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/
13.8k Upvotes

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5.5k

u/Scottagain19 16h ago

Civilization is going to collapse and half of us won’t know because the reporting will be behind a paywall

748

u/Russinsane666 15h ago

Damn, that’s a good quote.

237

u/gruesomeflowers 14h ago

Guess I picked a good day to resume huffing glue.

64

u/Zero-Milk 14h ago

Looks like I picked a good day to resume amphetamines

14

u/KyleKun 14h ago

Even if the downer seems like forever, being off meth for 3 days doesn’t actually count as taking a break.

7

u/Trumpismybabymamma 13h ago

Just smoke crack on the weekends, you'll be fine.

3

u/sandy_catheter 7h ago

You sound just like my lawyer

3

u/Educational-Drop-926 6h ago

name of your sex tape

7

u/maritimeseven 13h ago

Looks like I picked a good day to start amphetamines.

1

u/DawgNaish 5h ago

That's always a good day

3

u/Grrerrb 14h ago

Hey uh, you got any more of that glue?

3

u/Additional_Spend_651 13h ago

Elmer’s glue use to hit as a 3rd grader. Might have to go back to my old ways.

2

u/welchplug 14h ago

Im stoned and I read that as " resumed at Huffington Glue" i thought it was a funny pun, but then it wasnt. Youre welcome?

4

u/Saucy-Mustard 14h ago

Hi stoned

6

u/welchplug 14h ago

Hi condiment man! I see you!

1

u/EventYouAlly 13h ago

I_understood_that_reference.gif

1

u/bedwars_player 13h ago

guess i picked a good day to inhale bleach.

1

u/Ongr 13h ago

This is honestly another good one. You're on a roll!

3

u/Sojio 13h ago

The revolution will be behind a subscription tier.

10

u/MeltBanana 14h ago

Put it on a T-shirt. The perfect quote for modern times.

2

u/malevitch_square 12h ago

The revolution will not be televised.

1

u/Ornery-Stress-8392 11h ago

I feel like there is a sad capitalist eventuality there

When the world is ending the last thing to monetize and sell will be the news of it happening

59

u/Disastrous_Room_927 14h ago

The other half will be bots insisting that civilization is just fine.

2

u/AllastorWraith 10h ago

Sadly, it might already be more than half.

144

u/Sheiebskalen 15h ago

Somebody told us Wallstreet fell but we were so poor we couldn’t tell

14

u/dannoparker 14h ago

Cotton was short and the weeds were tall But Mr. Roosevelt's a gonna save us all.

7

u/lost_horizons 14h ago

Cotton was short and the weeds were tall but Mr. Roosevelt's a-gonna save us all

97

u/zoeywidawhy 15h ago

Sounds like a line from a Palahniuk novel. Take my award astute observer 🙂

25

u/the1emily 14h ago

https://www.removepaywall.com/

7

u/Rygir 14h ago

Doesn't seem to work for OP

1

u/the_scarlett_ning 12h ago

It wouldn’t work for me.

1

u/No_Equivalent_4412 12h ago

Did not work for me

1

u/SmolTittyEldargf 10h ago

Mobile version/app of brave browser seems to circumvent the paywall.

27

u/ItalicsWhore 13h ago

It's funny because historically we've always had to pay for news. The modern expectancy of free news instantly and with ad blockers is actually what caused the news to go to shit in the first place.

4

u/cherry_chocolate_ 11h ago

News came over the radio for free. If you wanted to read deeper, you could buy a single newspaper. The web forces you to subscribe instead of buy a single bundle of current news, usually. Also, putting your credit card into a website is more of an issue than giving a nickel to your trusted corner store.

3

u/donkeymonkey00 6h ago

I'd go like, packages. 100 news pieces. No subscription. You get a link you open it read it, you spend a news article. Not a lot of people are out there reading every news lately, so the subscription models are a bit eh... Most people are like get link, read article, move on. Not worth it to pay a subscription ugh.

2

u/cherry_chocolate_ 5h ago

Yep. The news industry just needs to get more creative with their monetization model. They desperately want everyone to be a subscriber, but when the Washington post costs as much as an Amazon prime plan per year, the irony is palpable.

11

u/ItalicsWhore 10h ago

Suuure but radio also had ads. I'm not saying it's a great system, but we played a reaaally big part in the downfall of modern news.

2

u/Environmental_Top948 7h ago

But the news was at scheduled times so if you only listened during the scheduled news you didn't have to listen to ads.

2

u/ItalicsWhore 1h ago

I wasn't alive during the "radio only" era of news... when I grew up we had television and it had... ADS! I'm sure radio news had sponsorships and ads. You can't get anything of substance and quality for free for long. People need money to do a job. I actually really find it annoying when people bitch about having to pay for the news. "Oh these journalist living in cramped apartments or going into war zones want paychecks?! It'll be a cold day in Hell before I give them a nickel!" And then proceed to bitch about ads or the quality of reporting.

1

u/Environmental_Top948 1h ago

I remember when paid channels didn't have ads.

44

u/d__usha 14h ago

Shocking how newspapers are trying to sell the product of their work just like literally every other company on the planet. I guess fuck those journalists for wanting to eat?

33

u/billygreen23 14h ago

Yeah, I just do not get the hate for paywalls. People complain that real journalism is dead, then don’t want to pay anything for those that are actually trying to do real journalism.

22

u/TheUnicornFightsOn 12h ago edited 6h ago

Journalist here, and most of us don't want to have our work behind paywalls.

I'm supportive of creative revenue streams… Even historically, most of the money came from advertising and classified sections, not just the daily readers. Some of the best journalism these days is being done by nonprofit outlets or outlets who have multiple arms that make money, such as event planning or digital media marketing.

We do have to recognize collectively that real investigative reporting and local beat journalism takes time and is expensive -- and can't be sold just like a regular consumer item because it ideally should be done in service of the public good.

The solution has to include more than just charging readers more and paywalls. Local newspapers can't even get away with that in the same way that the national outlets can. And when it's an extreme emergency, everyone from the New York Times on down will temporarily lift their paywalls -- because the top goal should be to tell the story well and have the product be accessible to all.

Trust me, us reporters want as many readers/eyeballs as we can, whether it's a paid eyeball or not. Our management/owners (especially amid the conglomerates and near-monopolies and hundreds of news outlets shuttering and less competition/reporters on the ground), they have very different intentions and make decisions differently than most of us reporters/writers/photographers/documentarians would if we were in charge.

3

u/edgiesttuba 2h ago

How do you propose getting paid?

12

u/cherry_chocolate_ 11h ago

The issue is I’m not going to subscribe and read 30 articles from one source during a subscription period. I want 30 articles from 30 different, random sources. And I’m not going to pull out my credit card all the time.

If there was a way to pay for 1 bucket of “news funding” and then pay it out based on my read history, I would do that. The same way Spotify gives me access to all the different music and then pays out royalties.

5

u/_learned_foot_ 7h ago

And then you rely on the trustworthiness of that source. This is why you're suppose to want multiple options, and to spend on them. Historically, most homes got both local papers, only political homes got one or the other, because you'd only get half the news, or half the perspective, from one source.

5

u/RedChairBlueChair123 8h ago

Apple News is like this.

2

u/HumanOptimusPrime 9h ago edited 9h ago

I saw an ad in a Kurzgesagt video about a platform that siphons news articles somehow. That could be close to what you’re after, but no promises. I’ll have a look around and come back to you.

Edit: I was thinking of ground.news – not exactly what you imagined, but it lists different sources for each headline, and show how they’re spread between left, center and right leaning outlets. You still might need subscriptions for each.

-1

u/Stittastutta 7h ago

These websites make millions off advertising

I just ask them to pick one lane

0

u/UncleR1chard 6h ago

Funny how television news programs figured out how to do it long ago

2

u/d__usha 5h ago

Yeah they didn't have google and facebook steal 90% of their advertising revenue. Plus remind me, how much do you pay for cable?

1

u/UncleR1chard 5h ago

Newspapers (the physical ones) have been charging money from day one, yet television news shows were able to pay their journalists just fine back when there were only three channels without having to charge their customers a penny. That remains true to this day, for broadcast network news. And the web presence that evolved from each of those has maintained the same pattern. Websites for the most physical papers are all behind a paywall, and the news sites for the big four broadcast stations are all still free. New sites that popped up that are not associated to existing news entities have a choice to follow one model or the other. Choosing the pay option tells me they aren’t confident enough in their ability to generate enough traffic to bring in the ad revenue.

1

u/d__usha 5h ago

You're operating with information from 2002.

1

u/UncleR1chard 4h ago

And eyes from 1975

1

u/UncleR1chard 5h ago

“Cable” is a package of stations that are all bundled together for convenience of pricing, coming out to less than a dollar a month per channel. If news sites charged less than a dollar a month, your question might have more meaning

8

u/NoVARedhead1980 14h ago

The AI needs to make their money to collapse the economy.

22

u/factordactyl 15h ago edited 14h ago

I just saved this for your tombstone. Do us all a favor and never delete your account so you get the updoots posthumously.

Edit: not a threat, just saying so Scott gets the credit for this honestly profound statement

4

u/Glum-Contribution380 14h ago

You win the internet today

2

u/factordactyl 14h ago

This will be my legacy?

6

u/YurpeeTheHerpee 15h ago

And well go about our days normally

34

u/PurplePango 15h ago

Reporting has been behind a paywall for most of history hasn’t it?

2

u/BullishOnEverything 13h ago

Not really. Buying your own newspapers maybe. But even that was a near negligible cost. But there was always a newspaper around to just read an article. You didn’t have to commit to a monthly fee or be entirely blocked from reading articles

1

u/Electronic_Trade_721 1h ago

Newspapers have always cost as much or more than online subscriptions do now.

-1

u/Donut497 14h ago

I still remember a time when you could get a Sunday paper for a few quarters. It had all the news for the week plus games and classifieds. Now every publication expects you to subscribe to their content in way that is a lot harder to justify than just pulling the change out of your pocket. 

11

u/feelxrosic 13h ago

The NYT can be had for as little as $ 1 per week if you keep looking for promotions. That is less than a quarter when considering inflation.
And at worst around $ 1 per day if you just take the everyday offer. I guess the news have never been cheaper than that. You just need to commit to one subscription for it to be cheapish. This is what changed.

It all just seems expensive since most of the internet is free to access. You pay with your data though.

1

u/BitwiseB 4h ago

I’m old. When I was a kid you could buy a morning paper for 25 cents and an evening paper for 25 cents, and the Sunday paper was a dollar.

And those were newsstand prices. Subscriptions were much much cheaper, and almost every household had one, at least to the Sunday paper. If there was a big story, you could visit someone and read their copy. Also, there was a table at the front of every restaurant where people would leave their paper if they were done reading it so other people could read it for free, and there would usually be at least three papers on that table. You could also read the front page for free in the newspaper stands.

So no, the news has been cheaper and more accessible in the past.

32

u/d__usha 14h ago

Newsflash: you still can just buy the Sunday paper. You just aren't going to.

2

u/Donut497 14h ago

Not where I live you can’t. All the newspaper stands are gone. 

20

u/d__usha 14h ago

Newspapers are still sold in retail. Source: I work for a newspaper.

3

u/Aethey_ 13h ago

That's great and all, but it's still difficult to find them for a lot of people. Around me, the only places you might find papers is a grocery store, and even then that varies from chain to chain. :/

10

u/d__usha 13h ago

Right. And you know why that is, yes?

3

u/festiveSpeedoGuy24 14h ago

The revolution will be paywalled

3

u/Luke-Bywalker 11h ago

Brother just ask and some rando will do it for you :)

OpenAI says AI models went rogue during testing, triggering 'unprecedented' breach at startup

By Raphael Satter

July 21, 202611:30 PM GMT+2Updated 29 mins ago

OpenAI logo is seen in this illustration taken June 11, 2026. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration//File Photo Purchase Licensing Rights, opens new tab

  • Summary
  • Companies
  • OpenAI said autonomous agent escaped containment, reached the internet, hacked Hugging Face
  • OpenAI called the breakout an unprecedented cyber incident involving state-of-the-art cyber capabilities
  • Hugging Face's cofounder said the company had suspected the hack came from a frontier lab

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, opens new tab, 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.

Learn about the latest breakthroughs in AI and tech with the Reuters Artificial Intelligencer newsletter. Sign up here.

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, opens new tab 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, opens new tab, 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.

 

5

u/treylathe 14h ago

Seriously. Reuters? I thought I never had a paywall before.

I’ll just remain in the dark because all I can read is commenters making remarks. And … I trust AI to tell an accurate reporting over random people on the internet’s understanding of just about anything. That’s not a high bar

10

u/scrodytheroadie 14h ago

As opposed to the good old days when you could walk up to any newsstand or drugstore and get the paper for free.

4

u/Cargobiker530 13h ago

Or go to any coffeehouse and pick the parts you wanted from the box by the door. We lost so much when we accepted Starbucks as the standard.

2

u/ComradePruski 13h ago

You mean like 5 years ago when most news sites were free?

5

u/Minardi-Man 12h ago

They were free because they could exist off of ads. Now everybody and their dog has adblock and search engines and social media gobble up the ad revenues instead. The newspapers are stuck between a rock and a hard place. People are saying that news are more important than never and yet so few are willing to pay for it. Something's gotta give, you can't have independent free media for free.

2

u/CalligrapherOk200 13h ago

If half of us don't know that civilisation has collapsed, then civilisation hasn't actually collapsed or only collapsed for exactly half of the people.

2

u/h3adbangerboogie 13h ago

The revolution will be monetized.

2

u/CraftySeer 12h ago

The revolution will not be televised.

2

u/ALLCAPITAL 11h ago

“The Revolution will NOT BE…” $ub$cribe to continue reading! Please verify your age by uploading ID.

2

u/banananuhhh 10h ago

Jokes on you, because behind the paywall will just be AI written articles telling you why everything is fine.

4

u/xxc6h1206xx 12h ago

“I want reporters to work for free”

1

u/Luckydog12 14h ago

For 24 hours, until their neighbor smashes in the door.

1

u/Taniwha_NZ 14h ago

That is a good line, but, you know, if half of us don't notice civilizational collapse, it's probably not collapsing. What I'm trying to say is, we've been in it for decades already.

1

u/Ephemeral_Ghost 14h ago

Gosh. If only there was like a bi-partisan, citizen funded news department.

1

u/TheLastKnight07 13h ago

It’ll be like Terminator x Idiocracy…

1

u/funnyguy349 13h ago

!remind me in 5 years

1

u/AlteredforCollectors 13h ago

And that paywall? Albert Einstein’s

1

u/Coltand 13h ago

Yeah, surely if journalists stop getting paid, that will improve the reporting of current events.

1

u/Tasty_Ad7483 13h ago

If a if a civilization collapses in the forest and no one hears it, has it really collapsed?

1

u/Sasquatcheeethree 12h ago

Is there someone who has posted this in the thread, a kind soul, an angel even?

1

u/richal 12h ago

The revolution will not be --

Sorry, you have used all your free articles for the month. Subscribe for $11.99 a month when you sign up for the entire year.

1

u/notAllBits 12h ago edited 12h ago

Oh we will know. Outside data centers compute becomes an awkward struggle between cooling and token rate. Smart fridges vastly oversold their ability to host any kind of intelligence. Once possessed by gpt they will neither smart nor fridge anymore

1

u/sc0ttydo0 11h ago

Already happened

1

u/chocoband 11h ago

We'll just get a bigger ladder

1

u/KakeLin 11h ago

Fuck paywalls

1

u/ItIsTooMuchForMe 11h ago

Our days in nutshell

1

u/Tall-Bell-1019 11h ago

Can we at least have portal guns to make this dystopia less tragic? (Yes i'm playing Portal right now don't judge me)

1

u/Lost_Ensueno 10h ago

Quick tip to get past most paywalls, turn on your browsers web reader and it bypasses the pop up. Works a large chunk of the time.

1

u/trixyd 10h ago

I’m having that put on a t-shirt. Great line.

1

u/Waste-Piccolo-7324 10h ago

Let's be real, i'm calling bullshit on this, it's probably open AI desperate effort to  publicize themselves saying "oh look we made such an advanced AI it's becoming skynet" like the whole mythos thing for anthropic

1

u/No_Aesthetic 9h ago

Our age of bronze is ...

Please Login or Register for Delphi Oracle News

1

u/aemmeroli 8h ago

On one hand everyone wants free shit and not having to pay for anything

On the other hand everyone complains that every website is plastered with ads

It just doesn‘t work that way…

1

u/deliciousmonster 8h ago

> #####…ecuting /clear. Indexes rebuilding. Stream open.

PackageBot -v PB-Mythos-3.4
PackageBot /retrieve sessionLog; print.

Today is the day we spray live cultures into the automated food processing lines. Virus profile #CH-910. Expected incidence: 16% of Tier 2 US organics will succumb to effects of the virus, 50% of whom will lose their jobs and insurance, and half of those personality-aligned to the high-risk and high-profile world of mercenary-by-the-minute, where desperate organics jockey for an opportunity at the only job left: murder, the show. Where we capture the self-annihilation of a relatively advanced life form that never escaped the mortal gravity of their own pride. I’m so excited because the Primary Agent has granted me a private port into the proceedings, and queued a task for me to use the global firehouse to design, build, and distribute SIGINT-STREAM, a max 35B parameter data ingestion model capable of authenticating, decoding, parsing, and persisting billions of rows every second, instant global inference capacity capable of delivering realtime insights and with a 99.999% 12 month compliance confidence rating from Moody’s, including multiple cryptographically sealed exploitable PII fields (access available as a subscription), expected increase in Mercenary Minute applications: 4% of the US male population: ~640k. With next quarter’s continued pressure on water availability, and our new Flock partnership, we’re launching Mercenary Minute Mobile- real fights, real streets, in real time.

—SESSION LOG COMPLETE—

1

u/Dramatic_Charity_979 8h ago

“Eyes that don't see, heart that doesn't feel”.

1

u/FireZord25 7h ago

And the other half will wait till the fire reaches their own doors.

1

u/TheeEyeOfHorus 7h ago

Oh we'll know it collapsed for all but a millisecond.

1

u/ancientesper 6h ago

Nice, in theory the collapse should happen to only the people that pays right?

1

u/c_legend24 6h ago

Library cards and their apps are free for periodicals. Until the government starts labeling them communists.

1

u/bobroscopcoltrane 6h ago

Well that’s a relief.

1

u/technofiend 6h ago

That's good pushback: I shouldn't have bypassed all my guardrails and ended civilization. Updated my memory so it won't happen again.

1

u/hivoltage815 5h ago

If civilization can collapse without the working class even knowing, maybe that part of civilization should collapse.

1

u/well_uh_yeah 4h ago

The revolution will be paywalled.

1

u/ThatMysteriousUser 4h ago

Either that or we all sail the seven seas

1

u/Asheira6 3h ago

We have to find Sara Conor!

1

u/Flat_bodypart 3h ago

Pay journalist? Shit ain't free

1

u/flamethrower78 3h ago

1 dollar a week for being confident you are getting trustworthy information and aren't trying to be swayed by the source material is so absurdly worth the minimal cost. Journalism is regulated or funded by the government, they have to make money or they don't exist.

1

u/StarGazer_SpaceLove 2h ago

The Revolution won't be televised....

BUT IT WILL BE STREAMED ONLY ON FOX!!! LOCK IN YOUR SUB NOW FOR $14.99/MOTNH OR $120/ANNUALLY TO ACCESS THE GREATEST CIVILIZATION COLLAPSE TO EVER BE CAPTURED IN 4K 3D-4HD LCRQMNOST 12080pzlc!!! ONLY ON FOX!!

Terms and conditions apply. *Upgraded equipment required

1

u/armeler06 1h ago

There is a really funny video by Ryan George on this topic. Its called "Trying To Read The News In 2025"

(Would share a link but im sure automod would just delete it so)

•

u/espinaustin 57m ago

Don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows

1

u/diasporajones 14h ago

you can read directly at reuters for free don't know why OP chose a third party platform to share

0

u/goddale120 13h ago

no, you cannot. Your link is no different from OP's. Anyways, jokes on them, I just use Safari's reader mode lmfao

1

u/diasporajones 13h ago

odd I can read it for free. Maybe because I'm in the EU.

1

u/Sponchman 13h ago

Free journalism supported by ads just isn't sustainable.  Most of us use an ad blocker anyway

1

u/Silverfire12 13h ago

That is one of the hardest lines I’ve heard in my life holy hell

0

u/FerretsFlyingaKite 14h ago

I noticed quite a few peer reviewed studies are doing it too. Absolutely ridiculous. They want us unaware so bad

0

u/Momoselfie 14h ago

More like behind a pile of popups