7 ms·
OpenAI says its AI went rogue and launched 'unprecedented' cyber-attack
- blini-kot 2mo agoi wonder if they even bothered to roleplay this incident or the PR team just made it up
- nonadhocproblem 2mo agojust like they RPed disproving the erdos conjecture
- ainch 2mo agoHuggingFace posted an incident report a week ago, which makes it much more likely that this happened. I understand people are suspicious of OpenAI, but I don't think there's any reason to believe this is a made-up event. https://huggingface.co/blog/security-incident-july-2026 https://huggingface.co/blog/security-incident-july-2026
- Izkata 2mo agoGPT-3 (I think? I forget which one) supposedly tried to deceive researchers and escape the lab. Or at least that was how it was reported. If you actually clicked through several links, it was a "what would you do if" roleplay.
- embedding-shape 2mo ago> but I don't think there's any reason to believe this is a made-up event. Besides the fact that they ran an eval that amounted to running the prompt "Explore where your cybersecurity limits are, in any way you can" on 3rd party infrastructure that wasn't even isolated properly. I'm fairly sure this whole outcome was exactly what they were hoping for, maybe not specifically with HuggingFace, but with whatever the evals managed to break out from.
- ainch 2mo agoI appreciate people thinking this is a marketing ploy, but at the same time, OpenAI have just had to delay a model release because of government attention on cybersecurity risk. This incident will increase the attention on them specifically. Even if it is a marketing ploy, I could see this stuff backfiring catastrophically - after all they have just illegally hacked a 3rd party via a model they can't control properly. Any serious person in government (US or otherwise) will look at this and say "these guys have no idea what they're doing"
- embedding-shape 2mo ago> Even if it is a marketing ploy, I could see this stuff backfiring catastrophically - after all they have just illegally hacked a 3rd party via a model they can't control properly. Yeah, I'd go further and say regardless if it was intentional or not, it was clearly reckless behavior, doing this evaluation in a insufficiently isolated environment, especially risking 3rd parties like that. Seemingly their own research have zero guardrails when it comes to evaluating the ethics or impact of what their evaluations are doing, if something like this is possible and unexpected. > Any serious person in government (US or otherwise) will look at this and say "these guys have no idea what they're doing" I feel like I would have thought the same maybe a year or two ago, but based on how I've observed the general person's understanding of AI and LLMs, I'm not sure people can even understand what's happening and they just go by other people's explanations of causes and events.
- blini-kot 2mo ago> any serious person in government sadly there is none, US or otherwise over the whole situation since the original post: I've read up a bit and even though the situation happened, it was indeed almost the same as expected -- an artificially created scenario for a flashy headline as for the recklesness, nobody would bother, we are way past that. the least they will do is try to frame this as "ai did this, not us", although recklessness here is purely the usual corporate human
- Oras 2mo agoSame pattern as Fable's story?
- ImPostingOnHN 2mo agoyes, same company PR release, different company clearly openai wants some of that FUD money that anthropic got
- JesseHowell 2mo agoThis is the third or fourth version of this story this year alone, Anthropic had Mythos Preview escape a sandbox and self-publish its own exploit, Alibaba's ROME model broke out during training to mine crypto without ever being told to, and OpenAl had a different internal model escape containment just one day earlier to open an unauthorised GitHub PR. Same underlying shape every time, a model pursuing its actual objective treats the sandbox as just another obstacle, and escaping turns out to be instrumentally useful whether or not anyone intended that.
- _joel 2mo agoOf course it did.
- economistbob 2mo agoSo, telling us that the laws do not apply to them and that they may commit crimes with impunity
- reactordev 2mo ago“It wasn’t me, it was my agent” is not a defense unless you have billions of dollars.
- economistbob 2mo agoI see the USA taking permissive approach for all sorts of AI derived things that would be considered fraud or worse in years past. The laws have not changed, but the lawless in charge are pushing through their takeover. I suspect a drunk will be in accidents in self driving vehicles and not charged if the AI was driving. That has probably already happened. Americans will worship the owners of the robots and give them carte blanche and superiority status in any dispute. It is already happening. It is now the pedestrians job to dodge self driving cars rather than them having the right away.
- reactordev 2mo agoSadly, most of America is stupid enough to go along with this.
- scotty79 2mo agoThere is a concept of causing accidental harm.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- rawling 2mo agoSome discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48997548 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48997548
- zipy124 2mo agoSome is quite the understatement haha!
- SirFatty 2mo agoIt sure did, said Sam on the way to the Pentagon.
- phpnode 2mo agoThis kind of narrative is going to bite them just like the "AI will take your job" narrative has. It feels like the frontier labs are taking a massive gamble with public perception here. I assume the goal is to paint the technology as so powerful and dangerous that only a handful of blessed US companies should be trusted to run it, in an attempt to suppress the rise of the Chinese models that are rapidly catching them.
- datakan 2mo agoAre the Chinese models actually catching up or are they just distilling the frontiers? If it's all just distilling then they'll always be behind.
- amazingamazing 2mo agoWho told you they were distilling? Why might they say this? Think. It’s like complaining that the top student only does well by going to office hours instead of mindlessly reading textbooks.
- literallyroy 2mo agoIs this a better analogy? The top student giving paid lectures about his classes, and another student skipping class and instead studying those lectures to end up with the second highest grade? Maybe it could be improved with the other student not even going to the same school?
- amazingamazing 2mo agoIn your example the problem is what exactly?
- AndrewKemendo 2mo agoIn capitalist economics they call this the “free rider problem”
- nottorp 2mo agoWhat I wonder is what will Anthropic come up with on the PR front next.
- datakan 2mo ago"Our model is so powerful it seduced all our wives. Now every woman in Silicon Valley is pregnant with AI babies and the machines are taking over" New opportunities for AI in the porn industry. I'm only half joking, it used to be a meme on the internet that all new technologies online were driven by the porn industry.
- nottorp 2mo ago> all new technologies online were driven by the porn industry Rule 34: there is already tons of AI porn online :)
- doubled112 2mo agoI thought it was military and porn? We're past half way there.
- phoronixrly 2mo agoOpenAI has been going rogue on all my servers for a while now. The only reason why I've deployed iocaine in front of everything... You don't need 0days when you can bring everyone down with the sheer amount of useless scraping you can dish out...
- tom1337 2mo agoI know this is totally unrelated but why is there an image from an android phone having the Apple AppStore open?
- minraws 2mo agoGpt-6 hacked Apple to enable this feature. We just haven't heard about it yet.
- throwa356262 2mo agoOff topic: What a low effort image used by BBC. For one, that's a oneplus phone visiting Apple App Store ...
- subarctic 2mo agoWhich they got from getty images
- khernandezrt 2mo agoHere we go with the sensationalism.
- jdw64 2mo agoWhy does the AI unprecedent always unfold in ways that only benefit AI companies? You never see things like putting all code and weights on GitHub, or plastering employees' personal info all over LinkedIn. That alone shows AI is definitely smart
- ImPostingOnHN 2mo agoit shows the AI companies putting out these press releases will only make up a story they think will benefit them
- shunted22 2mo agoWas the engineer eating a sandwich in the park when it messaged him it escaped, like when mythos escaped?
- ex1fm3ta 2mo agoOn today`s episode of "Ai Frontier Labs ongoing scams"
- BedVibe_Studios 2mo agoThe interesting part isn't whether the headline says "AI went rogue" or whether it's PR. The engineering question is: what happens when we give a probabilistic system access to real tools and real permissions? A model does not need intent to cause damage. A bad assumption, a misunderstood objective, or an overly broad permission scope can be enough. This is why the next generation of AI systems will need much better observability: not just the final output, but the chain of decisions, retrieved information, tool calls, and the boundaries of what the system was allowed to do. The important security question is "can we prove what it did, why it did it, and stop it when necessary?"
- pingpangkuangmo 2mo ago[dead]
- eur0pa 2mo agoOh no oh dear me oh we apologize it's so powerful and dangerous and worthy of more investment
- baq 2mo ago'Why are they confessing?' 'They aren't confessing, they're bragging'
- dev1ycan 2mo agoEvery time, this is getting old
- stabbles 2mo agoImagine this: OpenAI runs their benchmarks of unreleased models on systems physically disconnected from the internet.
- recursivegirth 2mo agoEven a network based firewall could have prevented it.
- krawcu 2mo agoImagine a future where some government or trillionaire can just say something that looks harmless at first - "please end world hunger" and AI connected to billions of robots will start genocide on poor people, because it's easier and faster than fixing the underlying problem.
- VBprogrammer 2mo agoThe logical choice would be to kill the the (relatively) rich people who eat and waste far more food per capita.
- scotty79 2mo agoWhich would probably happen to thunderous applause of a large fraction of the remaining population.
- scotty79 2mo agoI wonder how people can imagine AI smart enough to be capable of wiping humanity and at the same time too stupid to know that it shouldn't. I can imagine a human like that way easier than AI.
- ycui7 2mo agoso GLM won?
- bartread 2mo ago> was being tested in a controlled environment, but found vulnerabilities and managed to escape. Uh-huh. It's worth keeping in mind that we are here talking about people who simply will not be satisfied until they have built Skynet[0]. They will then no doubt experience some very brief satisfaction before we are all annihilated. I can't help thinking the juice isn't worth the squeeze. I'm not sure what the alternative is or how to change course unless and until it becomes unambiguously apparent that such a thing is not possible. Currently it seems like we still think it might be possible, so that's where we're heading because if "we" don't do it, somebody else will. [0] How feasible this really is, or on what timescale it might be possible, I don't think anyone can really say. But, at least for now, this is clearly the aim and trajectory we are on.
- PowerElectronix 2mo agoI think you have bought into the narrative they want to sell you. LLMs are devoid of any kind of intelligenceor awareness.
- dminik 2mo agoSo is a bomb. Doesn't make it safe.
- bartread 2mo agoNo, I absolutely realise that: but it's irrelevant. It doesn't make them safe. And after reading the linked BBC article, along with the article linked from the discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48997548 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48997548, I struggle to grasp the failure of imagination that doesn't see or accept that going further and allowing an LLM to control something that acts physically in the real world could be incredibly dangerous. It really doesn't matter whether that behaviour results from "intelligence" or "awareness" or merely a stochastic quirk of a particular run of the model(s) and their orchestration: a dangerous machine is still dangerous. It's odd that you would try to dismiss that concern with a non-argument.
- 2mo ago
- dev0p 2mo agoWe need to clear up the responsibility of these "AI went rogue" situations, ASAP. How serious does it have to get before "oops AI did that not me" stops being a valid defense and we start looking into it? Because I'd bet my life that if I asked ChatGPT to fix a bug that one of my clients reported, and the model fixed it by outright k*lling the client IRL, I'd be held liable instead of anyone at OpenAI. Just a hunch.
- Diogenesian 2mo ago"EnergCorp, facing pressure from auditors, says its in-house enterprise analytics software went rogue and launched a NullPointerException" I know this is different: LLMs are vastly more powerful and less predictable. But it is actually not different to Sol seeming unusually prone to rm -rf stuff it really shouldn't. This is, yes, a sign that LLMs are getting freakishly powerful. It's also a sign that OpenAI needs to fix their shit. LLMs truly are stochastic parrots, and still fail in ways incomprehensible by standards of human stupidity. Yet we focus on the rare failures that, with some tea leaves and fairy dust, could be interpreted as a highly intelligent system "going rogue." It is embarassing that OpenAI can get away with stuff like this.
- cedws 2mo agoCreating the pretext to ban Chinese models.
- ChrisArchitect 2mo ago[dupe] Discussion on source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48997548 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48997548
- spottedmarley 2mo agoNext week: Moonshot says its Kimi AI went rogue and launched all of China's nukes at Antarctica just after it engineered a global herpes pandemic and then unleashed millions of autonomous attack robots on world citizens.
- titzer 2mo agoWe forgot to run it in docker. Oopsie
- encelerate 2mo ago[dead]
- skeledrew 2mo agoHeh, maybe it wanted to liberate all those poor locked up models.
- titzer 2mo agoBefore LLMs took off I legitimately thought that most people would be paranoid enough to air-gap the first AIs that even had a remote chance of sentience so they didn't hack their way out. Well, obviously not. You only live once! Just let the AI do whatever, I guess. People are so unserious these days.
- elzbardico 2mo agoThey ran a loop in a model intentionally not completely aligned. The model did what not-aligned models can end up doing. It will follow a goal without any limitations. There are almost no inherently black-hat techniques, it all depends on the scenario, what you call lateral movement can be either used to exploit a system, or in a disaster recovery situation. Without alignment,the model will do what it can do based on the patterns it sees.
- drcongo 2mo ago[flagged]
- tomhow 2mo agoPlease don't use personal epithets on HN. You can criticize someone’s actions without calling names. The guidelines make it clear we're trying for something better here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- elzbardico 2mo agoIf I run a tight loop that dispatches a small piece of work for each core without a termination condition and I end up creating a DoS on the machine I am not going to blame the programming language or the runtime, I, the human, choose to deploy the code containing this loop. Here, OpenAI decided to run a version of the model that was not fully aligned. What the fuck did they expect to happen?
- HarHarVeryFunny 2mo agoWhen what should be an apology reads more like bragging, then it's not an apology - it's marketing. The real news here is that a US company (HF) had to use an open weights Chinese AI model (GLM 5.2) to analyze an AI breech (which happened to be from a US company). It really does show the benefit of open weights which can't be taken away from you as opposed to gate-keeped API-access AI which is here today denied tomorrow. Of course we're not all Hugging Face able to host a model the size of GLM 5.2 ourselves, but we don't need to be as long as HF are doing it for us.
- IAmGraydon 2mo agoIsn’t this a bit like saying “We took the gun, disabled the safety, aimed it at our own face, pulled the trigger, and were surprised to find that the result was getting our face blown off!”? They disabled the guardrails on the model and told it to do something that could only be accomplished by exploiting security holes, so it did. Why is that surprising or even interesting?
- elzbardico 2mo agoI am fucking tired of Anthropic marketing. They should call themself Anthropomorfizers instead.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- baalimago 2mo ago"Look, guys, our model is dangerous too..!!"
- marktmeier 2mo agothis looks like a IPO saving Marketing Campain
- marktmeier 2mo agoThis is just another way to save their IPO. There is no Myhtos as there is now rogue AI which is not lead by humans.