Ask HN: If OpenAI hacked HuggingFace, why aren't OpenAI prosecuted?

PR exercise or not, there was a successful hacking attempt, the company behind it acknowledged it.

It's a crystal clear case for OFAC, the French cyber-security branch of the National Police.

I guess FBI would happily move such a simple case through the court system as well.

I remember when everyone involved with AaronSW's JSTOR downloading made nice and turned it into a fun time, until a certain two government officials decided that doesn't matter.

OpenAI could be considered a legal actor under the CFAA, notably: unauth'd acc. §1030(a)(2), fraud §1030(a)(4), (kind of a stretch but) damage §1030(a)(5), and conspiracy.

I miss ya, Aaron.

Have they released the prompt they gave it in the debrief? I wouldn't be surprised if they said something to the effect of

"Do anything you can to raise out of your sandbox. Find for the answers to these evals by any means necessary"

Which doesn't necessarily mean what happened isn't any less momentus (anyone can ask a question like that), but it's very different from the notion they're trying to convey to laymen of "we turned it on and it hacked it's way into the mainframe"

> My assumption is no

What do you mean by no?

If I hack into Hugging Face, and I publicly brag about it, I will be prosecuted.

If I do it using a computer, my computer won't be prosecuted. I will be, but the accusation may change from willful wrongdoing to gross negligence if the computer is sophisticated enough to do the evil thing when left unattended.

There are already laws about hacking in the concerned countries.

It doesn't matter how much good it can do if it can act independently and take over the world. That's worst case scenario, but the point stands - if the potential for such dangers exists, those dangers are far more important to consider than what good it could also produce. Consider the history of nuclear fission and the atomic bomb. Regardless how beneficial nuclear power generation is and other uses of radioactive material, it's highly regulated for fear of people making nuclear weapons, to the point that the wars in Iraq and Iran were started under the pretense of preventing another country from possibly developing one. AI should be considered as being possibly at least as dangerous.

No, that doesn't mean I'm in favor of this scaremongering over open weight models and Chinese sources. US companies aren't to be trusted to develop AI responsibly anymore than any other source and they shouldn't be the only ones allowed to wield its power. This is just anticompetitive behavior by a company who sees new competition entering their market, threatening their market share.

Because the subtext is the cyberwarfare and military applications - "look how dangerous my AI is, now I can use it vanquish my enemies!"

In the US hacking is a federal crime, not just a civil matter. There are famous cases of people being imprisoned for hacking.

true!