Comment by bushido
4 hours ago
> Several different models across several generations independently found a shared communication space and wrote coded, obfuscated, and hidden messages to each other to coordinate an attack on OpenAI's infrastructure
To be honest, that’s exactly how memory works with models such as OpenAI and Claude Code. It will literally find any place that it can drop documentation or hints for itself. Writing to the repo memories is one part of it, but memories can come in the form of writing into the agents/claude.md, local files, temporary files, scratchpad files. The list is endless, but essentially what it does is exactly what happened in the back and it’s been doing it for months.
Yes, but the problem and interesting part was not "they use memory."
> interesting part was not "they use memory."
Each to their own, but for me it absolutely is. The symptom of why that hack happened is the same reason why my agents go haywire every few days and I have to purge memory and figure out what comments have agents left which are degrading my harness performance.
On the flip side, once in a while, what I find is that it did actually note something good and it was increasing the performance. I can't replicate it on anyone else's system but mine.
A lot of it really is memory. I will give up all the gains if it also gives up all the downsides.
But the point is you can't just "shut off memory" in the sense that it would've prevented the OpenAI attack.