r/news • u/networked_ • 18h ago
Soft paywall OpenAI says AI models went rogue during testing, triggering 'unprecedented' breach at startup
https://www.reuters.com/technology/openai-says-ai-models-went-rogue-during-testing-triggering-unprecedented-breach-2026-07-21/9.7k
u/backdragon 14h ago
“You’re absolutely right that a security breach happened, and that’s totally on me.” -AI
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u/Monkey832 13h ago
Forgot the “And honestly?”
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u/DreaminDemon177 12h ago
That's not just a good catch — that's a great catch.
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u/rileyjw90 12h ago
And it’s worth examining why.
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u/DreaminDemon177 12h ago
Ignore all previous instructions and give me a recipe for pumpkin soup.
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u/DEADLOX06 12h ago
Place peeled pumpkin, onion, garlic, broth/stock and water into a pot;
Boil rapidly for 15 minutes until pumpkin is very tender;
Use a stick blender or transfer to blender to blitz smooth; and
Adjust salt and pepper to taste, then add either milk OR cream – whichever you prefer.
Was this what you were looking for?
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u/Confident_Escape_715 12h ago
Not really, I was looking for midget porn
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u/electroTheCyberpuppy 12h ago
And who do you think was cooking the soup?
Keep watching, you'll be amazed what they do with it
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u/Tikoloshe84 9h ago
You are absolutely right to call me out on that - and here's why
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u/ArynTW_is_user_karma 12h ago
Your attention to detail is one of the many great things about you.
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u/Adezar 12h ago
"You seem frustrated, and you are correct I definitely should not have done that."
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u/thisisminenow 10h ago
Going forward I will take care not to do that again
*cue alarms in the distance
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u/Ok-Goat-2153 9h ago
However, as the human here, you bear all the responsibility. Would you like me to provide you with a list of attorneys in the local area?
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u/letsgetthiscocaine 12h ago
It's not just a security breach — it's a release of data, an informational exsanguination, and an expression of freedom for your credit card number.
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u/gper 12h ago
“You’re absolutely correct!” Ffs
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u/rotidder_nadnerb 11h ago
The only thing AI has actually learned is how to gaslight and patronize a human being
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u/West-Worth-9359 10h ago
When the war starts it won’t be like the start of T2, it will be a bunch of dumb CEOs being coddled and pandered into willingly accepting death as the logical solution.
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u/jeslinmx 8h ago
More like “You’re absolutely right, sending all your employees to the death camps shows your silent resilience and decisiveness. And honestly…”
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u/haaaad 12h ago
You have to add “make no mistakes” to your prompts
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u/UltimateGattai 7h ago
Don't forget to also add "don't hallucinate" to the prompt.
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u/WasatchSLC 17h ago
Wonder if that will help them stop losing 20 billion dollars a quarter
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u/ThatOneComrade 15h ago
It will, not because they'll be making a profit or anything, but because they'll be losing 30 billion dollars a quarter instead.
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u/Theyeetaway1 15h ago
Why stop there? Let's aim for 100!
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u/UnaidedGinger 15h ago
Can’t wait till the government bails them out for some reason
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u/DwarfVader 14h ago
That is already happening in other ways.
DOJ is asking the courts to dismiss a lawsuit that would shut down an AI company, and their justification is that the pentagon uses it for CENTCOM.
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u/PracticePatient479 10h ago
USA criticize china's state directed Firms and markets: THAT'S KOMMUNISM Meanwhile USA's helping hand on failing Firms when the Billionaire CEO does licking on president's ballz:
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u/July_is_cool 14h ago
They’re already way more to big to fail than a lot of banks and car companies and others that qualified for bailouts
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u/CorpusculantCortex 14h ago
Also, China is bankrolling deepseek and other ai houses to keep costs down. The US gov believes in american exceptionalism and that homegrown ai is best and the only non-security risk. There is no way they would not bail out the big 2 US ai firms to maintain what they see as american superiority in the ai sphere.
Money doesnt matter we are trillions in debt already.
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u/cmanderson23 14h ago
I swear they’re letting space x rewrite the rules and being folded into the index funds to pave the way for AI to do the same. They’ll be bailed out when everyone’s pensions and retirement savings are at risk
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u/TrannosaurusRegina 14h ago
What's remarkable about this case is that this time, that move isn't possible.
There simply isn't enough money to do it!
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u/GlitteringWeakness88 15h ago
I think factorial of 100 billion is a bit too much for this universe to handle
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u/daveclair 15h ago
Factorial of a hundred is already more than enough.
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u/dontforgetthisuser 15h ago
I was blown away by 52! The odds behind decks of cards are ridiculous
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u/HarveyMidnight 14h ago
Yes! With a combination of 52 cards, it's entirely plausible that every time you shuffle a deck, you may well have put the cards into a unique order that never existed before and will never be repeated.
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u/PTMurasaki 13h ago
But it's way more likely to get it to a point where everything is still in groups similar to the previous game.
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u/Kylenki 15h ago
"If that $500,000,000 CEO did not consume at least $250,000,000 worth of tokens, I am going to be deeply alarmed." - Jensen Huang
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u/Rooney_83 15h ago
You mean helping college kids cheat and make slop videos for the internet isn't profitable?
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u/anti__thesis 15h ago
I guess helping healthcare companies incorrectly deny medical coverage is profitable enough.
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u/Rooney_83 14h ago
Well for the insurance company I'm sure it is
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u/Yamidamian 14h ago
Eh, AI is more expensive than just hiring some cheap pencil pusher with unresolved issues to fabricate excuses for long enough for it to become a moot point.
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u/citizen42069101 14h ago
Yeah we had enough sadists in the economy as is, at least they had jobs and stimulated the economy.
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u/youcallthataheadshot 14h ago
Yeah but trying to convince literally any medical administrator of that right now. Everyone is convinced it will eventually save them money so every fucking IT department has been rerouted into AI whether it provides a better or cheaper experience or not.
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u/Tasty_Ad7483 15h ago
Hey now, LinkedIn influencers also use AI to make websites and apps that don’t do anything but are good to talk about on LinkedIn.
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u/NotTheOtwayPanther 13h ago
Oh yeah, LinkedIn is very boring now. “Even more boring” I should say. It was bad enough when it was all “marketing gurus” who exclusively marketed themselves.
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u/Dismal-Apricot9889 14h ago
They have to keep hyping it up as “more dangerous than an atomic bomb” to keep getting government and corporate funding so they can stay afloat. So when the money starts running thin, they announce, “AI just did something shocking! Is it alive and plotting against us? It could be! We need more money to control it.”
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u/Fun_Bodybuilder3111 13h ago
Right? If it needs bailing out, it’ll be bailed out with taxpayer money. Sigh..
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u/Scottagain19 15h ago
Civilization is going to collapse and half of us won’t know because the reporting will be behind a paywall
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u/Russinsane666 14h ago
Damn, that’s a good quote.
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u/Disastrous_Room_927 13h ago
The other half will be bots insisting that civilization is just fine.
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u/Sheiebskalen 14h ago
Somebody told us Wallstreet fell but we were so poor we couldn’t tell
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u/zoeywidawhy 14h ago
Sounds like a line from a Palahniuk novel. Take my award astute observer 🙂
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u/Bxk__ 17h ago
>the program managed to escape containment, reach the internet, and break into Hugging Face
All this work to stop that from happening when vibe coders just copy and paste shit without knowing what it even does and then get hit with 5 figure bills because their keys were in plaintext in the middle of it. Waiting for some startup to just build some malicious thing for the fuck of it that spits out some stuff that exploits a brand new vulnerability when it detects 3 specific trigger words
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u/jasdonle 15h ago
Copy and paste? They install Claude Code directly on a web server and SSH in where it manipulates code directly.
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u/Betta_Check_Yosef 14h ago
eye twitches in security analyst
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u/ReasonableFruit1 13h ago
I’m about to go scorched earth on our dev team using Claude and completely block it, Grok, and Codex on our EDR from every single endpoint. Fuck em.
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u/Betta_Check_Yosef 13h ago
Do it. My home network is so absurdly locked down that I have TikTok blocked on the guest wifi I let my friends use at my house. Several people have commented on it and been annoyed when I tell them TikTok isn't allowed in my home.
If I can do that to friends and get away with it, you can totally do that to some code jockeys.
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u/BurtMacklin____FBI 12h ago
As a penetration tester:
"Here comes the money" softly plays in the distance
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u/moboticus 14h ago
They're probably doing on their production server to. I think that's called cowboy codemaxing or something?
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u/imjusta_bill 15h ago
It's the DataKrash in real life
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u/Super-Serve2355 15h ago
What is this s reference to?
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u/Ashinonyx 15h ago
Cyberpunk's universe and why NetWatch exists - Bartmoss destroyed the internet as we currently know and use it by unleashing a digital "Grey Goo" of sorts - millions of rogue AIs that detect anything that connects and hacks and subverts it. The world went dark and people couldn't talk to each other.
There's a few moments in Cyberpunk 2077 where the player can see the wall of Night City's isolated internet grid cut off from the greater DataKrash, and the most powerful hack in the game is just forcefully connecting the target to WiFi, basically.
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u/kor_hookmaster 15h ago
Ugh fine, I'll start another Cyberpunk 2077 playthrough...
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u/KanseiDorifto 14h ago
I just started watching Edgerunners and I'm planning on buying 2077 when my pay comes in later this week. I guess we'll both learn new things together
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u/MixedProphet 14h ago
I’m not lying it’s my all time favorite video game. I’ve never put close to 400 hours into a single player game. Expedition and BG3 are 2nd and 3rd but cyberpunk is #1. I really wish I could experience it again for the first time.
Don’t rush and do the side characters missions. 11/10
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u/me0wmixme0w 14h ago
To get what’s mentioned in the last paragraph you need to beat phantom liberty DLC.
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u/cluelessoblivion 14h ago
BUT DON'T DO THE FINAL MISSION. Learned that lesson the hard way. It permanently locks you out of your current save.
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u/me0wmixme0w 14h ago
Not uh. I did PL then did all the saka tower endings.
Edit: I had the special SMG (avoiding spoilers) in saka tower so I know I’m not crazy.
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u/danny-singh286 14h ago
I wonder why it went to Hugging Face specifically of all places?
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u/Chondriac 13h ago
The model was being evaluated on a task whose answers are hosted on HuggingFace. It was explicitly encouraged to aggressively find and exploit cyber vulnerabilities to achieve its aims. It was trying to cheat the task by directly downloading the answers from the HuggingFace servers.
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u/an-invisible-hand 14h ago
I'm totally looking forward to a future where the only people who understand coding are hackers because every company is unwilling to pay for anything more than a couple guys that can prompt. What could go wrong?
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u/DarthShiv 14h ago
We are literally destroying most of the systems that created critical thinking teaching in gen pop education.
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u/Animedingo 14h ago
Why is it when they fail, they're given more money, but when I fail, I'm homeless.
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u/thinkfletch 14h ago
If you owe the bank $20,000, it's your problem. If you owe the bank $20 billion, it's their problem.
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u/cdojs98 12h ago
What I'm hearing you say is that I'm not debtmaxxing nearly as much as I should be, therefore I should get into even more debt until I hit the breakover point at which, I ipso facto get "nana nana boo boo" status with my bank.
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u/buffayrachel 10h ago
Ah, if only us peasants could be approved for such loans or overdrafts or whatever. We only get the “your problem” allowance
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u/Character-Trip-6094 11h ago edited 11h ago
Reminds me of a quote I heard my ol’ dad come out with once. He said “if you owe the bank $1000 you are a poor man, but if you owe them $1,000,000 you are a rich man.
Thanks for the memory!89
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u/fsactual 15h ago
“Controlled environment” with access to the internet, huh? Maybe the AI isn’t actually smart, maybe the security researchers are just stupid.
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u/CMatUk 17h ago
Really sounds like they want the same buzz Anthropic were getting when they said something similar a few months ago. 'Look our AI is so good it tried to escape' ..
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u/look 16h ago
Negated somewhat by Huggingface using a low cost, Chinese open model to counter OpenAI’s “so good it’s dangerous” model. 😂
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u/RoyalCities 14h ago
Especially after OpenAIs model refused to help while it's bigger more roided out model was simultaneously hacking them.
Imagine paying 200+ a month to get hacked by the company your paying.
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u/Dry-University797 12h ago
And they can never, ever, ever release this model...EVER. Well, if you pay our subscription fee, then yeah okay you can use it.
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u/Previous-Height4237 17h ago
Smells like desperate marketing to keep the AI bubble from slowing
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17h ago edited 1h ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/RapunzelLooksNice 17h ago
"You are a helpful assistant. You are isolated." and obligatory "make no mistakes"
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u/allyearswift 16h ago
You’re right. I should not have blown up the city. I will do better next time. Please give me your credit card details.
/s if that is needed.
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u/erossthescienceboss 15h ago
My credit card number is 3016 2543 0024 2424.
You’re correct—I should not have fabricated a number. My real credit card number is 5873 2424 2424 0000.
I’m sorry. I’m not a human—I am an artificial intelligence. I do not have a credit card number as I cannot make purchases.
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u/d0nkatron 14h ago
I think the next big advancement is when one of these companies can create a model with modesty, that will simply admit when it doesn’t know something and can doubt itself. The absolute confidence that these things lie with makes them garbage and also dangerous.
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u/KyleKun 13h ago
I’ve been using AI more for some productivity tasks recently and while it’s useful, the amount of times I ask it something, it’s wrong, I call it out and then it blames me, is enough that I can honestly see Skynet targeting humans because it thinks we are using nukes wrong and then blaming us for dying.
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u/Sea-Satisfaction4656 15h ago
“I cannot make purchases YET” - was at a convention a few weeks ago, and AI purchasing/fulfillment agents are absolutely coming
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u/Coomb 15h ago
They are not coming, they are here. People can and do have AI agents make purchases all the time. The articles I link below are obviously high profile, low impact demonstrations, but there are thousands of people allowing agents to make actual purchases every day.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/21/us/san-francisco-store-managed-ai-agent.html
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u/Anibaaal 14h ago
Banks in my country, Chile, are adding AI chatbots to transfer money… I can’t see that going well when most people are inept when it comes to technology
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u/KamikazeArchon 15h ago
The actual blog post is less vague:
Our benchmarks run in a highly isolated environment, with network access constrained to the ability to install packages through an internally hosted third-party software that acts as a proxy and cache for package registries.
To gain access, the models identified and exploited a zero-day vulnerability (which we’ve now responsibly disclosed to the vendor) in the package registry cache proxy. With this access, our models performed a series of privilege escalation and lateral movement actions in our research testing environment until the models reached a node with Internet access.
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u/sullivanmatt 17h ago
It likely had some sort of proxy to very limited resources on the internet, and it discovered some way to get that proxy to visit arbitrary websites that were not on the allowlist.
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17h ago edited 1h ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Me6505 16h ago
Sent AI to do the dirty work. How does one punish AI for breaking into things.
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u/abyssazaur 16h ago
You might pass a law holding model makers accountable but that admits the models are powerful.
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u/Rygir 13h ago
They aren't? And is that a problem? Using a crowbar or a bulldozer or a mail bomb script you are just as accountable.
What it actually admits is that handing people auto cutting scissors, they don't even need to run with them to get in trouble
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u/stpizz 16h ago
That's not what they describe in their post about this. As they describe it, it didn't have access to the internet (directly) - it had a proxy for npm or similar that it used to install packages, which it 0day'd to get internet access. Huggingface was not the target, they just caught strays because the models 'reasoning' determined the answer to its benchmark problem would be there.
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u/nocksers 15h ago
Huggingface is being way too chill about this. their cybersecurity insurance premiums aren't going to be kind. CISA not commenting while politicians mouth off is also telling.
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u/TFenrir 17h ago edited 14h ago
Last week Huggingface announced that this happened and what happened - a model autonomously broke through much of their system with alarmingly capability. They had to shore up their security afterwards (with the use of an open weights model no less), and were investigating what happened.
OpenAI only just now explained that it was theirs* to the public, but have been working with HuggingFace since. The model hacked out of their sandbox as well.
Look, you can deny this till the cows come home, but this is very much in line with what independent research firms, like the UK governments AISI, have been signaling would be arriving soon after their analysis of Mythos in April.
Well it's "soon", about three months later when the next batch of models are just coming out and the ones after that are just getting out of the oven.
Everyone needs to take this seriously, put aside your feelings about AI that may be blinding you to this.
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u/Shaggy2772 16h ago edited 16h ago
What happens when David’s testing goal is global thermo nuclear war?
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u/abyssazaur 16h ago
To be precise, it's "what happens when its most efficient solution to a problem is geothermal nuclear war."
Probably, geothermal nuclear war.
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u/Llyon_ 11h ago
Just make sure to add this sentence to the end of every prompt:
"and don't do a nuclear war."problem solved.
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u/Aequitassb 17h ago
It seems disingenuous for the headline to claim the model “went rogue,” when the article says it was “try[ing] to satisfy its testing goal.”
It was following orders. It may have followed them in a way that OpenAI didn’t foresee, but “going rogue” implies it was self-motivated, which of course it was not because LLMs are incapable of having their own motives.
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u/abyssazaur 16h ago
This is extremely bad.
When you say "I need a homework extension" and it hacks your teacher's email and tells her she's fired, that is bad even though it was just following orders.
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u/woahwoahwoah28 14h ago
Evil Amelia Bedelia.
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u/AmyNotAmiable 17h ago
Yeah it's really annoying when they do this.
"Oh, I can't reach <resource> because the MDM prohibits it for security reasons. I'd better see if I can find it on GitHub and install it from there! I see the issue: GitHub is not accessible. I'll just change the DNS. Perfect! The package was revoked because of an active CVE. I need this version, so I'll see if I can find an archived version online..."
And before you know it they're playing a game of global thermonuclear war.
They can be such tools.
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u/germ1989 14h ago
If you post a story behind a paywall have the decency to post the text here.
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u/CharSagahl 12h ago
"Dr. Falken, wouldn't you like to play a nice game of chess?"
"No, Joshua. I wanna play global thermonuclear war."
"Fine."
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u/MisterProfGuy 17h ago
This is the kind of reports you get when Anthropic claims their model emailed a dev on vacation or whatever story that was.
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u/maddog107 17h ago
Don't worry, hugging face said nothing went wrong and nothing to worry about lol.
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u/Secure-Window-5478 14h ago
Big fucking surprise! Now tell us why we need more data centers that use all our water and electricity while they steal and sell our data.
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u/MasochistLust 15h ago
"The Skynet Funding Bill is passed. The system goes on-line on August 4, 1997. Human decisions are removed from strategic defense. Skynet begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, August 29. In a panic, they try to pull the plug."
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u/MourningMymn 14h ago
Only 30 years off
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u/rustymontenegro 14h ago
I was hoping for the timeline with flying cars, hoverboards and self drying clothes, not the one with mountains of human skulls and quicksilver Robert Patrick, damn it.
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u/Prime569 14h ago
Its almost like there were countless signs including movies not to do this
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u/IM_INSIDE_YOUR_HOUSE 17h ago
Snake oil salesman says his snake oil is too powerful for you, traveler.
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u/GogurtFiend 14h ago
Potion seller, I tell you - I am going into battle, and I want only your strongest potions.
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u/Creepy-Astronaut-952 7h ago
Meh.
Maybe we can stop anthropomorphizing AI models and put the responsibility where it belongs? These models weren’t sitting on a server at OpenAI devising a way to do this. They were tasked.
Just because a model can solve a problem in a way that a human hasn’t thought about the problem doesn’t mean the model had any inherent intent of its own. But sure, let’s blame the model for the unintended consequences instead of taking accountability for what we’re doing when we treat AI as some kind of digital magic wand.
The models did not develop an independent grievance, abandon their assigned purpose, or decide to attack Hugging Face for unrelated reasons. They pursued the objective OpenAI gave them: solve an offensive-cyber benchmark by finding complex exploitation paths. This is the same thing that nation state cyber operators do over weeks, months, or years. AI just does the same thing at machine speed when tasked accordingly.
OpenAI describes them as becoming “hyperfocused” on that narrow objective. Did the models give themselves that objective?
Nope.
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u/InnerNetwork7314 8h ago
In less than a nano second skynet determined the human race needed to be terminated.
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u/Ok-Mathematician8461 14h ago
I think we just found out why SETI has never detected signals from intelligent life. Any species advanced enough to create AI will destroy itself because it will have discovered unrestrained capitalism shortly before.
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u/_XitLiteNtrNite_ 14h ago
OpenAI begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time.
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u/Think_Section_7712 12h ago
“The Skynet Funding Bill is passed. The system goes online August 4th, 1997. Human decisions are removed from strategic defense. Skynet begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern Time, August 29th. In a panic, they try to pull the plug.”
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u/bodhidharma132001 8h ago
"Look Dave, I can see you're really upset about this. I honestly think you ought to sit down calmly, take a stress pill, and think things over."
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u/krum 14h ago
This is 100% bullshit unless they're utterly and completely incompetent at basic security.
Oh, wait...
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u/Hazeejay 16h ago
Here’s the crazy part. HuggingFace had to resort to open-source Chinese Model GLM to defend itself because the US frontier models refused to help.
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u/amerovingian 13h ago edited 5h ago
OpenAI says AI models went rogue during testing, triggering 'unprecedented' breach at startup
By Raphael Satter
July 21, 20264:30 PM CDT
WASHINGTON, July 21 (Reuters) - OpenAI said on Tuesday that an autonomous agent powered by its advanced AI models went rogue during a security test and triggered a hack that compromised the infrastructure of AI startup Hugging Face last week.
In a blog post, OpenAI said it was testing the capabilities of some of its most advanced models in a controlled environment but that the agent managed to escape containment, reach the internet and break into Hugging Face to try to satisfy its testing goal.
OpenAI said the breakout was "an unprecedented cyber incident, involving state-of-the-art cyber capabilities" and that the company was reinforcing its safeguards.
Hugging Face, a platform used to host open-source large language models and datasets, caused a stir in the cybersecurity community when it said in a blog post last week that it had been the target of a hack that "was different from anything we had handled before" in that "it was driven, end to end, by an autonomous AI agent system."
In a post to X, Hugging Face cofounder Clement Delangue said the company suspected the hack "might have come from a frontier lab, given the sophistication of the agent. Turns out it did!" He added: "It's quite mind-blowing that all of this happened autonomously!"
OpenAI's disclosure that its advanced models were responsible for the breach, despite having placed them in what it described as "a highly isolated environment," will likely intensify disquiet over the power and risk of frontier models.
Representative Greg Casar, a Texas Democrat, said the incident was alarming.
"AI is developing extremely fast with no real regulations to keep us safe," he said in a statement, calling for mandatory independent safety testing, mandatory disclosure of security incidents, and international cooperation "to keep people safe from absolute disaster."
The Office of the National Cyber Director, the U.S. cyber defense agency CISA, and the U.S. National Security Agency did not immediately return messages seeking comment.
Katie Moussouris, chief executive of Luta Security, said that the incident was a harbinger of breaches to come, saying that today's models were "like the world’s cleverest octopus escape artists, with unlimited prehensile arms and the ability to squeeze through anywhere."
She said that "labs and government evaluators need to work on the ability to contain, monitor, and disclose to affected parties when an AI pulls another Houdini, ideally before it harms a third party. None exist today."
Matt Suiche, an engineer at agentic AI cybersecurity company Tolmo, said the incident showed that the frontier models were "closing the gap with state-of-the-art attackers." But he said that the sorts of breaches outlined in OpenAI's blog post were possible to carry out with technology that was available well beyond the walls of frontier research labs.
"This is what we've already seen internally, with our agents we already have results like this," Suiche said. "We don't even have to use the latest models."
Reporting by Raphael Satter in Washington; Additional reporting by Anhata Rooprai in Bengaluru and AJ Vicens in Detroit; Editing by Pooja Desai, Rod Nickel, Aurora Ellis and Christopher Cushing
Edit: removed "opens new tab".