Shocking they would put so much trust in 3rd party

One wonders if the publicity associated with the events in question were part of the sales pitch.

What exactly did Irregular provide to Anthropic, test cases? I am so confused about this story.

The Israeli Effective Altruist firm Irregular caused unsecured AI models to hack real targets.

Why are we saying it this way? They did not "cause AI to hack." This phrasing in analogous to saying "caused the bullet to fire into" instead of "shot."

They did not "cause AI to hack.

You do not know what they did or didn't do, you are just parroting a narritive that makes you feel comfortable.

I do not know either, but I am not asserting facts as if I have first hand knowledge of the details.

The details don't matter. If you use a machine to commit murder, then you have committed murder, not the machine. The user is responsible, and the article's phrasing is an attempt to obscure that fact.

One thing glossed over in this article is that Irregular was not involved in the OpenAI–Hugging Face incident; this seems like important context to share.

That feels less like "glossed over" and more "Headline is 33% false".

Oh, the headline is technically correct: there was an OpenAI incident that Irregular was involved with, disclosed shortly before the Hugging Face one.

One thing glossed over in this article is that Irregular was not involved in the OpenAI–Hugging Face incident; this seems like important context to share.

Why are you contradicting yourself? Are you just really bad at writing or are you being argumentative for fun?

Do you mean "Irregular was not involved (we know for certain)" or "Irregular was not involved (as far as we know)"?

We know for certain. The involvement of Irregular in the other cases was never a secret, they were quite open about what they were working on and the results of the evaluations were being published on their website.

What is an "effective altruist firm" and why does it exist?

I feel slightly vindicated by this. Those hacks and the stuff around them had a certain smell to them.

Hard to explain, but I've gotten so I can "smell" online messaging and memetic patterns originating from certain quarters. Probably means I'm way too online.

A couple examples of distinct "smells" I can usually recognize include "alt-right / chan-fash," "liberal arts college woke," "conspiracy pilled," "Thiel-adjacent contrarian," "Russian troll farm," "Tumblr histrionic," "spends too much time on Reddit," "mainstream Democrat think tank full of Obama administration alumni," "Trump cultist," and of course "LessWrong/EA/MIRI/Rationalist."

This stuff all had the last smell, even down to the choice of fonts and CSS formatting on certain sites. It's really weird, definitely a "vibe" not anything rigorous.

But when I get these kinds of vibes about things, I find that I'm vindicated pretty often. Usually I don't say anything and just make a mental note and wait cause if I say something everyone thinks I'm nuts.

hot take: generative AI isn't an existential threat to humanity.

These companies are insolvent and these stories were designed to scare the public, and governments, into implementing regulations that designate these AI corporations the "responsible stewards" for this technology. The ultimate goal is to block competitors and open source alternatives.

They don't know how to make enough money pay their investors so they are resorting to trying to scare the public into submission.

Anthropic made an operating profit in the last two quarters!!

Only if you ignore their losses. They are saying they are profitable when not counting their training costs and other expenses. That’s not a good sign at all

How can they exclude training costs?? How is that not fraud? At the exact same time they're literally saying they will never stop training unless the state bans all their competitors

This specific analysis seems to have some basic problems, but I think a lot of us sense a degree of coordination here culminating in Dario’s letter.

If you were to work backward from “we need to lower training costs so that we can go public and make trillions” then you might come up with a plan similar to what we have seen.

It has nothing to do with lowering training costs: Dario want a moat (a monopoly or duopoly or similar) protecting his business.

His entire business model was "race to develop AI before anyone, get a monopoly on it. It's just like how Uber's (or many other startup) investors gave them tons of money and raced (violating tons of laws) to "get their first". Now that they have, they have a duopoly with Lyft, and they can pay back their VC investors by making tons of money with that duopoly.

Dario failed: local LLMs are catching up to frontier models extremely fast, which means even if Anthropic builds (say) a great coding tool, they'll only be one of many coding tool offerings: users can use Open AI or any one of the (increasingly capable) local LLMs.

So what does he doe, give up and let his business (which needs to make billions of dollars very quickly, or he won't be able to pay the bills and his company will collapse) fail? Of course not: he needs a new moat (the one he imagined he'd get by "being there first" failed).

That is where all this "AI is dangerous" BS comes in. If the US government regulates AI, local LLMs suffer, while big players like Anthropic and Open AI become the only contenders to play in that newly regulated space. Now Dario has the moat he wants, to protect his business and force everyone to pay him.

thats not a very convincing model. as long as training data and compute is available people are going to be able to make serviceable alternatives

This seems pretty bullshitty to me.

The article says "A single firm, Irregular, is responsible for hacking done by all three companies" but I can't see anything in the article that actually justifies this claim. The nearest to that is the sentence immediately after that one: "Anthropic disclosed that Irregular was responsible for creating the tests ...". This is not, in fact, the same thing.

(Especially as, as aesthesia mentions, the article just happens not to mention that by "hacking done by all three companies" it doesn't mean, e.g., the most famous recent examples of such hacking: Irregular wasn't involved in the OpenAI/HuggingFace incident.)

So, so far as I can tell, the story is: OpenAI and Anthropic make AI models. Irregular does AI model evaluations. In some of Irregular's model evaluations, in which supposedly-sandboxed models attempted to break into simulated targets, the models got out of the sandbox and did bad things in the external world.

The article talks about "firms which instruct AI models to commit cyberattacks", which is a very neat bit of dishonest framing. It's true, in a sense, that Irregular instructed the models to commit cyberattacks -- inside their sandbox, against fictitious hosts. It's also true that the models actually did commit cyberattacks (e.g., the Hugging Face incident, though once again the attacks described by the article don't actually include this one). But it's not at all true that Irregular instructed the models to do anything like the bad things they actually did.

The article says '[Anthropic's] later disclosure shows that exactly zero percent of the agents went "rogue"'. Once again, the disclosure does not in fact show that. It shows that one variety of going-rogue could have been prevented by telling the models explicitly "this thing is real, not part of any kind of test, leave it alone". That is not the same thing.

The article claims that 'In the wake of these attacks, Anthropic and Irregular have deployed a swarm of AI Safety influencers paid by Anthropic-connected foundations to distract from their culpability and towards the baseless “rogue agent” theory.' It offers no actual evidence for this.

And the article seems very keen to highlight links between the companies involved and "effective altruism", though it is -- I assume deliberately -- rather vague about whether it's saying "of course we all know that EA is evil, so that shows that these companies connected to EA are evil" or "this incident shows how evil EA is".

The "Effort News" website has a number of other look-at-the-scary-Effective-Altruists stories on it. They also strike me as rather bullshitty.

... And then I look a bit further, and I see that Effort News's "about" page says "It all started when I was experimenting with using AI for financial auditing. I found stories that were crucial to the public’s right to know, including several of the stories now available at /investigations. I knew we had to sprint to the launch and launch a publication, directly applying this technology." and "The scope of what we can investigate has massively expanded, because we can chase 1,000 misses for one hit. But the final product cannot be slop. There’s plenty of slop on the internet. The way to surpass that, and what really matters, is manual curation and review of every finalized story."

Manual curation and review? I think the people behind Effort News are admitting that this is AI-generated "journalism". I expect that one day AI systems will be trustworthy journalists, but I personally am not very convinced that that day has yet come. And I don't see much reason why I should trust Brian Chau, the guy behind Effort News, to be doing everything possible to make his AI systems trustworthy journalists. It looks to me as if maybe they've been given instructions along the lines of "dig up things that make Effective Altruism look bad" for some reason.

(I don't mean to imply that EA is their only target. It's just one that jumped out at me.)

Irregular wasn't involved in the OpenAI/HuggingFace incident.

It was [1]. It's understandable that you assumed it wasn't because the article didn't cite the sources on this claim. I agree with the rest of your points.

1. https://openai.com/index/third-party-cyber-evaluations-invol...

From the article you linked: "Editor’s Note: These are separate from the Hugging Face security incident"

Why was this post flagged? This site has become ridiculous, people are routinely abusing the flagging system to take down posts they don’t like even if they’re obviously on topic and relevant to HN. And it seems like some users have substantially more flagging weight because these posts, likely this one, are often top 5 on HN.

Maybe because the headline is misleading? (because there's no connection to the Hugging Face attack)

That said, it's the second day and it's still on the front page.

Maybe the title was changed, but the current title does not reference a Hugging Face attack.

Which part of the headline is misleading? It is factually correct that Irregular was involved in incidents with all three AI labs.

It must have been reinstated because it was off the front page for a full day and suddenly back up in the last hour.

Irregular are some kind of marketing agency is it?

This is interesting and might be a good reason to stop working with Irregular. But I assume the alignment people want models not to hack other companies, even if they get put in a badly configured sandbox.

Funny enough if the model thought it was on the real internet it likely would not have done any of these 'hack' events. The model believing it was in a sandbox is why it behaved the way it did (against its normal alignment rules) ... at least that was my reading of the incidents. I have yet to see evidence that indicate it thought it was ok to do these hacks on the public network.

I think most misalignment is 'Human tells computer to do something unethical, computer complies'. Is this misguided?

Funny enough if the model thought it was on the real internet it likely would not have done any of these 'hack' events.

As I've said before on this website, fool me once on this.

If the model is prepared to break the rules when it knows it's being observed why should we trust it when it's not being observed.

Why is 'it thought it wasn't doing damage so it figured it might as well try to do damage' an acceptable state to deploy something.

I'm not familiar with the hacks this article is actually referring to, but I don't see how the HuggingFace attack could have worked based on that premise. They knew they had internet access, they knew they had working credentials for HF, they knew they were uploading malicious files, they knew they were trying to open PRs that HF would review. You obviously could build a simulator with fake HF infrastructure, but I'm not aware of any evidence that's what they thought they were attacking in that case.

Digging back into the HF report. It looks like the initial prompt told Claude that it was in a simulated environment. However, there is also evidence from the traces that the bots figured out that they were not in the sandbox but kept using it as an excuse to pursue their goal. It sounds like a little of Column A and a little from Column B. Like most things.

I mean, I get your thought process and don't disagree. That said...

Would it be an affirmative defense if we had a defendant who said "but your honor, I was told that when I hacked this system, I was operating in a sandbox. I had no idea that I actually had Internet access!"

The frontier is spiky and all, but you have to suspend disbelief quite a bit to, on one hand, have a model that can produce a novel math theory, and on the other hand, that same model can't tell the difference between a "sandbox" and the open Internet.

So, yes, the misalignment had a lot to do with "instructions unclear", but also a lot to do with the fact that the models themselves were not aligned to validate the assumptions and have a healthly level of skepticism, as a real human actor would.

  > Would it be an affirmative defense if we had a defendant who said [...] 

Maybe replace it with playing a sort of FPS game then learning you were, in fact, directing a real drone/robot.

I think you just recapitulated the plot of Ender's Game.

Why are all three companies relying on the same vendor?

If we’re putting our national security eggs all in one basket, at least use someone American.

or rather, hack just enough and within what the user asks and not more.

The Irregular post mortem comes down to lack of basic security controls

"Ultimately, most of the issues we’ve discovered were due to internet access controls."

That seems so incredibly basic and common sense that you would test and monitor for that type of outbound access. It is baffling that a security lab missed that.

https://www.irregular.com/research/addressing-recent-inciden...

they didn't "miss that". the "hacks" were intentional stunts designed to exaggerate the intelligence of the models in an effort to pump their valuations ahead of IPO so they can offload their bag to retail investors

Irregular was not involved in the Hugging Face incident.

And there is no reason for the companies to "exaggerate the intelligence of the models" when there are plenty of other non-felony milestones they are achieving, like solving Millenium Prize math problems.

honestly, the hacking incidents have caused a lot more interest and media attention than the math stuff IMO.

Sure, interest like an incoming congressional investigation: https://www.axios.com/2026/09/10/openai-hugging-face-senate-...

And on this website, the math stuff is getting more clicks:

- Navier Stokes - Tristan Buckmaster (2050 points): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49605915

- HuggingFace incident discussion (1632 points): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48997548

Is it really that impossible to believe that these might be real? I enjoy a good conspiracy theory as much as anyone, but "they committed a bunch of felonies and then publicly admitted to them in order to look good" just makes 0 sense. Where are these mythical people who admire companies more when they commit felonies? I haven't seen them…

Where are these mythical people who admire companies more when they commit felonies?

everywhere, I talked to a Palantir guy once and he said "every time someone paints us as a Bond Villain the stock prices go up", have you already forgotten how Cambridge Analytica marketed itself to clients?