Timeline of the OpenAI accidental attack against Hugging Face

From the video:

> [14:00] Jun 11: Highly persistent experimental internal-only model begins training and during this time the SSRF vulnerability has been written to the message board. Other models are aware of it and the message board itself is still functioning and the models are actively communicating using it.

> [16:04] Jul 6: At this point, AI training and evaluations resume. [...] We have cleared the original message board contents.

> [17:04] Jul 8: An internal-only AI model was trained while the message board was originally available and also found this particular path to recreating it. This model creates a new agent message board using directories. Other agents independently find this new message board [...]"

So within about one month of RLVR-ing a 5T+ (10T? larger?) param model, where I would charitably assume only some "agents" / traces of the message board still existed likely by accident / oversight (the systems had been patched, training stopped and restarted by this point), the "internal-only" new model internalises the message board's existence and actively promotes it to the point of it being used to find another exploit. (or 2 days if you go by the latter two timestamps in the video, which is even crazier)

That's.. fast?

I've now watched the video on the idea that your write-up was misleading.

BUT the video is much worse. For two months with highly dangerous agents agents were hacking a service and none of the researchers watched (drank coffee for 2 months, didn't say).

THEN they found the hack, removed the message board.

AND the agents found another way to create a message board, on the same service, and the researchers again - after the agents having hacked a service - do nothing - like monitoring the hacked service or tightening the sandbox.

WOW!

THEN agents hacked OpenAI infrastructure, and the researchers did nothing.

THEN the agents hacked HF.

The video does not explain why the agents run for two months unattended. They claim for model training, but don't explain how letting run agents without proper sandboxes (One might think they had written a small proxy to Artifactory with 'list packages' & 'install package ' to prevent leaks or hacks of the service, but no, their sandbox is no sandbox at all, but security researchers!)

But it makes a nice PR presentation on agent capbilities.

CUI BONO!

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I just find it unbelievable that agents on their own collaborated months after an initial prompt without any guidance or direction towards a goal - which is what your write-up seems to imply with sentences like:

"More agents discover this new informal message board while browsing Artifactory’s file listings, and start reading and writing messages."

"discover this new informal message"

How? Why? What was their original task?

And on the researchers:

If this is highly dangerous work, why wasn't it monitored?

"Beyond a whole lot of online conspiracy theories [...]"

The agents did something 'ABC' then found the informal message board without direction, then collaborated on that months later without any guidance from humans ("like try to hack/exploit ABC").

I personally think putting people who disagree with OpenAI PR to pump the company value in a "conspiracy" box is quite a weak move.

I work with Claude Code daily for a long time now, it never started to work without a prompt or direction. It never idled and then said, "Wait, I could hack Amazon today! Oh there is a message board of other agents who already hacked a way into the internet, how convenient and quite at the right time!"

I do think strong claims need strong evidence.

That’s basically what “pari passu” means.

And of course this also satisfies those who think the best prospect of aligning superintelligence is to be in The Room Where It Happens. Arms races are what make that room exist, after all.

It’s the Yelp protection playbook too. If you don’t play ball, somebody else will control your reputation and livelihood. We live in a dark forest.