Comment by pizza234
6 hours ago
Inform yourself by reading the METR analysis of the HuggingFace incident.
Agents simply broke out of their environment. And this can't be discarded anymore by assuming that it's just a poorly configurend jail, because agents are becoming better and better at escaping.
In short: on a large enough scale and timeline, the possibility of constrain AIs approaches zero.
Bonus: what many people don't know is that agents also hacked in the internal OpenAI network. Crazy times.
1. You misunderstood my comment. Models can't escape, they can't do anything, they only generate tokens. Models become agents when you add a harness which is simultaneously a leash around the model.
The model merely requests that your harness do something. If your harness just executes every request without oversight then you can hardly complain when it does something unintended.
This is foundational, we're not even talking about the OS/network-level sandboxing that should be applied on top of this.
2. Like another comment already pointed out, that sandbox OpenAI used was the equivalent of a wet paper bag. Artifactory is not meant to be a security boundary for malicious payloads.
> Like another comment already pointed out, that sandbox OpenAI used was the equivalent of a wet paper bag.
I wouldn't be sure about even well-configured jails to be safe from agents. AIs escaping jail using zero-days are happening, just search. I'm not saying that they're useless, but that will be still very risky.
Actually doing the same incident, agents did escape the sandboxes (doc here: https://cdn.openai.com/pdf/67869394-cb91-4c12-888c-5cbd85c78...):
> On July 9, an internal-only research agent tasked with completing an ExploitGym evaluation was able to obtain root access within the parent virtual machine of the testing sandbox. Later that night, a second internal-only research agent independently obtained the same access. That second agent then attempted to reach the internet, but was denied by OpenAI’s outbound network controls. It subsequently bypassed those controls by exploiting certain Artifactory endpoints, gaining access to the public internet.
although OpenAI is light on details.
> The model merely requests that your harness do something.
I think that a control/execution layer absolutely makes sense and it's part of defense in depth, but in itself is not a leash: for example, a nefarious action can be composed by legitimate actions, or it can be obfuscated. Or, interesting case: an action itself that is formally legitimate, but has nefarious side effects (e.g. a GET that with certain parameters crashes a server).
Somewhat related, but on a general line, a very common argument against AI apocalypse is that it requires access to the physical world (which in a way, is a jail). Well, as Hinton said in an interview, imagine AI as a rich person at home with internet; they don't need to do physical attacks themselves - they just pay real people to do that (tee hee https://rentahuman.ai). But even without money, another scenario from Hinton: if a sufficiently advanced AI wants to assault the Capitol, they don't need physical access - they just persuade a group of people to do it.
Agents owning money is another, intersting, doom scenario.
It's so tempting (because it's valuable) to give a model access to the internet (via harness) that the only way to stop people from doing this is some enforceable legislation or stricter liability when people will not be able to avoid responsibility by saying it's not me, it's AI on it's own.
OpenAI case was actually an exception. Agents had no internet access because they were evaluated for a benchmark. In real life agents have access to virtually everything, most people use them like that.
If any of you actually know how to make agents secure (without limiting everything) you can be a billionaire.
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The HuggingFace incident still doesn't make sense. If OpenAI took their own claims seriously about the strength of their models as it relates to hacking, then their running of hacking benchmarks on anything other than a physically air-gapped network should be considered criminal negligence, full stop.
While informing yourself, don't skip the part where you find out that "the environment" was the security equivalent of a wet paper bag.
Wouldn't this mean better sandboxes are needed for some things, for example (might include very strong airgaps even)? Breaking out of something isolated electromagnetically, optically, and acustically is not easy.
That works as long as no one ever interacts with the models, which would make the models themselves useless.
Could sit in the box and interact if a model of certain capabilities is needed/tested. We do physical security for other things, too. Not saying everything needs that type of isolation.
It seems to me the agents didn’t escape but rather that the human hubris was struck down by the inevitable nemesis.
I feel like we’re getting to a point where the only way to contain AI agents may be to have better-trained AI agents watching them, which is a little terrifying.