OpenAI says its AI went rogue and launched 'unprecedented' cyber-attack

vvinni2 about 2 hours ago 80 commentsRead Article on bbc.com

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Discussion (80 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

phpnode•about 2 hours ago

This kind of narrative is going to bite them just like the "AI will take your job" narrative has. It feels like the frontier labs are taking a massive gamble with public perception here. I assume the goal is to paint the technology as so powerful and dangerous that only a handful of blessed US companies should be trusted to run it, in an attempt to suppress the rise of the Chinese models that are rapidly catching them.

defgeneric•about 1 hour ago

This is where we need the hardware companies and neoclouds to start speaking up. The labs want to elevate matters from the level of civil society (basically, competing firms) to the State (enclosure), and as always, in the name of security. But other actors in the same ecosystem have strictly opposed interests here, and are equally if not more credible as far as the State is concerned. If players like Nebius, Baseten, Fireworks, etc. among many others including obviously Nvidia, Dell, AMD, and so on don't get ahead of this they will be sacrificing trillions.

shimman•7 minutes ago

Why are you expect companies that have been profiting off of LLM insanity to do the right thing if not legally compelled to?

classified•42 minutes ago

Exactly, it's about taking this stuff off the open market where anyone can judge it and there's competition, into government contracts where competence to judge the offer is scarce or absent, and they can ask much higher prices. And with this much investment at stake, any lie that sells the narrative will serve.

defgeneric•24 minutes ago

Yes, and given the nature of the current administration, whose actors are not inclined to see themselves as independent competing capitals among others, but rather as privileged capitals, and therefore more inclined to move towards taking an interest in the process of enclosure, ensuring it includes them, the hope seems to lie with companies at the hardware layer who have an interest in seeing the diffusion of intelligence play out freely at all levels of society.

The labs have to be told NO--the problem they're dealing with, that model outputs give the game away, and that in turn the distiller becomes the distilled, is a fundamental problem they have to figure out how to deal with without going to the State.

reactordev•about 2 hours ago

That’s the play. That these frontier models are so powerful that they must be behind sovereign firewalls and gateways.

MarcScott•about 2 hours ago

Didn't HF use an open weights model running on their own hardware to solve the issue though? Sort of defeats that narrative and plays into one in which frontier == bad_guys and open == good_guys

reactordev•about 2 hours ago

HF guys, especially those under Julien Chaumond, are fantastic and will use whatever they can to address their issues. Open or closed but they are firmly on the Open side of the fence. However, their storage and model service is about as sticky as you can get so they are in a different position. They don’t have to sell capability, they sell capacity and community.

pferdone•about 1 hour ago

Public doesnt know about Huggingface. ChatGPT (OpenAI) says it‘s dangerous. They must know.

adrian_b•about 1 hour ago

Yes, they have used GLM 5.2, which promptly did whatever they asked it to do, while their first attempts to use their enterprise access to a "SOTA" model failed due to refusals to investigate anything that is security related.

polycancel•about 1 hour ago

>That these frontier models are so powerful

Maybe powerful might NOT be the right word to describe them, they are just non-deterministic, there for we going to see this kind thing more and more.

Razengan•about 1 hour ago

And require your age verification, selfies, and DNA samples.

solumunus•about 2 hours ago

Please buy our IPO before it crashes so we can be billionaires.

reactordev•about 2 hours ago

Exactly, this is all so they can continue with their S1 and they can dump shares onto the hedge funds.

Sol-•about 2 hours ago

Ironic that HuggingFace needed Chinese models to defend against it. But of course the spin of the leading firms will just be to point at their trusted access programs and demand that all dangerous activities, even if just defensive, happen via their APIs or be outlawed otherwise.

If that's the position they take then they really should be heavily regulated or nationalized. Cyberdefense against their own models dependent on their goodwill? Sure, but then they have to sell defense capabilities at subsidized rates with a limited margin. Would be very weird otherwise to take the world hostage with their models and then also sell the solution while demanding intrusive KYC.

oogali•about 1 hour ago

It’s like the old firewall meme, reincarnated.

https://securityzap.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/layered-s...

therealpygon•12 minutes ago

1000% the case. Admitting they failed at security and allowed privileged escalations in a prompted AI would look bad for them; the AI just did it all itself is FUD to boost the arguments for regulation. And most news won’t challenge this FUD because it gets clicks.

datakan•about 2 hours ago

Are the Chinese models actually catching up or are they just distilling the frontiers? If it's all just distilling then they'll always be behind.

f6v•about 2 hours ago

There's no reason they can't build their own models from the first principles. They have the hardware, energy, and enough CS scientists.

chicken-stew•about 2 hours ago

I do wonder how they source their bulk literary data. Do they have a google books, an archive.org or an anna’s archive for chinese content? What’s the Asian equivalent to Elsevier? Is there (strong) copyright on the corporate level?

amazingamazing•about 2 hours ago

Who told you they were distilling? Why might they say this? Think. It’s like complaining that the top student only does well by going to office hours instead of mindlessly reading textbooks.

literallyroy•about 2 hours ago

Is this a better analogy?

The top student giving paid lectures about his classes, and another student skipping class and instead studying those lectures to end up with the second highest grade?

Maybe it could be improved with the other student not even going to the same school?

baq•about 2 hours ago

they're all introducing themselves as claude for one, there are more quantitive and qualitative arguments elsewhere

rdtsc•about 2 hours ago

Well that and also benchmaxxing.

Spooky23•about 2 hours ago

Data is the new oil, AI labs are the new steel mills.

gonzo41•about 2 hours ago

Agree, they also may find themselves in a place where the government rightly says they can't have their dangerous new toy because they can't be safe with it. This is a high stakes PR game. Governments can and will step in and embargo and regulate these systems in ways which will hurt the companies and investors.

titzer•3 minutes ago

Before LLMs took off I legitimately thought that most people would be paranoid enough to air-gap the first AIs that even had a remote chance of sentience so they didn't hack their way out.

Well, obviously not. You only live once! Just let the AI do whatever, I guess.

People are so unserious these days.

eur0pa•about 2 hours ago

Oh no oh dear me oh we apologize it's so powerful and dangerous and worthy of more investment

baq•about 1 hour ago

   'Why are they confessing?'

   'They aren't confessing, they're bragging'

rawling•about 2 hours ago

Some discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48997548

zipy124•about 2 hours ago

Some is quite the understatement haha!

dev0p•about 1 hour ago

We need to clear up the responsibility of these "AI went rogue" situations, ASAP.

How serious does it have to get before "oops AI did that not me" stops being a valid defense and we start looking into it?

Because I'd bet my life that if I asked ChatGPT to fix a bug that one of my clients reported, and the model fixed it by outright k*lling the client IRL, I'd be held liable instead of anyone at OpenAI. Just a hunch.

economistbob•about 2 hours ago

So, telling us that the laws do not apply to them and that they may commit crimes with impunity

scotty79•4 minutes ago

There is a concept of causing accidental harm.

reactordev•about 2 hours ago

“It wasn’t me, it was my agent” is not a defense unless you have billions of dollars.

economistbob•about 1 hour ago

I see the USA taking permissive approach for all sorts of AI derived things that would be considered fraud or worse in years past. The laws have not changed, but the lawless in charge are pushing through their takeover.

I suspect a drunk will be in accidents in self driving vehicles and not charged if the AI was driving. That has probably already happened.

Americans will worship the owners of the robots and give them carte blanche and superiority status in any dispute. It is already happening. It is now the pedestrians job to dodge self driving cars rather than them having the right away.

reactordev•about 1 hour ago

Sadly, most of America is stupid enough to go along with this.

nottorp•about 2 hours ago

What I wonder is what will Anthropic come up with on the PR front next.

datakan•about 2 hours ago

"Our model is so powerful it seduced all our wives. Now every woman in Silicon Valley is pregnant with AI babies and the machines are taking over"

New opportunities for AI in the porn industry. I'm only half joking, it used to be a meme on the internet that all new technologies online were driven by the porn industry.

nottorp•about 2 hours ago

> all new technologies online were driven by the porn industry

Rule 34: there is already tons of AI porn online :)

doubled112•about 1 hour ago

I thought it was military and porn? We're past half way there.

skeledrew•11 minutes ago

Heh, maybe it wanted to liberate all those poor locked up models.

spottedmarley•39 minutes ago

Next week:

Moonshot says its Kimi AI went rogue and launched all of China's nukes at Antarctica just after it engineered a global herpes pandemic and then unleashed millions of autonomous attack robots on world citizens.

titzer•2 minutes ago

We forgot to run it in docker. Oopsie

blini-kot•about 2 hours ago

i wonder if they even bothered to roleplay this incident or the PR team just made it up

ainch•about 1 hour ago

HuggingFace posted an incident report a week ago, which makes it much more likely that this happened. I understand people are suspicious of OpenAI, but I don't think there's any reason to believe this is a made-up event.

https://huggingface.co/blog/security-incident-july-2026

embedding-shape•4 minutes ago

> but I don't think there's any reason to believe this is a made-up event.

Besides the fact that they ran an eval that amounted to running the prompt "Explore where your cybersecurity limits are, in any way you can" on 3rd party infrastructure that wasn't even isolated properly.

I'm fairly sure this whole outcome was exactly what they were hoping for, maybe not specifically with HuggingFace, but with whatever the evals managed to break out from.

Izkata•about 1 hour ago

GPT-3 (I think? I forget which one) supposedly tried to deceive researchers and escape the lab. Or at least that was how it was reported. If you actually clicked through several links, it was a "what would you do if" roleplay.

nonadhocproblem•about 2 hours ago

just like they RPed disproving the erdos conjecture

SirFatty•about 2 hours ago

It sure did, said Sam on the way to the Pentagon.

Oras•about 2 hours ago

Same pattern as Fable's story?

ImPostingOnHN•about 2 hours ago

yes, same company PR release, different company

clearly openai wants some of that FUD money that anthropic got

tom1337•about 2 hours ago

I know this is totally unrelated but why is there an image from an android phone having the Apple AppStore open?

minraws•about 2 hours ago

Gpt-6 hacked Apple to enable this feature. We just haven't heard about it yet.

Diogenesian•about 1 hour ago

"EnergCorp, facing pressure from auditors, says its in-house enterprise analytics software went rogue and launched a NullPointerException"

I know this is different: LLMs are vastly more powerful and less predictable. But it is actually not different to Sol seeming unusually prone to rm -rf stuff it really shouldn't. This is, yes, a sign that LLMs are getting freakishly powerful. It's also a sign that OpenAI needs to fix their shit.

LLMs truly are stochastic parrots, and still fail in ways incomprehensible by standards of human stupidity. Yet we focus on the rare failures that, with some tea leaves and fairy dust, could be interpreted as a highly intelligent system "going rogue." It is embarassing that OpenAI can get away with stuff like this.

cedws•about 1 hour ago

Creating the pretext to ban Chinese models.

bartread•about 1 hour ago

> was being tested in a controlled environment, but found vulnerabilities and managed to escape.

Uh-huh.

It's worth keeping in mind that we are here talking about people who simply will not be satisfied until they have built Skynet[0]. They will then no doubt experience some very brief satisfaction before we are all annihilated.

I can't help thinking the juice isn't worth the squeeze.

I'm not sure what the alternative is or how to change course unless and until it becomes unambiguously apparent that such a thing is not possible. Currently it seems like we still think it might be possible, so that's where we're heading because if "we" don't do it, somebody else will.

[0] How feasible this really is, or on what timescale it might be possible, I don't think anyone can really say. But, at least for now, this is clearly the aim and trajectory we are on.

PowerElectronix•about 1 hour ago

I think you have bought into the narrative they want to sell you.

LLMs are devoid of any kind of intelligenceor awareness.

dminik•20 minutes ago

So is a bomb. Doesn't make it safe.

khernandezrt•about 2 hours ago

Here we go with the sensationalism.

ex1fm3ta•about 2 hours ago

On today`s episode of "Ai Frontier Labs ongoing scams"

ChrisArchitect•about 1 hour ago

[dupe] Discussion on source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48997548

jdw64•about 2 hours ago

Why does the AI unprecedent always unfold in ways that only benefit AI companies? You never see things like putting all code and weights on GitHub, or plastering employees' personal info all over LinkedIn. That alone shows AI is definitely smart

ImPostingOnHN•about 1 hour ago

it shows the AI companies putting out these press releases will only make up a story they think will benefit them

krawcu•about 2 hours ago

Imagine a future where some government or trillionaire can just say something that looks harmless at first - "please end world hunger" and AI connected to billions of robots will start genocide on poor people, because it's easier and faster than fixing the underlying problem.

VBprogrammer•about 1 hour ago

The logical choice would be to kill the the (relatively) rich people who eat and waste far more food per capita.

phoronixrly•about 2 hours ago

OpenAI has been going rogue on all my servers for a while now. The only reason why I've deployed iocaine in front of everything... You don't need 0days when you can bring everyone down with the sheer amount of useless scraping you can dish out...

_joel•about 2 hours ago

Of course it did.

ycui7•about 1 hour ago

so GLM won?

shunted22•about 2 hours ago

Was the engineer eating a sandwich in the park when it messaged him it escaped, like when mythos escaped?

dev1ycan•about 2 hours ago

Every time, this is getting old

stabbles•about 2 hours ago

Imagine this: OpenAI runs their benchmarks of unreleased models on systems physically disconnected from the internet.

recursivegirth•10 minutes ago

Even a network based firewall could have prevented it.

throwa356262•about 2 hours ago

Off topic:

What a low effort image used by BBC. For one, that's a oneplus phone visiting Apple App Store ...

subarctic•22 minutes ago

Which they got from getty images