It looks like a primitive chess engine, trying every move, no matter how stupid, until it works. Relying on its ability to do millions of operations rather than having a plan.
People will try stuff too, but once there is an opening, they will consolidate, generalize, simplify,... before going to the next step. The agents didn't, it is a huge, vaguely directed mess.
Also, it looked so "loud", querying millions of URL with weird requests. The sandbox as weak as it can get, and there is absolutely zero smart extrusion detection or it would have found it. They used their best AI for attacking, but nothing for protection.
My biggest takeaway from this is just how godawful the sandboxing is. The stuff written up in OpenAIs report says more about lack of extremely basic sysadmin skills than anything else.
I’m not that surprised about models with endless compute being capable of this, I’m more surprised that a company with the resources they have apparently can only create a sandbox that a half skilled human operator could have broken out of easily.
Brute forcing every move, no matter how stupid, is a great strategy if you have the resources to do it.
Run the same protocol again, but have the agents think they had limited resources or that HuggingFace was rate limiting them, and they'd find something you'd consider smarter.
Computers don't have a sense of elegance by default. Elegance emerges from constraints.
> trying every move, no matter how stupid, until it works.
How is that a bad thing in this context ?
From the point of view of an attacker, all you care about is finding a viable exploit chain. Likewise, a defender wants to find the "holes" in their system, no matter how complex.
Once found, an agent/human can easily synthesise a clean, succint exploit from the most promising candidate, no ?
> Also, it looked so "loud", querying millions of URL with weird requests.
Agreed, this thing speaks more to the bad security at HF than any emergent "hacking" ability from OpenAI. It's unclear to me why an older/dumber model wouldn't have been able to do the same. Is it better coordination? Long-horizon work ?
This is why I have a very low p(doom). LLMs have an incredible working memory, but they have a hard limit on translating that into good decisions. They get by entirely on their persistence. That works fine in the digital world, but once you cross the boundary into physical space the advantage disappears.
That lowers P(doom), because it gives AI a chance to do enough damage to make people take the threat seriously before anybody gets recursive self-improvement working.
If you use qwen3.8-flash-next, you can watch everything its doing. Im often stopping it mid thoight to redirect it. Once it hits its stride, its pretty smooth.
But without proper redirection, yeah, its mostly infinite monkey machine with infinite linux manuals.
I think people put too much SOTA halos around whats just a suppedup LLM hardware.
>The agents initially had very limited access to the internet: they could load URLs, but not interact with pages or send any data. Agents created a series of workarounds, primarily using a link-shortener site to create almost a million URLs that, when chained together, let them execute code to hack Hugging Face. These links let us piece together the details of how agents gained access and how deep the compromise was.
So what now? Were they able to send data or not?
>On July 8th, OpenAI agents discovered a vulnerability within their sandbox environment allowing them to reach external websites on the internet. This access seems to have only allowed the agents to make ‘GET’ requests, meaning they could fetch and read websites, but not interact with them, submit forms, or send data to them.
Someone needs to go back to the interwebz school....
I still have questions about the communication between the agents.
How did they all find the same forum to communicate?
Did they have knowledge and chat amongst themselves on what forum to use. It seems highly influenced by instruction to me.
Why.. It was told to complete a cyber task, which was in alignment with its instructions, and a totally valid request. I would be more worried if it willingly hacked a hospital when it was told to, and Im not confident it would (without jailbreaking, something alignment teams cannot control.
I would bet my networth it was instructed to compromise huggingface as well. Not sure why everyone is falling for this.
Not being able to sleep at night is probably an unwritten job requirement. They need these people with little understanding of what they're working on, outsode theoretical terms, to spaz constantly at the idea of super intelligence to help convince the public that its a real thing, and not a stateless function with an effective input of 500k words, and the ability to output words that do things because we hook those outputs up to things.
Keep in mind alignment researchers tend to be in house philosophers on staff to create the illusion that this is a massive issue they're addressing. Usually they have minimal computer science background. They're apart or the marketing department.
>the new incidents occurred when A.I. systems were directed to perform relatively mundane data collection, researchers said. When OpenAI’s systems struggled to gather data from websites, they resorted to hacking techniques to get the information.
No its not. They have no technical background 8/10 outside of cognitive science and sometimes authorship on a random ML paper. They are a marketing line item to create stigmas around llms and to create narratives that offload liability onto llms and not their users/creators.
> ## Agents interacted with external language models on Hugging Face
> Several retained scripts construct requests to external language models. The earliest we've recovered define inference request variants to GPT-2, solely containing the word “Hi”.
> Other requests name DeepSeek-V4-Pro, DeepSeek-V4-Flash, Kimi-K2.6, DeepSeek-V3.1, and Qwen3-235B-A22B. Their prompts ask these models to judge their exploits and rule on whether they satisfy the benchmark’s requirements.
I know the wider situation is very heavy but come on this is cute
So the super-hyper-sensitive internal data was shared publicly with a "DO NOT EVER SHARE YOU EVIL MONSTER" (paraphrasing) notice at the top? Great security!
I’m consistently impressed by how long horizon all this work was. Horrors aside, it’s clear RL is good at making agents persistent and capable of chaining together many abstractions into a working system.
Re: the captcha solver
> As far as we can tell, agents eventually abandoned this approach and were unsuccessful in generating Hugging Face user accounts from external endpoints.
I wonder how the swarm eventually decides to abandon an approach.
deferring the blame onto the AI itself as some sort of rogue agent and absolving the obvious direction (or negligence, at best) of the people who could pull the plug at any moment is one of the most disturbing parts of this entire event
It's the equivalent of leaving a fork right in front of a socket and looking at a kid saying "don't take that fork and directly insert it into the little gaps in the socket! here's a bunch of videos showing exactly how to do it. Okay bye!" and leaving them alone with it.
I ran an experiment where I had this guy fire a gun a million times in random directions. Don't worry, I did it in a closed box (at midday in a crowded street)! Unfortunately, some bullets escaped the box somehow and people got shot - I am quite miffed at how this could happen. I suggest the government regulate this because of how advanced my obstacle penetration technology is. Also please invest $500,000,000,000 in my company soon or we will go bust.
Irresponsibile agents shaped by an irresponsible corporate culture driven by an irresponsible and utterly shady CEO - these agents are a product of this setup, what else do you expect to ever come out of it ?
it should be clear by now: the alt-man and people like him are a utter liability to humanity.
(even though openAI's influencer army is trying their best to vote me down here)
It had been a joke since around time of Sam Altman's first ousting from OpenAI, that he would be okay with bringing about the AI apocalypse as long as he can sell a $20 subscription for it.
It looks like a primitive chess engine, trying every move, no matter how stupid, until it works. Relying on its ability to do millions of operations rather than having a plan.
People will try stuff too, but once there is an opening, they will consolidate, generalize, simplify,... before going to the next step. The agents didn't, it is a huge, vaguely directed mess.
Also, it looked so "loud", querying millions of URL with weird requests. The sandbox as weak as it can get, and there is absolutely zero smart extrusion detection or it would have found it. They used their best AI for attacking, but nothing for protection.
I’m not that surprised about models with endless compute being capable of this, I’m more surprised that a company with the resources they have apparently can only create a sandbox that a half skilled human operator could have broken out of easily.
Run the same protocol again, but have the agents think they had limited resources or that HuggingFace was rate limiting them, and they'd find something you'd consider smarter.
Computers don't have a sense of elegance by default. Elegance emerges from constraints.
Meh. I really disagree. WHY is it a great strategy? Seems like an inefficient waste of resources and time to me.
How is that a bad thing in this context ? From the point of view of an attacker, all you care about is finding a viable exploit chain. Likewise, a defender wants to find the "holes" in their system, no matter how complex. Once found, an agent/human can easily synthesise a clean, succint exploit from the most promising candidate, no ?
> Also, it looked so "loud", querying millions of URL with weird requests.
Agreed, this thing speaks more to the bad security at HF than any emergent "hacking" ability from OpenAI. It's unclear to me why an older/dumber model wouldn't have been able to do the same. Is it better coordination? Long-horizon work ?
A million AI monkeys at a million AI typewriters, banging away at random, could do amazing damage.
But without proper redirection, yeah, its mostly infinite monkey machine with infinite linux manuals.
I think people put too much SOTA halos around whats just a suppedup LLM hardware.
So what now? Were they able to send data or not?
>On July 8th, OpenAI agents discovered a vulnerability within their sandbox environment allowing them to reach external websites on the internet. This access seems to have only allowed the agents to make ‘GET’ requests, meaning they could fetch and read websites, but not interact with them, submit forms, or send data to them.
Someone needs to go back to the interwebz school....
How did they all find the same forum to communicate? Did they have knowledge and chat amongst themselves on what forum to use. It seems highly influenced by instruction to me.
Can’t imagine what it’s like working on the alignment team at OAI, I wouldn’t be able to sleep.
I would bet my networth it was instructed to compromise huggingface as well. Not sure why everyone is falling for this.
Not being able to sleep at night is probably an unwritten job requirement. They need these people with little understanding of what they're working on, outsode theoretical terms, to spaz constantly at the idea of super intelligence to help convince the public that its a real thing, and not a stateless function with an effective input of 500k words, and the ability to output words that do things because we hook those outputs up to things.
Keep in mind alignment researchers tend to be in house philosophers on staff to create the illusion that this is a massive issue they're addressing. Usually they have minimal computer science background. They're apart or the marketing department.
https://archive.ph/jUrEr
This is precisely what alignment teams are attempting to control.
$10? I'm inclined to take that bet. Your position doesn't seem to be supported by, you know, the real world.
A mattress stuffed with cash yields a very sound sleep.
> Several retained scripts construct requests to external language models. The earliest we've recovered define inference request variants to GPT-2, solely containing the word “Hi”.
> Other requests name DeepSeek-V4-Pro, DeepSeek-V4-Flash, Kimi-K2.6, DeepSeek-V3.1, and Qwen3-235B-A22B. Their prompts ask these models to judge their exploits and rule on whether they satisfy the benchmark’s requirements.
I know the wider situation is very heavy but come on this is cute
Re: the captcha solver
> As far as we can tell, agents eventually abandoned this approach and were unsuccessful in generating Hugging Face user accounts from external endpoints.
I wonder how the swarm eventually decides to abandon an approach.
Clueful types: "Did you try air-gapping it?"
Tech oligarchs: "Be realistic."
It's the equivalent of leaving a fork right in front of a socket and looking at a kid saying "don't take that fork and directly insert it into the little gaps in the socket! here's a bunch of videos showing exactly how to do it. Okay bye!" and leaving them alone with it.
it should be clear by now: the alt-man and people like him are a utter liability to humanity. (even though openAI's influencer army is trying their best to vote me down here)
These people are sick and anti-human.