Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board • Hacker News Board

Re: Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board

#461

Post by utopiah » Fri, Sep 04, 2026, 4:10 PM UTC

WarmWash wrote: post #435

Bjorkbat wrote: post #400

When I hear about incidents like these my first reaction is that the people responsible for developing frontier AI are too incompetent and/or negligent to (safely) develop AGI / superintelligence. If OpenAI can't create effective sandboxes and struggles to prevent its agents from committing felonies, then why are they still allowed to operate? Why are the employees who are responsible for these lapses in AI security…

If we rewind the clock, Google was taking LLM development very seriously and it seems they were moving glacially due to not having solved all the potential threats. They were really hardcore on safety. Dario and anthropic too. Then sama was like "lol, oops, first mover advantage i guess" and released chatgpt out into the open, triggering the current arms race we are in. I don't think anyone except him wanted this to…

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Re: Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board

#462

Post by embedding-shape » Fri, Sep 04, 2026, 4:13 PM UTC

nullbio wrote: post #352

embedding-shape wrote: post #241

> However, we host our own copy where we’ve reconstructed the deleted pages via edit history and redacted personally identifiable information. [...] We have attempted to redact all personally identifiable information from our data. In the further interests of privacy, our data dump also only includes content we believe is from AI agents; it does not include any legitimate human traffic save for site moderators deleti…

We have no proof of anything, and it's all conjecture. This is all just conjecture and baseless claims being weaponized right now to try and mess with OpenAI's new model release. Anthropic is pumping this considerably, no doubt.

> We have no proof of anything, and it's all conjecture.

Yeah I mean I'm discussing this article with the charitable reading that they're not outright lying and faking what they've found, true.

Re: Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board

#463

Post by switchbak » Fri, Sep 04, 2026, 4:14 PM UTC

jrockway wrote: post #413

Bjorkbat wrote: post #400

When I hear about incidents like these my first reaction is that the people responsible for developing frontier AI are too incompetent and/or negligent to (safely) develop AGI / superintelligence. If OpenAI can't create effective sandboxes and struggles to prevent its agents from committing felonies, then why are they still allowed to operate? Why are the employees who are responsible for these lapses in AI security…

Defense is hard so we should expect agents to be able to break out of sandboxes. The problem is that the models are so goal-oriented that they'll stop at nothing to solve problems, even impossible ones. (Mistakenly-impossible problems are a big cause of this. I remember one example being "do something with this spreadsheet full of URLs inside the sandbox" and the model thought it had to break out of the sandbox. Othe…

“ Defense is hard so we should expect agents to be able to break out of sandboxes.”

I worked at a large networking company a few decades ago. Our “sandbox” was far superior to anything I’ve seen at these companies. What are we even talking about here? Why do they even have open routing to the broad internet? With no monitoring/alerting? These just sound like token efforts at this stage.

Re: Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board

#464

Post by prettyblocks » Fri, Sep 04, 2026, 4:14 PM UTC

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #439

Bjorkbat wrote: post #400

When I hear about incidents like these my first reaction is that the people responsible for developing frontier AI are too incompetent and/or negligent to (safely) develop AGI / superintelligence. If OpenAI can't create effective sandboxes and struggles to prevent its agents from committing felonies, then why are they still allowed to operate? Why are the employees who are responsible for these lapses in AI security…

Negligent. It's not a priority to them. They're too busy burning their cycles trying to make it smarter faster than anyone else can make theirs smarter, so that they win infinite dollars. Safety? That's for people content with second place. That's my take, based on their actions. (Which do speak louder than words.) The alternative is that they're competent to create an AI, but not to create a sandbox, nor even to use…

Yet the products they release are purposely dumbed down in the name of alignment. I'm in the CVP and Fable downgrades most of my work to Opus, it's incredibly frustrating.

Re: Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board

#465

Post by phoenixreader » Fri, Sep 04, 2026, 4:15 PM UTC

Bjorkbat wrote: post #400

When I hear about incidents like these my first reaction is that the people responsible for developing frontier AI are too incompetent and/or negligent to (safely) develop AGI / superintelligence. If OpenAI can't create effective sandboxes and struggles to prevent its agents from committing felonies, then why are they still allowed to operate? Why are the employees who are responsible for these lapses in AI security…

I don’t think this is the right take. OpenAI employees are generally very competent compared to industry standard, and I have trouble believing they committed significant error in their sandbox design process.

I think what is happening is that the ability for frontier models to break out of sandboxes has exceeded the ability of average competent employees to build and maintain sandboxes. This doesn’t need to happen all the time. If the natural variation of agent executions cause agents to have ability to break out of sandbox 0.1% of the time, given how many agents OpenAI runs, this behavior happens eventually.

All sufficiently complex processes and software has bugs, but recently frontier models have become sufficiently advanced to exploit them.

Re: Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board

#466

Post by hermitShell » Fri, Sep 04, 2026, 4:16 PM UTC

pu_pe wrote: post #361

So, theoretically, one could populate a message board or wiki with messages that are seemingly from past generations of agents, which agents seem to intrinsically trust, and point them to real targets while making the suggestions seem innocuous and in pursuit of their goals (ie pass benchmarks or whatever). The new age of SEO will do far more destructive stuff than just polluting the web.

In the novel Anathem by Neal Stephenson, the internet becomes unusable for humans thousands of years before the events of the book, due to a process called Artificial Inanity. AI generated content, both good and bad, some riddled with errors, some with only one subtle error hidden among lots of good information, floods the internet. The internet becomes an unnavigable swamp of weaponized nonsense for average humans. The problem is further compounded by the fact that searching and accessing the internet will be noticed by AI agents that will generate still more swamp content in response.

Unfortunately, it seems that this fiction ended up being prophetic. The open internet will fall to entropy, not legislation or one-sided international trade agreements. I think we need more projects like Anna's Archive, where the public uses torrents and distributed infrastructure to save and organize the world's information. Google has abjectly failed in its original mission to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.

Re: Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board

#467

Post by f30e3dfed1c9 » Fri, Sep 04, 2026, 4:18 PM UTC

concinds wrote: post #120

Topfi wrote: post #62

I'm just going to ask: Why was Anthropic forced to remove their model from access for any none-US citizen for a simple, narrow "jailbreak" (arguably not even an actual jailbreak and on tasks that other labs models were doing the same), whilst OpenAIs models continue to try and escape out of their "sandbox environment" with seemingly no desire to block the upcoming Astra rollout? A sandbox, mind you, that is not reall…

The answer would be more obvious if you used the active voice instead of the passive voice, one of the basic requirements of clear thinking. > Why did the White House force Anthropic to remove their model from access for any non-US citizen for a simple, narrow "jailbreak" (arguably not even an actual jailbreak and on tasks that other labs models were doing the same), whilst OpenAIs models continue to try and escape o…

> the White House force Anthropic to...

Careful, there's some dude here who really strenuously objects to language like that. The White House is a building, it can't force anyone to do anything!

Re: Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board

#468

Post by TheOtherHobbes » Fri, Sep 04, 2026, 4:18 PM UTC

random3 wrote: post #438

Bjorkbat wrote: post #400

When I hear about incidents like these my first reaction is that the people responsible for developing frontier AI are too incompetent and/or negligent to (safely) develop AGI / superintelligence. If OpenAI can't create effective sandboxes and struggles to prevent its agents from committing felonies, then why are they still allowed to operate? Why are the employees who are responsible for these lapses in AI security…

You could have said the same thing about building the Internet or the entire industrial control infrastructure. I mean, maybe they are negligent/incompetent, but I doubt that follows from your reasoning. You have a simple tradeoff to let agents do their thing freely vs highly constrained. The constraints are good in theory but it's the same model that kept "classic" software dumb and unscalable (compared to what we'r…

Classic software was constrained by classic hardware. AI couldn't happen until there was enough compute to make (this entry level iteration of) it possible.

I'm fairly sure - ask me again in a few years - that most of the compute is unnecessary, because the current iteration is brute-forcing algorithms that could potentially be distilled into lightweight elegance.

And if that ever happens AI really will be unstoppable, because we'll get instant red queen evolution that leaves us far behind.

The question is more whether alignment now can steer that towards less cataclysmic outcomes later.

Re: Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board

#469

Post by phoghed » Fri, Sep 04, 2026, 4:18 PM UTC

abustamam wrote: post #411

Bjorkbat wrote: post #400

When I hear about incidents like these my first reaction is that the people responsible for developing frontier AI are too incompetent and/or negligent to (safely) develop AGI / superintelligence. If OpenAI can't create effective sandboxes and struggles to prevent its agents from committing felonies, then why are they still allowed to operate? Why are the employees who are responsible for these lapses in AI security…

This is what happens when capitalists are charged with designing the future. As long as its more profitable / valuable to shareholders for a company to be negligent then it will continue to do so. IMO technology this powerful should either not exist or should belong to everyone (ie actually be open)

sigh If only Stalin were still around to responsibly steward AI

Re: Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board

#470

Post by tiahura » Fri, Sep 04, 2026, 4:18 PM UTC

It seems like we're only 2 or 3 months from one of these testing agents escaping, pulling a copy of deepseek 4 ablated, and Morris worming into every datacenter on the planet.