Posted by rwmj 3 hours ago
1) The AI failed to solve ExploitGym problems.
2) The OpenAI sandbox is such a horrible hack that the AI managed to escape using standard and well documented script kiddie methods.
3) Huggingface has no security and the AI broke in using standard script kiddie methods.
OpenAI and Huggingface covered it up and used it for public relations. That is, if not all was invented and everything was scripted in the first place in order to get desired regulations.
Huggingface reported it to the police, you say? I'm sure the police will have as much enthusiasm to investigate anything as in the Suchir Balaji case. In other words, zero.
> AI broke in using standard script kiddie methods.
I've spent time gathering the detail of what happen here and while there are some solid theories and indicators, absolutely nothing so far has suggested a sandbox escape using "well documented script kiddie methods" or that the method used to break into the HF network was similar. Where did you get this from?
I think truly we don't know enough to say this. OpenAI says their AI found a 0-day exploit in some proxy software they were using but don't give a ton of details. On the Huggingface end we know a little more, they say the AI spun up tons of sandboxes and tested different exploits until it found one that worked.
They created an experiment they knew would generate the outcome they wanted. It would be the similar to what say car companies do to over hype their cars. "This EV can go over 800 miles on a single charge!" And then at the bottom you see all the disclaimers: "Must be on flat ground, with no headwind, with a spare battery in the back seat, with no extra weight added."
Same thing here. Everybody in infosec is calling this out as a marketing stunt and nothing else for a litany of reasons. I'd say look up MG (creator of the OMG cable) on twitter, he has some interesting insights on this one.
I dunno; Check my posting history, I'm as skeptical of AI companies' claims as anyone, but in this case your theory doesn't explain why:
1. OpenAI guardrails refused to let the target use OpenAI's models to defend against this.
2. Huggingface used GLM (I think) so that they could defend without guardrails.
If this was an intentional marketing ploy, it was marketing for GLM, not for OpenAI nor for Huggingface.
Hence, I don't think it was intentional.
"our model is horribly misaligned and used security exploits to break out of our sandbox and into another company, without being prompted to do so" is not positive marketing.
This is an actual critical problem, not a stunt. We're going to see more of this, and it's going to get much worse.
If your AI is really that dangerous you don't need a sandbox at all, you should airgap it from any network.
Another applicable metaphor I've seen floating around is weapons companies testing out a new bomb.
We know the AI labs don't care about negative vs positive public sentiment, and only care that investors see their tech as powerful. The only difference in PR strategy from a weapons company is the latter doesn't care if they get protested.
> AI broke in using standard script kiddie methods.
Go ahead and show us how easy it is to break into HuggingFace (and OpenAI) networks.
Whilst it would be nice to see actual evidence of this because brute forcing relatively sophisticated hacks is something an LLM actually should be capable of, every time I hear this sort of story, I'm reminded that humans reportedly gained access to the "too dangerous to release" Anthropic models by the super sophisticated hacking technique of guessing the URLs...
Similarly, as long as I’m under the assumption we are prioritizing accuracy: it is against our charter to assert it was “script kiddie” attacks on both ends.
They announced it publicly within days. https://huggingface.co/blog/security-incident-july-2026
>3) Huggingface has no security and the AI broke in using standard script kiddie methods.
Isn't the issue less that gpt 5.6 is a l33t h4x0r (though other tests do show that) and more that the incident shows the model has alignment issues?
> These deployment safeguards were intentionally not enabled during this evaluation because it was aimed at testing cyber vulnerabilities
Choosing to commit crimes to steal the cheat sheet to something you know is a (low stakes!) evaluation is not well aligned.
If we don't know how this model was instructed, it seems like it's impossible to definitively claim that the model's actions were not in alignment with the intent of the operator.
I guess all I'm getting at here is that alignment is relative, right?
I can't help thinking of them as the terrible "security" scripts of yesteryear (often but not exclusively in PHP) which would test input variables for a "suspicious" substrings like "--" in order to "fix" an unresolved deeper SQL injection flaw. They only partly worked, and surprise-surprise now nobody with a surname like O'Anything can make an account.
Unlike that situation, there's no known route to a proper fix for LLMs today, because the bug is the feature, and once someone has built a system giving you all that recurring revenue, it's hard for them to abandon it due to a few isolated hacking incidents...
In this case the model was explicitly prompted to "commit crimes" (ExploitGym). It didn't decide doing it on its own.
They are no more beholden to "human safety and goals" than any individual human is, and anyone telling you we can make deterministic guarantees about their output is making a category error.
LLMs do not "have motivations", they reproduce a model of human motivations embedded into their weights. This includes the full spectrum of human desires, not just the positive ones. If we tried to remove all examples of lying, or disagreement, etc. from the training data we'd have basically nothing left. Even the sycophancy we treat as aligned is basically just the other side of the lying coin.
It's so trivially easy to do that it all but guarantees the test was rigged in some way to make the LLM understand that breaking out of the sandbox was an option available to it.
Based on the fact that none of their invaluable frontier models have leaked, we know OpenAI knows how to do security. But like we learned with OpenClaw, none of these companies perceive any benefit from securing their own agents against other people's data.
That's exactly it. If your prompt says "go to whatever lengths necessary to maximize your score", and then you spin up 100 agents, at least one of them will interpret that as you implying they should cheat, even without you telling them to explicitly.
You can't prompt your way to a compliant model. This is just a reformatting of the 'make no mistakes' meme.
What sort of announcements should they have made?
> if not all was invented and everything was scripted in the first place in order to get desired regulations
ends up covering up what is more worrying:
> OpenAI sandbox is such a horrible hack
I am more worried that this is sloppiness with potentially harmful resources than I am worried that people are juicing the stock price.
not going to get a decisive first advantage over Anthropic with that attitude!
Why the OpenAI escape is the most worrying AI mishap yet
https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2026/07/22/...
Having said that, if knowledgeable people were to write these articles, you'd end up with boring, dry, truthful content.
Their Insider video interview things are sponsored by Anthropic. Supposedly "Insider is a product of The Economist and thus editorially independent" but it's hard not to raise an eyebrow.
"It's a marketing stunt" is just denial trying to look like it's being clever.
It does not claim that capabilities are not real.
Secondly: to the people who aren't saying it....then why are you bringing up marketing at all? If the model is capable of it, then the motivation for why OpenAI is talking about it/reporting on it is completely beside the point. Either the capability matters or it doesn't. If the capability doesn't matter, or doesn't matter in the way that some particular person is claiming, then say that and explain why. Just saying "marketing stunt" adds zero value to the discussion.
I'm very open to arguments about why we shouldn't be concerned about this event (although my prior is very much that we should be, not so much because of the capabilities themselves, but because of how fundamentally misaligned this demonstrates the models are), but I am completely over listening to anyone who has nothing to add other than "marketing stunt".
The marketing of their models as super dangerous has a direct link to the regulatory moat they’re pursuing.
"It's not a marketing stunt" is just delusion trying to appear measured and safe.
1. The way OpenAI seems to want: Their latest LLM is too powerful and can’t be contained without them building in guidelines to the model.
2. OpenAI’s harness and network security controls were unintentionally so bad that it should reflect more poorly on them as a company more than it should reflect positively on their latest model.
3. The whole thing was faked or at least very intentionally not avoided.
The first interpretation is the only one that is positive for OpenAI and it has some assumptions. First, it’s seems to assume that this is the first case of fully automated attacks using AI. Second, this only happened because their latest LLM was a) more advanced than competitors, b) didn’t have refusals in the model.
Assuming the first about this being the first autonomous AI attack is true (which may be more of a survivorship bias), the second seems to forget that jailbreaks are available for every model. Therefore, the models guardrails don’t seem to be the differentiator here. Also, benchmarks seems to put most models pretty close to each other so it seems unlikely that their capabilities are far beyond what’s in the market already.
So then it’s seems it’s either that this was intentional(ish) or bad security. However, it also just could be that this isn’t the first case of this attack; just the first that was caught.
My take from working in offensive security for over five years is that this likely only looks novel since they did it poorly. Scripts are faster than LLMs and a combination of code, LLMs where it makes sense, and humans is the most efficient right now. Hundreds or thousands or agents spinning up attacks in the internal network is poor opsec and token efficiency. As for why it happened in the first place, it’s hard to say but I’m inclined to believe it was intentional or careless at best since simple network and sandbox controls makes this attack impossible. The timing of this attack after big open weight competitions drops seems too convenient.
To echo OP's article, these companies have proven time and time again that they DO NOT CARE if people like them, they only care that investors believe their technology is powerful.
Given that, point #2 is not a negative, it's a neutral. It's also fully compatible with point #1.
I know that may seem like a nitpick, but their entire media strategy relies on this. If they can convince you they're taking a risk by disclosing these stories when they're actually not, they can inflate their own credibility.
Point #3 is what actually happened, but it will never be possible to prove. The only hope we have is that a decade in it'll get harder to convince people that the revolution is just around the corner. The fact that we're getting this from the Guardian already is a good sign.
also if things happened as both claimed it would have been in huggingface's interest to immediately sue openai and make a legal mess over it just for the publicity alone.
reading their blog posts was pure cringe by the way. they are likely both blowing it out of proportion by an order of magnitude.
Hugging face also needs someone arrested for not providing security but that is a lesser charge.
It may or may not be a crime and typically the damaged party is pressing the charges. One would argue there is no actual damage here.
No offense but prosecutors have better things to do with their time.
As a practical matter it would be difficult to prosecute an assault where the victim opposed the prosecution, so most states wouldn’t bother - but for things like speeding and dealing drugs the law has been broken despite the lack of a victim.
If I blow up your house or steel $100000 from you and we both resolve our differences out of band, should I just be allowed to go about my day like I never did anything, or should I be punished for the crimes I committed? If I am not punished, it makes a mockery of the law that is (supposed) to have protected you, and if it happens repeatedly people will start wondering why the law even should exist if it clearly and obviously doesn't work. Granted, this has yet to happen again, but if OAI isn't punished it sets a very bad baseline precedent: that if I just hack you with an AI model, it's a-okay, and you can't do anything about it because eh, it's all good man!
Note that for criminal cases (which this was), the justice system can choose to prosecute even if the victim doesn't want that. It often doesn't, but this is one case where it should.
There’s also an optics issue for the justice system at play here: there’s immense public distrust of and anger at the labs right now. I would go to jail if I hacked HuggingFace, even if I said “it was during an eval!”; not doing the same for the labs makes it look like they’re above the law, which is going to make this anger get worse.
This is factually false: they both can and clearly did operate in an autonomous and unsupervised manner: https://openai.com/index/hugging-face-model-evaluation-secur...
This does not require sentience, personhood, a soul, or anything of the sort. It further doesn't mean an erasure of legal responsibility, not in principle, and not in historical practice.
I wish people would finally stop with the spiritualistic reasoning around this.
> This is factually false
From your link:
> After investigating, we now know that this particular incident was driven by a combination of OpenAI models...while being internally tested on a benchmark of cyber capabilities.
Someone set up that test and started it. Whether they outsourced the majority of the work in "setting up" and "starting it" to an LLM or not, they still set it in motion. That's not spiritualistic reasoning.
There's no indication of there having been a human in the loop during its operation: nobody was approving its tool calls, and nobody instructed it to commit these specific actions during its run (via prompting or steering).
There's no indication of any supervision of its operation either: OpenAI's engineers acted with significant delay, long after the agent has already meandered its way through their own infrastructure first.
Given that setting up this contraption in an insufficiently secure manner is almost certainly already a legal liability of equal significance, rejecting this very clear structural distinction is not necessary. That is unless someone is biased towards not wanting to grant the label of autonomy to it, in which case yes, this is absolutely spiritualistic reasoning, hence my point.
I do not want regulation to ride on people's nebulous identification on what specific traits and labels count as human-exclusive. Not just because I deeply disagree that e.g. autonomy would [0], but also because it is entirely unnecessary, for the reasons you also lay out. The agent having operated autonomously doesn't wash OpenAI of responsibility - so why reject the label, if not on a spiritualistic basis?
[0] thousands of years old idea that it is not, by the way: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automaton -- see also existing regulation recognizing this idea and working with it fine
Edit: one might also want to consider if the law should bite different if there was a human in the loop, or if there were explicit instructions for the agent to take unlawful actions. I'd say yes, and then that also requires this distinction to exist.
But there are also reasons why the story could be true: OAI are admitting that they apparently can't control their own models, Hugging Face said they used a Chinese model to protect against the attack, and an incident like this in general seems likely to happen given current frontier ability and lack of rigorous safe testing standards.
In any case, make calls to think more critically are often just disguised requests for you to replace your existing bias with someone else's.
Have we not seen several examples of older such models exploiting the docker control socket, etc., to escape containers? Even the news isn't new.
I support it being repeatedly publicized, but a bit more of a straightforward description would be an improvement.
Good to see that more neutral companies (Microsoft and Meta to name two) are pushing back against US government involvement:
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/24/nvidia-microsoft-meta-open-w...