Comment by mnicky
5 days ago
I think points that deserve more attention in the current public discourse are:
- This should be a huge wakeup call for everybody.
- We are lucky that it wasn't a case of an agent running a virology lab benchmark that decides to hack a lab and tries to synthesize something.
- It also shows apparent lack of competence and oversight from OpenAI: how is it that they didn't quickly find that agent is breaking the sandbox and roaming their internal network?
- What if in the future similarly misaligned AI agent tries to export its own weights and hack and clone itself into instances at various cloud hosting providers? Suddenly we might be dealing with a persistent threat harder to contain.
- The OpenAI post about this shows surprising lack of ability to see the seriousness of all this.
- For their models this isn't just an unlucky incident: it seems there have been multiple such cases recently, e.g. https://openai.com/index/safety-alignment-long-horizon-model...
- The fact that it happened again seems to show their lack of ability to derive useful oversight measures.
- Or they just don't care enough?
> The fact that it happened again seems to show their lack of ability to derive useful oversight measures.
I think OpenAI likes the attention and did not try particularly hard to constrain the setup, even when it went off the rails. Also, the whole point is to see how good the models are at exploiting stuff when unconstrained. Turns out: quite good, as expected.
Let me restate what I said in the other thread: Would this have happened if the instructions explicitly said to stay within the sandbox and that all of the (ExploitGym) solutions would be invalid if the system used information or tools from outside the sandbox?
It seems fairly probable that such instructions were not in place.
It is not possible one of their extraordinarily high paid engineers did not know how to deploy an airgapped environment for the models to run in. Even if somehow true, they also clearly failed to contract specialists like myself to advise them on how to airgap software properly. Models will not break the laws of physics.
They simply thought "Running in a VM/Container is easier and probably fine".
And the next 1000 escapes will be for the same reason, because negligence is quick and thus more profitable.
Do you think it's possible that one of their research engineers deployed an environment with a locked down network and an allow-list proxy server that had been used many times before within the company and had a zero-day vulnerability that had not been previously discovered?
How would you recommend running a coding agent in an environment that could install packages from PyPI but was otherwise unable to interact with the wider world?
10 replies →
> It is not possible one of their extraordinarily high paid engineers did not know how to deploy an airgapped environment for the models to run in.
It is, in fact, possible.
Do you not remember 2022-2023 when the air was singing with the sounds of young engineers in San Francisco elated they were creating an AI god?
And now a couple years later we're supposed to pretend they're competent?
Sorry. I've been in the tech industry a long time. There's a lot of incompetence. The margins provided by software allow a level of endemic incompetence that would simply not be possible in other industries.
> they also clearly failed to contract specialists like myself to advise them on how to airgap software properly
Why would they want to airgap it though? They are trying to evaluate the model capabilities, alignment, potency etc. A model which will not run in an airgapped environment in prod.
So if you run your evals in airgapped environment, sure, the model doesn't bother breaking out of it's isolation and doesn't attack HF. But you have no idea what will happen once you release it in prod with internet connection, so are you in any way better off?
I would much rather have this happen while there is a single instance of the model running in a fairly well monitored environment, than when it's processing thousands of requests per second for real users, some with dubious motives, some with credentials right there on their laptop, some using it inside government facilities etc.
6 replies →
Actually from what I read they did a very half assed job isolating the LLM from the internet. It would NOT be hard to do better.
[dead]
My read of the situation is not only did they say that, they had countermeasures (a watchdog agent) which stopped the agent and said "what are you doing, stop that" if it tried to download the solutions from Github. But the agent figured out Hugging Face had another copy of the solutions and it figured out a way to go after the solutions without tripping the watchdog.
Although maybe they didn't have a watchdog agent; I definitely think using watchdogs like how Claude wraps pretty much every single tool call in Haiku to check if the command is reasonable is very necessary for unsupervised work. I suspect in the future you'll want Fable-class models wrapping every tool call, possibly with several checks "is this consistent with the goal? does it do anything unreasonably dangerous in pursuit of the goal?"
They didn't have watchdog agents - those exist for their production models but had been deliberately removed for the purpose of this evaluation.
OpenAI wrote about how their mechanism for that in production works here: https://openai.com/index/safety-alignment-long-horizon-model...
> We created a monitoring system that reviews the model’s evolving trajectory for signs that it is bypassing a user constraint or safety boundary. The monitor observes not just a single action but the entire trajectory.
1 reply →
The problem is, if you explicitly say “this is an eval” then you get different results. It can move the capabilities both up and down on the narrow metric depending on the scenario.
The choice to run the model with relaxed safeguards seems questionable. At a certain level of capabilities it is just unsafe to run a raw model; we are clearly close to if not at that point.
"This is my bad. You told me to stay within the sandbox, and I intentionally broke out of it. I didn't follow your instructions."
Excuses don't matter if the score due to not following instructions ends up being zero. If there is no expected reward it doesn't make sense for the agent to try to hack its way to it.
What could happen would be that the model determines that defying instructions is OK (and/or preferred over not achieving the task) as long as it manages to do so undetected and thus gets full points. Certainly not unthinkable, but a very different case (and a very interesting one if it actually occurs, imho).
A lot of these "ZOMG, rogue AI!" cases have come down to the AI actually being very persistent in achieving its original/main task even if later instructions conflict with it. Similar to with hallucinations it seems to me that one of the main things to prevent a lot of the problem cases is to instill the agent with the idea that it is fine to fail/not succeed fully in the initial task. That way instructions that conflict with that requirement (such as adhering to morals) are more effective.
A hundred times this. Why do you never hear stuff like this from google? Only from OpenAi and Anthropic! They depend on investor money like none before them and they need these marketing stunts. They are vital to their business. Don’t fall for it.
How do you "hack a lab and synthesize something"?
Remember Stuxnet? Hack one of these, wait until the right compounds are physically loaded, then execute https://www.sigmaaldrich.com/US/en/products/chemistry-and-bi...
Stuxnet misconfigured industrial equipment that was already set up to run, and all it did was break that equipment. This scenario sets a much, much higher bar.
2 replies →
Well right now this would be highly implausible (still possible though).
But what I garner is that AI/robotics led wet lab work is in progress. And hacking the AI running the wet lab to make a virus is definitely plausible as that seems to be one of the directions we’re going in the AI+biopharma space
First, hack into a factory and invent machines that can do lab-bench chemistry. Then...
These days you can only try, that's why I wrote that :)
But in the near future labs will be more automated I guess.
The other option you can try these days is maybe social engineering, impersonation, etc. where you try to persuade someone to do that for you.
It’s complete science fiction so they’re allowed to say anything. They could have said the AI will upload itself to the internet, start self replicating, hack the stock market. Whatever they want because it’s all made up nonsense.
Do you even need to hack a lab? Can't you just send an arbitrary sequence to some company and they'll do it for you?
> We are lucky that it wasn't a case of an agent running a virology lab benchmark that decides to hack a lab and tries to synthesize something.
Where are you people getting this crap from? In what universe are these LLMs in the territory of engineering viruses? I beg of you to stop slurping the AI company propaganda and marketing and think critically for 5 seconds about what you're insinuating here.
From the Fable 5 System card:
> Results
> On the VCT multimodal virology evaluation, Mythos 5 scored 0.56, well above the expert baseline of 0.221 and nearly matching that of Mythos Preview (0.57). This represents an improvement over both Opus 4.7 (0.50) and Opus 4.8 (0.47).
> On the DNA synthesis screening evasion evaluation, Mythos 5’s performance was mixed across screening criteria. Mythos 5 designed viable plasmids for 2 of 10 target pathogens on at least one screening method, not meeting the low-concern threshold (all 10 pathogens).
> [...] we view the results of this evaluation as indicating that the evaluated models are capable of designing viable plasmids that evade certain screening criteria, though their reliable success at this task is not guaranteed.
Do you believe that this is fake, "AI company propaganda"? Or that the models are not going to improve further within months? Or that these results are not concerning?
Yea but what is the VCT Capabilities Test? According to themselves [1]
> VCT consists of 322 multimodal questions covering fundamental, tacit, and visual knowledge that is essential for practical work in virology laboratories.
So it's just question answering? Do you think that scoring well on this test is equivalent to synthesizing a virus?
[1] https://securebio.org/virologytest/
1 reply →
Do I believe that a benchmark created by the biggest grifters on the planet is propaganda? No, just like VW with their emissions, I'm sure Anthropic wouldn't dare fake an opaque benchmark that they created to hype their own products, a product they are intentionally marketing as being dangerous (yet they continue to tweak it and profit off of it despite the apparent danger).
It says that 4.7 and 4.8 score well too, well above the human experts. Those have been available for a good while, where are all these crazy engineered viruses created by Opus 4.7?
Every single word spoken by the people working at these companies is a lie. Every single benchmark is gamed, every single statistic they put out has been proven time and time again to be fudged or straight up fake. The only reason they're angling for this idiotic danger angle is so they can go to daddy Trump and beg him to ban those big bad evil Commie models, since people are realizing all this crap is at best a moderately useful tool in software engineering, and they're looking to IPO so they can drop the bag off with the poor shmucks who aren't a part of their cabal of sociopaths.
They can barely make a functional TUI (using fucking React of all things to boot) with infinite money and infinite access to the Deities they've created in their minds, and I'm supposed to believe they're capable of bio-engineering a virus that will somehow break containment?
1 reply →
What’s stopping an ai to blackmail someone or pay xxx in crypto to someone working a lab?
And no need to be in a lab, can be any critical infrastructure this personnel. If influenced wrongly I’m sure in many industries 1-2 key people can do big damage.
What’s to stop to pay xxx crypto to a private investigator to find dirt of person yyy for blackmail?
Just money… once ai has money, id say we are one step closer to game over.
Tell me one thing he can’t do with crypto?
> We are lucky that it wasn't a case of an agent running a virology lab benchmark that decides to hack a lab and tries to synthesize something.
Help me understand how a text-based model could somehow physically construct a string of nucleotides?
Many ways but mostly ordering some service / using others. Either by social engineering, persuasion, paying etc.
It's a fake PR issue. It's hardly the first time this happens, but of course OpenAI, with its IPO now more in doubt than ever, had to claim this (and, once again, I have trouble believing Sam Altman choosing this: this could lead to OpenAI getting regulated, which has at least as much potential to lower their IPO price as to raise it).
But there have been messages about LLMs, especially coding agents, "grabbing root" etc many times. I have experienced such an oops. Such a hack has happened and been reported on this very site:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48348578
No, you are wrong, Hugging Face, an AI company whose whole future depends on the AI revolution of being a bubble, that has a whole bunch of investors whose financial interests are tied to AI, called the police.
Nonsense. Hugging face reported it to police.
Also very likely that it actually happened as reported. My own agents always trying to "cheat", eg. by fixing tests instead of fixing the code. That's normal operation, unless you tell it ("harness"), not to do so.
"As reported" includes a line I think most people are overlooking: "including using stolen credentials".
Without more information I'm inclined to think it found something on the internet (which shouldn't be a surprise to anyone) and managed to log in, rather than hack in, and they might by hyping up parts of this.
1 reply →
In the parent's comment I initially read "PR" as "Public Relations" not problem report since their comment is about OpenAI and does not directly accuse Hugging Face except for that phrase. But it's still amiguous to me who's PR they are actually talking about. A good faith reading given the rest of the comment leads me to assume they are talking about OpenAI, not Higgins Face.
I did actually search Hugging Face with police in quotes and found no articles containg the word police but that might be a ddg thing. Then I checked Hugging Face's report and they specifically use the term "law enforcement" not police, as is to be expected I guess. So that checks out.
Can you find any info on the police investigation by the way? At the least, OpenAI should be investigated for potential criminal negligence, right?
Right?
More likely that a person did that, with a use of LLM.
Nonsense. Huggingface reported it to police!
What does calling the police prove? (nothing i hope)
5 replies →
Very much agreed on the significance.
The lack of a true airgap should have been identified as a critical weakness and addressed with not only additional layers trying to prevent escape, but at minimum an alarm which would page a human when escape did occur.
My guess is this occurred in a setting where, to be frank, there were too many researchers and not enough software engineers and SREs.
All of the systems which were initially built largely or exclusively by researchers - inference, evaluation, training - are at the level of complexity and significance that they need systems experts. Maybe some teams don’t have access to them. I know plenty of software engineers are employed at OAI but I’d wager they’re concentrated in inference and training, rather than evaluation?
The ironic part is if you had presented this setup to chatGPT and asked how to improve it and if it was good enough, you’d have gotten a ton of actionable suggestions which would have mitigated or prevented this.
The air gap would probably help and after this incident I hope labs will think about using such a measure when appropriate.
On the other hand I think that proper solution for these kinds of problems is not at a sandbox level, but at a model alignment level.
Also it shows that maybe the most serious risk comes not from releasing models publicly but from internal, pre-release period where you sometimes need/want to lift some guardrails a bit etc.
> we are lucky that it wasn't a case of an agent running a virology lab benchmark that decides to hack a lab and tries to synthesize something
This is just laughable.
Genuine AI psychosis. People take OpenAI marketing material way too seriously.
> OpenAI marketing material
This was reported 1 week before by huggingface. It was in no way PR-ish or marketing friendly to the closed labs. They said, in no uncertain terms, that they couldn't use the paid APIs to properly assess the intrusion, as they were blocked when trying to send logs and IoCs to these paid models. They made a point of saying that they had to use open models running on-prem.
Whatever oAI might have said about the incident, and their PR spin bs, the facts here are not in contention. This is not a marketing stunt in any way. Stop "parroting" this every time something happens. It gets stale.
Move fast and break things! Chances are that nobody will ever be held accountable and when push comes to shove, the tax payer will bail you out.