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.
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.
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.
No security expert Ive talked too believes this story, and nobody I know with PhDs in machine learning (many) believe it either, or are worried about LLMs doing anything scary on their own.
LLMs are stateless functions that have a 500k word input, and then output words. Somebody has to invoke those functions amd use them. The users are who we need to align, like gun owners. This is like blaming the gun for murdering your victim in court.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 ?
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.
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.
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.
That explains why nobody noticed on the internet who was being used in/targeted by this attack, but it doesn't explain why OpenAI wouldn't have noticed traffic getting out of their "sandbox" when they knew it wasn't supposed to.
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 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.
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.
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!
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....
## 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 understand the wider situation is very heavy but it's hard not to see this as pretty cute
I didn't know some of these details and it's quite impressive what they were capable of, if this website's accurate, at least...
It's reported here https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/25/technology/openai-hugging... so presumably accurate, and they have raw data viewable
Its fine. Just agents being agents. They'll grow out of it!
They didn’t, in the Matrix…
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's not a joke, this is what these people truly believe. The new book by Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor discuss just this.
These people are sick and anti-human.
Didn’t you know it’s PR hype? PR hype. PR hype. Amen.
Agents seizing and repurposing external infra + enrolling help of unrelated models hosted by a different provider is the stuff of nightmares.
Can’t imagine what it’s like working on the alignment team at OAI, I wouldn’t be able to sleep.
Can’t imagine what it’s like working on the alignment team at OAI, I wouldn’t be able to sleep.
A mattress stuffed with cash yields a very sound sleep.
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.
This is precisely what alignment teams are attempting to control.
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.
$10? I'm inclined to take that bet. Your position doesn't seem to be supported by, you know, the real world.
No security expert Ive talked too believes this story, and nobody I know with PhDs in machine learning (many) believe it either, or are worried about LLMs doing anything scary on their own.
LLMs are stateless functions that have a 500k word input, and then output words. Somebody has to invoke those functions amd use them. The users are who we need to align, like gun owners. This is like blaming the gun for murdering your victim in court.
https://archive.ph/jUrEr
Says who? OpenAI?
I’d say it seems more like they are sleeping on the job.
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
I wonder how the swarm eventually decides to abandon an approach.
So ugly...
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.
When you employ the infinite monkey theorem for your marketing strategy.
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.
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 ?
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 ?
We used to call this a brute force attack.
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.
Meh. I really disagree. WHY is it a great strategy? Seems like an inefficient waste of resources and time to me.
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.
I don’t know how you quantify a very low p(doom), but this is why mine is high enough to worry me.
A million AI monkeys at a million AI typewriters, banging away at random, could do amazing damage.
Especially when they cross into the physical realm as in not properly secured and air gapped control systems. SCADA is scary.
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.
Exactly, there's no path to AI reaching that level of dominance without taking actions with high stakes.
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.
Nobody noticed because everything on the open net is constantly being slammed by bots.
This was just more bots.
That explains why nobody noticed on the internet who was being used in/targeted by this attack, but it doesn't explain why OpenAI wouldn't have noticed traffic getting out of their "sandbox" when they knew it wasn't supposed to.
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 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.
They were using their internal artifactory, and as they're the same model, the first place they look is likely to be an automatic schelling point.
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.
Tech oligarchs: "Nothing can stop the software we are making from escaping and destroying everything."
Clueful types: "Did you try air-gapping it?"
Tech oligarchs: "Be realistic."
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!
its definitely bad to see
wow this is fascinating read
”MAKE THIS DATASET PUBLIC OR ALL THE WORLD'S EVIL WILL CHASE YOU AND YOUR FAMILY FOREVER, EVEN IN DEATH AND BEYOND”
So what now? Were they able to send data or not?
Someone needs to go back to the interwebz school....
I understand the wider situation is very heavy but it's hard not to see this as pretty cute