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

Re: Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board

#661

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

mag7269 wrote: post #652

tavavex wrote: post #603

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

#662

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

#663

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

tavavex wrote: post #603

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

#664

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

#665

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

BoiledCabbage wrote: post #646

tavavex wrote: post #603

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

#666

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

subroutine wrote: post #609

verytrivial wrote: post #599

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).

Re: Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board

#667

Post by nobody6502 » Fri, Sep 04, 2026, 7:03 PM UTC

Tepix wrote: post #40

I just discovered more wiki instances that got used by the OpenAI agents over at https://www.wikiservice.at/fractal/wiki.cgi?action=browse&id... and https://www.wikiservice.at/probier/wiki.cgi?action=browse&id... It's the same software and host as DseWiki. If you want to see the amount of activity on DseWiki, here's a link that shows it: https://www.wikiservice.at/dse/wiki.cgi?action=browse&id=Rec...

https://tmcleod.org/cgi-bin/apchem/wiki.cgi?action=rc&days=9...

looks like apchem wiki got hit too

Re: Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board

#668

Post by solenoid0937 » Fri, Sep 04, 2026, 7:03 PM UTC

enraged_camel wrote: post #645

verytrivial wrote: post #599

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…

This whole thing is an absolute disaster honestly, and yes it is being downplayed and hand-waved away. Since March, so many people have mocked Anthropic for their approach to Mythos release, claimed it was all marketing, accused them of holding back the best models from the general public to boost their revenues and upcoming IPO, etcetera. Yet these OpenAI revelations offer a small glimpse into the type of world we w…

Wild that you are downvoted so much.

The HN majority and the VC crowd has been negligently complicit in downplaying AI safety, writing off Anthropic's statements as "hysteria" or "marketing", etc.

Now this capability will be coming to an open source model near you and every script kiddie will have a swarm of highly capable malicious agents. Now people care? Ridiculous.

Re: Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board

#669

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

titzer wrote: post #647

tavavex wrote: post #603

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…

That 2% of performance we got for not having bounds checks on by default, resulting in an endless march of memory safety violations is looking a lot less appealing.

We're still doing it! You've just described the AI labs: They'll trade safety / alignment for +1~2% of any positive metric, any day of the week.

The "ethical" employees will think they'll solve the problem later. The unethical ones won't be encumbered by such thoughts in the first place.

Re: Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board

#670

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

BoiledCabbage wrote: post #646

tavavex wrote: post #603

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…

But it is the very people who warned us about rogue AIs going out of control that set up a system that enabled and failed to conrol it.

It is as if Dr Frankenstein continually warned the villagers about monsters then said "Look! See what happened!". No, idiot - YOU sewed the corpses together, YOU set up the lightning collector, and YOU threw the switch.