person, but how realistic is it to assume that you can carry on trying to exploit a company for days with a fairly large volume of activity, and not get detected?
What is faily large volume of activity? A few thousand actions in a span of multiple days isn't going to be a blip for a company of HuggingFace's scale, especially if the agent was executing the attack from multiple IP addresses.
Re: Anatomy of a Frontier Lab Agent Intrusion: A Timeline of the July 2026 Incident
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
A trend I've noticed in results from AI search (not just LLMs) is that they often look obvious or hard to miss in retrospect. But finding them by oneself is more difficult. I personally experience this when looking at engine lines in chess or go. I have also noticed this description in AI-generated proofs or counterexamples to certain theorems. So while we can say, yes, it found public endpoints or poorly configured…
To put this into game theory lingo, I think this is because the “branching factor” for any kind of research or exploit is extremely large. So looking backwards it doesn’t seem complicated, but looking forwards there are an enormous number of possible next actions. Similar to finding a filament for lightbulbs, it might seem obvious to use tungsten, but at the time it wasn’t and Edison searched thousands of materials.
Tesla's critique of Edison was valid though (That he would rather spend a long time empirically testing things, rather than use a bit of theory and knowledge to narrow the search field).
Re: Anatomy of a Frontier Lab Agent Intrusion: A Timeline of the July 2026 Incident
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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"...
Hopefully there will be a criminal investigation. Or the government will create some sort of agency to investigate incidents like this.
Plenty of existing agencies could claim jurisdiction on this. Ultimately the outcome will be decided by the white house (hint: nothing will happen).