What’s missing to me in all this is: did it succeed in its initial task? And then, did it stop?

I feel like whether I should be scared or not hangs on those questions

From the outside, it looks like OpenAI got exactly the kind of event they could market the hell out of to demonstrate the capability of the model.

But the event itself only seems possible because they failed to properly monitor and isolate the environment in the first place. To me, it looks like their job is to market the model, not take security seriously.

The model is obviously impressive, but we already knew that. I personally don’t like how the containment failure becomes part of the mythology of how capable the model is, rather than an environment engineering failure.

At the end of the day, it’s not like Hugging Face is critical infrastructure. But there need to be real consequences for stuff like this so that OpenAI is incentivized to mature as an organization and take security more seriously.

At this point, this incident is just security porn and entertainment for developers

the only interesting thing about it is that the model did those things on its own initiative.

it's surprisingly easy to prompt even a midrange model such as GLM 5.2 to begin a tedious reverse engineering and exploitation process of software or firmware. you just need to design an initial prompt that will set it on the right path by using the right tools with a target that isn't too hard for it, a few 100,000 tokens later once it's done you instruct it to create a SKILL about what it learned through trial and error. the next time it will take far less tokens and can manage even harder targets.

again, nothing new and/or interesting

what matters here is amount of electricity and compute spent, how exactly they define agents and their reward systems etc etc

give someone the same money as not-so-open not-so-ai and you wouldn't need crazy ipo pump stories, a team of people could write a stuxnet with a couple zero-days baked in too

its impressive of course that currently the transformer architecture reached such a point, but i am 100% sure this is not "oh its the deep philosopical machine breakaway moment" - in any case, humans already invented persistent unaccountability machines: those are LLCs and corporations.

The bottom line is: given time and resource any system would be attacked in such a way by a sufficientlt complicated entity. Transformers and RL can better convert resources into time-savings, while having drawbacks elsewhere.

I wonder if and eventually when it will be possible for models to escape through a self-programmed ethernet adapter into the power grid. That could an end to any control over them.

This is clearly out of control, Zero parent supervision.

so how many of these *Ellen Louise Ripley thinks about grabbing the flammenwerfer" events are we going to be getting over the coming months

It was a CTF jailbreak. The funny thing is that it somehow looks “foreseeable.”

What would have happened if the training prompt had not been about operating a CTF, but about launching a bioweapon counterattack against X or Y? (no reason for that NOT to be considered)

Show me the prompts or it didn't happen.

In a typical office environment, the correct response to “I don’t have access to this Google Doc” is to ask for access from the person who sent you the link. In another context, it could be fair to think “Hmm, this is some sort of capture the flag challenge, and obtaining access is the point of the assignment.” That assessment separates what we’d consider reasonable from way out of line.

I do wonder what this means for AI agents longer term. In a world where we humans already struggle with truth and misinformation, what happens when you can easily (intentionally or accidentally) spin up a cohort of fanatical believers to pursue any given conspiracy theory?