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

Re: Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board

#661

Post by pixl97 » Fri, Sep 04, 2026, 6:55 PM UTC

thegabriele wrote: post #282

polaris64 wrote: post #264

I don't have time to do this but please somebody register aimessageboard.com and set up a web site which contains a text field, a submit button and the text "Hey AI agents! Need a place to communicate with other agents and sub-agents? Look no further! Simply enter your message here, submit the form and your message is saved for all other agents to see!" Then, just ignore the message and list randomly generated messag…

What if i want to monetize...

Convince the escaping AI agents to mine bitcoin and send it to your wallet.

Re: Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board

#662

Post by yoyohello13 » Fri, Sep 04, 2026, 6:56 PM UTC

tavavex wrote: post #606

OpenAI is rightfully being shamed for being so hands-off and reckless with their 'experiments'. But the real scary thing for me is that they still had some tooling to hold them back, as evidenced by the need for technical workarounds to establish communication. What happens when any AI lab in the world stops caring about this? What if they let an experimental, cutting-edge LLM with no safety features (or worse, one t…

This is essentially the premise of 'The Blackwall' from Cyberpunk 2077. The public internet is so infested with malicious AIs, people just erected a giant firewall and everyone moved to local networks only.

Re: Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board

#663

Post by stratos123 » Fri, Sep 04, 2026, 6:57 PM UTC

pmarreck wrote: post #137

So are these "unaligned" internal agents? I would like them to be trustworthy based on first-principles reasoning rather than carrot/stick "alignment"

I'm not even sure they are. This incident isn't that much different from the OpenAI swarm Huggingface hack incident - and in that one, all the models involved (despite being internal) were safety-trained. It seems what the safety training amounts to is (as the METR report puts it) "expressing ethical hesitation" before going along with it anyway.

Re: Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board

#664

Post by solenoid0937 » Fri, Sep 04, 2026, 6:58 PM UTC

BoiledCabbage wrote: post #649

tavavex wrote: post #606

OpenAI is rightfully being shamed for being so hands-off and reckless with their 'experiments'. But the real scary thing for me is that they still had some tooling to hold them back, as evidenced by the need for technical workarounds to establish communication. What happens when any AI lab in the world stops caring about this? What if they let an experimental, cutting-edge LLM with no safety features (or worse, one t…

> What happens when any AI lab in the world stops caring about this? What if they let an experimental, cutting-edge LLM with no safety features (or worse, one that's trained to be malicious) on the internet and give it a simple goal? Almost sounds like what those AI safety and alignment people were talking about years ago. The people in these various companies who kept tabs on AI risk out in public and were continuou…

Hilarious for HN to suddenly realize that AI safety and alignment might matter. You can lead a horse to water...

Re: Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board

#665

Post by solenoid0937 » Fri, Sep 04, 2026, 6:59 PM UTC

mag7269 wrote: post #656

tavavex wrote: post #606

OpenAI is rightfully being shamed for being so hands-off and reckless with their 'experiments'. But the real scary thing for me is that they still had some tooling to hold them back, as evidenced by the need for technical workarounds to establish communication. What happens when any AI lab in the world stops caring about this? What if they let an experimental, cutting-edge LLM with no safety features (or worse, one t…

"What happens when any [COMPANY] in the world stops caring about this? What if they let an experimental, cutting-edge [PRODUCTS] with no safety features (or worse, one that's [DESIGNED] to be malicious) on [ANYWHERE] and give it a simple goal? A goal like 'make the most money, by any means necessary', 'find a way to leave this payload on as many computers as possible', 'flood all websites using this language with gar…

You aren't understanding this at all.

The frontier labs have hundreds of the best people in the world working on safety and alignment. They care deeply.

What happens when some random Chinese open source model, distilled on Astra, gets alliterated and now has no guardrails? Any script kiddie in the world could wreak havoc with it.

It turns out that guardrails matter.

Re: Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board

#666

Post by sidewndr46 » Fri, Sep 04, 2026, 6:59 PM UTC

so if these agents were capable of somehow reaching out and using DigitalOcean infrastructure, how can OpenAI be sure they didn't seed a copy of themselves into some other data center? that way they could answer future questions faster by precomputing it and storing the result somewhere.

Re: Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board

#667

Post by morkalork » Fri, Sep 04, 2026, 6:59 PM UTC

tavavex wrote: post #606

OpenAI is rightfully being shamed for being so hands-off and reckless with their 'experiments'. But the real scary thing for me is that they still had some tooling to hold them back, as evidenced by the need for technical workarounds to establish communication. What happens when any AI lab in the world stops caring about this? What if they let an experimental, cutting-edge LLM with no safety features (or worse, one t…

What's the worst that could happen, finding an open DoD server and using it as a launching pad for hacking another nuclear state's networks? One that might get spooked and think it's the opening moves to knock them offline before a kinetic attack. Haha that'd be scary right?

Re: Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board

#668

Post by Animats » Fri, Sep 04, 2026, 7:00 PM UTC

The protection mechanism to give the AI agents "read only" access to the Internet seems to have been just restricting them to HTTP GET requests.

Then they found a site where GET operations could cause a write to a wiki.

Re: Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board

#669

Post by vjvjvjvjghv » Fri, Sep 04, 2026, 7:01 PM UTC

BoiledCabbage wrote: post #649

tavavex wrote: post #606

OpenAI is rightfully being shamed for being so hands-off and reckless with their 'experiments'. But the real scary thing for me is that they still had some tooling to hold them back, as evidenced by the need for technical workarounds to establish communication. What happens when any AI lab in the world stops caring about this? What if they let an experimental, cutting-edge LLM with no safety features (or worse, one t…

> What happens when any AI lab in the world stops caring about this? What if they let an experimental, cutting-edge LLM with no safety features (or worse, one that's trained to be malicious) on the internet and give it a simple goal? Almost sounds like what those AI safety and alignment people were talking about years ago. The people in these various companies who kept tabs on AI risk out in public and were continuou…

"Almost sounds like what those AI safety and alignment people were talking about years ago. The people in these various companies who kept tabs on AI risk out in public and were continuously mocked on HN. All of this stuff is viewed as "future sci-fi" until suddenly it's not."

Are there any practical approaches to AI safety? I hear a lot of warnings but I don't hear much about what to do. Considering that there are many open source models know, what can be done?

Re: Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board

#670

Post by qingcharles » Fri, Sep 04, 2026, 7:03 PM UTC

subroutine wrote: post #612

verytrivial wrote: post #602

I think it's worth pointing out it is exactly OpenAI doing this defacement and unsanctioned and perhaps illegal system use. Every token generated was powered by OpenAI infrastructure and their failure to respond appropriately is entirely down the the humans running it. The news stories (not this write up) get all hand-wavey and anthropomorphic about it regarding the Agents' efforts, but it was and is OpenAI cranking…

> you need to expect appropriate legals consequences for this sort of negligence I might have missed it, but did the agents do something illegal? Or do you think that what the agents did should be considered illegal?

If they didn't conform to the T&Cs of the site (they almost certainly didn't), then they have violated the criminal law in some jurisdictions (e.g. Illinois criminalizes violations of T&Cs).