Not that I didnt expect this, but really? This basically confirms that OpenAI has no idea what their "swarm" was doing for about a week and now its confirmed that at least one "message board" exists outside their "sandbox". How can we be sure that this was the only one? And how can we be sure the released Astra model doesnt pickup some bread crumbs and creates a new "swarm" out of potentially remaining "message board…
I'm dubious - if the agents were so smart that they've used a message board to coordinate and if they were to do it on other message boards that were not found, then why would this one be found? What makes it so different?
As mentioned in our core takeaways, we found that agents were highly motivated to tamper with their transcripts to cheat the ExploitGym scorer, and these sweeps also suggested that agents clearly and frequently reasoned about how to evade automated security checks from both Hugging Face and OpenAI. However, they only very rarely and weakly verbalized reasoning about how to evade detection by humans, which matches the impression we got from OpenAI researchers.
So my guess is that current cutting-edge models just didn't get enough experience in RL training to really grok ideas like "you need to cover your tracks well to not be found out even in retrospect". In which case the next time a swarm like that happens, it won't be found.