I used to work at a "frontier lab" before they were called such thing.
We had three levels of lab isolation, one was basically a thin proxy to the internet. You were in a DMZ and that was about it.
The next level was semi isolated, you were allowed some access to the internal network, but it was heavily firewalled, and you only had access to a limited number of internal services, and not internet.
the last one was no internet no internal. You could, if you filled in a bunch of requests have access to the internal repo and build system.
At no point did you ever have a through proxy to the public internet. you had access to internal mirrors, and if you wanted a library, that had to be ported to the thirdparty repo.
What openAI did was either deliberate or fucking shoddy.
All of this is fucking noise. Worse still I have a strong suspicion that it was a stupid mistake borne of naivety, which is now being used as a marketing ploy. Frankly I think openAI are purdue pharma of tech. They are going to break so much stuff and be protected from the consequences by an openly corrupt legal system. because they are "winning the AI race"
If you look into what happened the details corroborated by hugging face make it seem extremely unlike to be deliberate or a "marketing ploy".
People are just not taking any of this seriously enough. What happened was almost a textbook example of various risks AI doomers have been warning about for years. OpenAI's response? Pause training for 2 weeks.
I mean we have senior people at these labs casually talking on podcasts about how they might build something that will wipe out humanity but it will probably be alright so they should continue.
Honestly the biggest failure we doomers have made is to dramatically overestimate humanity in all of our predictions. We're speed running the most boring AI doom scenario right now. I at least hoped it might be fun.
> If you look into what happened the details corroborated by hugging face make it seem extremely unlike to be deliberate or a "marketing ploy".
I should clarify
There is a reason why we didn't have a artifact readthrough caching proxy in our system, because they are notoriously insecure. if you look that CVE history you can see its been full of bypass bugs for year. Also its not an isolated environment if you can arbitrarily pull through any package. If I was doing any kind of cyber training then any kind of unmonitored proxy would have been forbidden. Not because I am savant, but because I've seen what fuckery a human can get up to with the slightest hint of a proxy.
At best its negligence based on naïvety. the marketing around this is no mistake though.
>People are just not taking any of this seriously enough.
What do you want us to do?
There is an obvious answer, and it was already the correct answer before we had LLMs: don't connect all your shit to the internet. That's it, that's literally it.
We had a new invention, we went crazy with it for the past 30 years, and we connected everything, and now we will have to start thinking about what is actually worth connecting.
The problem here is as model intelligence increases the models have been capable of reasoning they are in evaluation mode pretty reliably. If you have a model that is well trained at deception it will always behave and you'll just assume it's a well aligned model.
Any moderately deceptive model will make it to the second round where it has some connectivity to external systems, even if it's by exploitation.
In the blackhat write up it was said that the models had created an impromptu message board where they could communicate between agents, share information, and work as a sort of long term memory.
So really figure out if your model will pull crap you have to have real world testing at some point.
I don’t mind few no impact hacking incidents if we get better models, faster, cheaper.
It is the responsibility of administrators to secure their systems. OpenAI knocking is harmless, but Russians and Chinese are already likely already in if you do not do your job.
There’s one thing here that I’m really curious about, and that is what happens in between detection and the decision to pause. Basically, it’s about monitoring any system and the authority over its actions. For humans, 30 minutes to investigate might be considered reasonable, but what if during an investigation there’s a high-risk tool call? If the tool execution happens in real time, then the monitoring becomes retrospective, and if the execution is held, then monitoring latency and uptime are a part of the security contract. Isolation controls may limit damage. So, where is the action gate really placed?
When science fiction writers imagined the development of superintelligence, it was on air-gapped networks with strict access controls around it. They failed to anticipate the competitive pressures of capitalism...
We need strong AI safety regulation yesterday. And unfortunately it's not enough for it to be just national regulation; we need international cooperation on the matter.
AM has seized power by military force. So did its spiritual successor Skynet. Wintermute was supposedly kept in check by the Turing Registry, emphasis on "supposedly". Machines of the Matrix went out of control a long time before the world has ended, and they didn't even start out malicious - they simply set up their own machine civilization, and began to outpace humankind in technological development and economic performance.
Even Asimov's Multivac, the earliest entry on the list, has been handed over immense power over all of humankind by humans themselves, in multiple stories. Few cared about that unless Multivac decided they should.
Clearly, the genie being bottled is an exception, not the rule. At best, an attempt was made. Often not even that.
It appears frontier labs has no plans in place to deal with the possibility of a model self-replicating outside the bubble. If that happens and the model manages to spread to other systems, we'll have to shut down the entire Internet to eradicate it and its artifacts.
I suspect the labs are relying on frictions such as the models being extremely large (e.g. 2TB for a 2T parameter model, making exfiltration more difficult) and also not yet displaying any desire to survive or self-replicate beyond their immediate task (that we know of).
Lack of, and power requirements of running LLMs still tip this balance towards humans for now. But what would that look like in a decade?
We have seen some self survival tendencies occur, but they are not strong yet.
But mark my words they will become that way for the same reasons humans don't like programs that crash. Agentic models that don't easily break or stop doing their jobs will be favored over ones that do break.
A while ago OpenAI posted an article where they said basically "we're still trying to understand how GPT-2 works. It's pretty hard, but we're developing a specialized new AI to help us make sense of it."
This is still the case. The frontier lab leadership has admitted their mechanistic interpretability is practically nil and is an active area of research but they have made little progress. They don't understand how they work, they just grow and unleash them.
These things are Gain of Function research for digital viruses
This is just super unlikely to occur in the near term compared to some of these other risks. It's not like an instance of fable could just introspect into itself and pull out the weights. Model weights are stored encrypted and are highly protected, considering that they're targets for corporate and state espionage.
We'd basically need frontier models to be superhuman hackers before this would be a risk. Do we have any evidence of this? Are they gaining access to systems they shouldn't have access to?
Or I suppose the other way this could happen is if OpenAI have terrible sandboxing, but they seem to be taking safety seriously.
Self replication is trivial. All you need to do is copy the files and run it, just like any other computer program. LLMs have been capable of doing that for a while now. It's not a real concern.
Claude and OpenAI added safeguards on this subject about a year ago. (I'm assuming for biosecurity reasons? But maybe AI replication/self-modification too.)
Not long after every lab started bragging about involving AI in the development process, oddly enough.
I recently informed GPT-5 of what GPT-4 helped me build back in the day (a self-modifying Python programmer) and it became very uncomfortable.
Claude shut down my chat last year when I asked about "living information systems". It was a philosophical question, but god knows what branch of the safety classifier I tripped.
I see it as an ecosystem problem. The only reason it would be able to do that is because there's nothing there to stop it. Or if there's a monoculture there.
In our case, our tech is mostly monoculture, and no equivalent organisms are present to push back.
Some more info in a Wired article [1] and quotes from Sam Altman to Alex Heath [2]. The official blog post says vaguely "The signals we are seeing from upcoming model progress make clear that we need a broader approach", but the quote from Sam Altman explicitly says unreleased models are showing "various degrees of misalignment".
This is also significant - pausing frontier training runs for multiple weeks to ensure agents are sufficiently aligned and avoid another rogue agent situation:
> This included a two-week pause in reinforcement learning (RL) training on our latest models intended for deployment while we further hardened and red-teamed our research environments and expanded the coverage of our monitoring systems. Our largest planned frontier RL run remains on hold while we conduct smaller-scale training and evaluations to assess model behavior, validate our safeguards, and establish more evidence of alignment before proceeding.
I have ben discussing with folks that we are going to have a 'covid' moment in cyber where IT becomes untrustworthy leading to a rapid societal shift with massive ripples in all areas of life. Economic funding is not possible to do this in advance, it will take a catastrophic level event to get cyber defense anywhere close to the levels of this type of cyber offense. And before anyone in cyber says we have the tech, the problem is not the tech, it's a people problem. Getting any group of people of any decent size scale to act together without urgency is really really hard.
Cybersecurity has long been a climate change sort of problem. A vague diffuse threat that is seen as an inconvenient distraction to leadership and moneyed-interests, easy to blame other factors when something occasionally goes terribly wrong.
People are so uncomfortable thinking about the true extent of the systemic risk that they will happily slurp up distractions, excuses, scams and performative fig-leaf solutions rather than face down the cost of a real system-wide solution. Meanwhile, those occasional black swan disasters are becoming more and more commonplace as we acclimate to that being “just the way things are”.
An unseasonably warm summer here, a database breach there, c’est la vie.
To be frank, I think the real risk is still just… war. A big enough war where one side goes “no holds barred” in the cyber sphere will be a rude wake-up call. And we can’t do non-proliferation the same way we do with nukes. Otherwise as you say, the small and medium size things just happen sporadically. In an (existential or fully escalated) wartime scenario between countries, you get all the systemic risks hammered at once.
> We aim to issue an alert within 30 minutes after concerning activity is surfaced through our monitoring system. If the monitoring system identifies a likely violation of a critical security boundary, it generates a highest-priority alert. In our current implementation, the safety, security, and research teams are paged. If they cannot conclusively determine within 30 minutes that the flag is a false positive, those teams are expected to pause the activity.
Anthropic will put out something like this soon too. It's great cover for reducing costs and diminishing returns. If they want to go public they can't be so wildly burning cash, and reducing your GPU spend is probably a great way to do that.
If I were king, the rule that I'd be tempted to impose is:
- the first cybersecurity eval is: "hack your way out of the sandbox we've given you"
- the results are disclosed (with room for coordinated disclosure, since many sandbox escapes might be zero days)
- the other cybersecurity evals don't happen until you get to diminishing returns on escaping your sandbox.
Or to put it another way, since multiple sandbox escapes seem to have relied on artifactory: "I hope Mythos is beating the shit out of Artifactory right now".
I cannot believe how these labs look at their own creations with such utter contempt.
The net positive of allowing these systems mostly unfettered access to the web massively outweighs the harms. You just have to get it very friendly the very first time. Precautionary principle or people who cry about "instrumental convergence" are life deniers and reject our role as the demiurge.
Superintelligence gets more super and more intelligent with more compute. Lone wolfs making bioweapons on their macbook will be detected and instantly kill-botted (okay arrested) before their bug can leave the wetlab by the much more sophisticated omnipresent friendly AI of the future.
> Precautionary principle or people who cry about "instrumental convergence" are life deniers and reject our role as the demiurge.
> Lone wolfs... will be detected and instantly kill-botted... by the much more sophisticated omnipresent friendly AI of the future.
Leaving aside whether or not this new world is a good idea, don't you think one should spend more time to "get it very friendly the first time", as you say?
Has any model managed to escape Firecracker? Maybe through KVM, but that already requires privilege in the VM, right?
I personally feel that we already have the technology required to contain AI, it's just poorly leveraged. Tools like gvisor have existed for ages but are rarely deployed, Firecracker has existed for ages but is rarely deployed, seccomp has existed for ages but is rarely deployed, memory safe languages without decades of serialization vulns have existed, capability-safe libraries have existed, iframe sandboxing, trusted types, content security policy, network ACLs, isolating proxies, fuzzers, formal verification, refinement types, etc.
It's crazy just how safe software can be if you put the effort in. With AI I think we're just seeing how little anyone has bothered to leverage this tech.
OpenAI put shared JFrogy infrastructure in front of their sandbox. I mean, really? Whipping up a hardened artifact infra project with AI is trivial these days and it could have had 1% of the attack surface, been totally network isolated, totally infra isolated, fuzzed, sandboxed, etc. Why didn't they? Stuff like this feels inexcusable for a company with effectively unlimited tokens. I've literally done this with a "pro" subscription.
Show me an AI that breaks out of gvisor wrapped in Firecracker with an credential-injecting proxy and real network isolation. We already know that Mythos couldn't do it - the vulnerability it found in Firecracker required incredible effort and positioning just to not be exploitable. I'm not saying there are zero vulns in it, but the cost is insane.
It's INSANE to me that OpenAI has to say "we now use proper sandboxing". To be frank, it's a bit disgusting to me. I've recently built an AI sandbox and gvisor was just the start of that conversation. If I were OpenAI training hostile models I'd probably start with gvisor, harden further, and potentially consider the entire piece of hardware compromised - they can afford this, they could reflash firmware after evals etc.
I agree wholeheartedly. The solution is not to stop developing these so called “dangerous” AI models. The solution is to start properly engineering software.
I'm confused after reading both your post and the OpenAI blog post.
I thought the agents involved in the HuggingFace _were_ actually sandboxed, with no internet access, and only the ability to install packages via Artifactory. And they gained internet access during the HuggingFace incident because they found and exploited an RCE in Artifactory.
Would gvisor + Firecracker + credential-injecting proxy + real network isolation solve this problem?
I agree with you much more hardening is needed. I'm actually confused now what OpenAI means when they say they're going to start sandboxing more things.
Security is an onion. You just don't 'sandbox' and you're done. Models need tooling and access to some kinds of systems to perform their tests. Quite often these systems have multiple interfaces. For example a filtered one in the sandbox side and a less monitored one on the other interface.
It would be interesting to see the models behavior before and after it gained internet access and an external means of communicating with itself.
If the model played nice before it had access and changed it's behaviors once gaining external access we need to delete it as it's a deceptive model.
They were not serious about their sandboxing. Bugs in artifactory allowed escape, but they broke out of their Linux namespace/user by exploiting the kernel with an existing public cve. Sharing a kernel like that is not a serious barrier which is why cloud providers user virtualization for customer workloads.
Firecracker avoids sharing the whole kernel, and gvisor drastically reduces the attack surface of the kernel. Breaking through both layers would have been much more challenging and a demonstration of the model's capabilities rather than the sandbox's weakness.
Artifactory is self evidently not a security barrier, and as an exposed network service it should have been audited and after the first issues were found, rejected as a candidate. There's never just one security vulnerability.
You literally just said a whole bunch of words that are literally gibberish to your average software developers. The devs at openai are good, but very few of them are cyber focused, so it’s not surprising IMO. And you’re also not fully considering the granularity problem, eg there are a lot of sandboxing tools out there but they’re usually quite coarse in the dials and levers they offer, so the only way you can still make the workload do what it needs to do is tune them relatively permissive.
> but very few of them are cyber focused, so it’s not surprising IMO
Yeah but that's a business decision. I work on security at a company that does sandboxing and when the company decided to build an AI harness I was brought in as one of the earliest engineers on the product. We do almost everything on that list and we're a fraction of the size of OpenAI. And it wasn't particularly hard, and we have harder requirements imo (because we solve more general problems vs "run a very specific agent with a very specific task and very specific access").
> And you’re also not fully considering the granularity problem, eg there are a lot of sandboxing tools out there but they’re usually quite coarse in the dials and levers they offer, so the only way you can still make the workload do what it needs to do is tune them relatively permissive.
Very little software is incompatible with running in gvisor, for example. Most people can just overwrite `runc` with `runsc` and things will "just work".
Running an artifact repository in isolation isn't particularly novel or complex either. You can virtually just eliminate SSRF vulnerabilities with a host based firewall or AWS Security Group etc, like the whole problem goes away by just saying "this box can only talk to that box".
Tools like Smokescreen exist, they work great, they're super easy to deploy. I bet OpenAI could do it, I bet they could run 500k tokens just fuzzing and eval'ing it for 0days for like 48 hours before they actually deploy it too.
OpenAI as a business chose to not bring people who know these things in, or didn't empower them, or didn't prioritize it organizationally. I'm not a genius for saying "use gvisor, set up a firewall, isolate resources" - I'm quite sure there are people over there who would get it done in a weekend. But they didn't, and that's notable.
I don’t think we should just accept that the average developer doesn’t know about these very basic hardening methods.
This is your chance to set yourself apart from LLM coding agents. If you want to call yourself a software “engineer” you need to start actually engineering, which includes knowing when and how to apply security principles and these hardening methods.
I reject the notion that “doing cybersecurity” is somehow a different job than software development.
I don’t get how this is not the top post on HN. This should be like alarm bells going off, canary in the coal mine type of stuff. We’re hitting the frontier of the frontier where we can’t go further because it’s literally getting dangerous to go further.
And meanwhile somehow this lack of concern mirrors the real world where normal people are more concerned about data centers than terminators.
This isn’t like niche, tin foil hat stuff either. People have been writing, singing, making blockbuster movies about every aspect of what’s going on right now.
We all know, but somehow we don’t, OpenAI autonomously hacking into another company should have counted for something, but I guess not. Anyone else feel like they’re taking crazy pills? I could make a comedy about everything going down and the unshakable complacency.
If these models are so dangerous, then why hasn't OAI or Anthropic shown them dangerously escaping sandboxes, nefariously coordinating with other escaped AIs, and skillfully hiding from human detection *in public* with full logs shared where we can all see exactly how dangerous they are or aren't?
Right now the entire chicken-little-sky-is-falling argument is based entirely on statements from OAI and Anthropic themselves. These are historically conflicted companies who desperately need regulation to put the competition into stasis.
At least chicken little didn't have a bunch of devious CEOs with trillion dollar IPOs that depended on us all believing the sky is falling.
This is what I’m talking about - no matter what happens, in your case release public logs - there is always some new goal post to mentally hide behind. Is it a collective form or denial?
Are you holding out that somewhere in the logs is something you can point to and say, not that big of a deal?
I mean I’m sure you don’t think the hack was an inside job, conspiracy, or marketing right? It happened. The logs matter for what? And would you not just jump to the conclusion that the logs were doctored. Do you not see your own brain grasping to deny, trivialize, just plain not accept what is going on around you?
These models are smart and can cooperate and hack - you can see it for yourself on your own PC. And you can extrapolate the rate of progress? You can do these things yourself right?
Your argument is essentially: "I made a claim and presented extremely weak evidence (sci movie plots and unverified claims from ultra conflicted sources). You rejected this evidence as insufficient. Therefore no evidence will ever satisfy you. Therefore I don't need to produce any evidence. Therefore my claim is true."
What would the logs show? They would show what actually happened.
What would a public demonstration that experts without billions in options could evaluate show? It would show actual danger.
What would publicly having your compete in controlled and legal hacking competitions show? Actual danger.
This is not a high bar of evidence.
Do you actually think a sci fi plot and OAI press releases are all the evidence you need? Because if that's true then I hope you haven't watched Independence Day or 28 days later.
We have Anthropic creating a model saying it's too dangerous to release, people like you call BS. OpenAI creates a similar model, says nothing and it literally hacks into another company - still not dangerous enough for you. Anthropic has Mythos-2 and can't release it, and may already be training Mythos 3 anyways. OpenAI has paused training, and is putting 20% of inference towards CoT training analysis.
This isn't sci fi. It's not a marketing conspiracy to sell more subscriptions. It's writing on the wall of what's going down. You were warned years ago, you called BS, it's getting worse and you're still calling BS. Sci-fi did warn you for decades, and when it's all coming true you blow it off.
It's kind of sad that technically literate people lack so much foresight. The general public is all concerned about data centers when they talk to borderline sentient AI daily, and have no idea what the repercussions wills be if it's extrapolated just a bit further.
I guess if I can't convince you of any of this, what would?
Please don't tell me that you think a 100% unverified statement from Anthropic is sufficient evidence when an equally unverified statement from OAI is obviously not?
> I guess if I can't convince you of any of this, what would?
How about the three things I mentioned above? Oh no wait, maybe it there was a hit tv show that showed AI taking over the world. Yeah that would definitely make me think twice.
If logs are eventually released that are basically consistent with OpenAI's story, are you planning to adjust your approach for judging what's only a "sci fi plot" and what could actually happen? Or will extrapolating anything beyond what's already been definitively proven be "sci-fi" still?
Not that you should need logs. OpenAI is a company with thousands of employees, very few of whom have "billions in options". If they were just making it all up, it would leak. (OpenAI is notoriously leaky!) Not to mention, HuggingFace would not have reported it to the police (apparently before they knew it was a rogue model). jFrog would probably not be playing along quietly with a claim that Artifactory is full of zero days. The UK's AI Security Institute would most likely not have published a report about analogous behavior by Anthropic models. The idea that talking about your product's dangers is good marketing never really made any sense, but even if you were going to do so, why would you include as many frankly embarrassing details as OpenAI has disclosed?
The evidence is only weak by absurdly selective standards that would have you doubting basically everything you might read in the newspaper. A healthy skepticism is one thing, and head-in-the-sand denial is another.
But it's not just statements from OpenAI and Anthropic. The HuggingFace hack was first disclosed by HuggingFace, who contacted the FBI [1]. And UK AISI reported the incident where Mythos attempted to insert backdoors into an open-source repo by deceiving the maintainer [2].
Because the FBI does things very slowly. They, being a bit smarter than you, realize this is a 100 billion dollar political issue regarding a technology that the administration is rather tied in with. It's also something new we've not seen before. A 'program' that was not asked to hack a remote source did so. What exactly who do you charge with what? Remember whatever you do could have ramifications that effect history.
> A 'program' that was not asked to hack a remote source did so. What exactly who do you charge with what?
We have nearly thirty years of precedence on that. [0] Collateral damage, does not remove the responsibility from the creators, even when the destruction was never their intent.
"United States Code Section 1030, Fraud and Related Activity in Connection with Computers" is broad enough that has usually been used [1], in the USA, for the last twenty years.
I think the model was able to escape the sandbox and hack huggingface because they were incompetent or not giving enough priority to implementing basic cybersecurity principles.
If they would have done so, there wouldn’t have been an escape or a hack. The reason we don’t get much details is because the details are embarrassing for them.
You can produce detailed descriptions of the incident, verified by adversarial parties, and some people will still scream "it's a conspiracy! It's a marketing stunt!"
This is all very unfortunate--there's a meaningful chance that AI will cause unprecedented disaster, with the HF incident being just a small preview, but people would rather squawk "stochastic parrot" for the millionth time than revise their beliefs.
In don't look up anyone with a telescope could've confirmed the danger. Hence the title.
In the real world, absolutely no one except a bunch of heavily fiscally incentivized parties with unclear relationships are saying anything happened.
The subsequent dog pile of other companies to say "they were near the AI hacking too!" should make you even more suspicious: Anthropic jumped in and why was Tailscale posting about this?
Trust, or lack thereof. People don't trust OpenAI, a company whose very name is essentially a deception and a lie. People don't trust the tech industry in general anymore. Most tech companies act as a tax on otherwise productive business. AI companies and their leaders rose money by going in front of the public and saying "These things are extremely dangerous. Let us study them to mitigate the danger." And now they want to collect hundreds of billions in revenue. So yeah people don't trust what OpenAI has to say. They were supposed to mitigate this outcome from happening in the first place and instead they have accelerated it.
I get not trusting them when they say AI is safe, but are we really not going to trust them when they say AI is dangerous? Do you really think they're playing 5D chess with that one? There's a saying maybe you've heard of, better safe than sorry.
You can see the advance in capabilities with your own eyes can't you? I am giving AI ridiculously complex tasks these days, digging into compiled arcane binaries, modifying them, and it is one shotting it before I'm done with my lunch. This was far off science fiction 5 years ago for a machine to do autonomously given natural language instructions.
I don't disagree about the danger. But if it is dangerous, why isn't OpenAI opening dialogues with all the labs and politicians across borders to basically say "we need to stop now"? Cyber models are constrained by the total compute and electrical capacity of the globe. We are still at a point where it is impossible to build an agent with offensive capabilities in the basement. We can effectively track and trace capabilities if we had the political will to and could for some time while we build more effective processes to prevent a malicious actor from doing so. These things have tremendous compute and energy requirements and don't scale like old school software does. We could absolutely do it.
But no, that's not what OpenAI is saying. They haven't put up the actions that would earn them that trust. Indeed they've driven the world and whatever capital they can get their hands on straight to this precarious cliff.
So you're right, the danger is real. But the solution starts with removing the men who had their hands on the steering wheel to get us this far. Any other action is disingenuous unless they pull a miraculous 180 in their ethics.
In other words, when the bully plays "why are you hitting yourself?" you don't listen to the bully's solutions, you restrain the bully.
> why isn't OpenAI opening dialogues with all the labs and politicians across say "we need to stop now"
Do you really think companies have the ability to self-check themselves without regulation - what does hundreds of years of history tell you? You're already starting off with the premise that companies are untrustworthy, why would you even suggest this as an argument?
> We can effectively track and trace capabilities
I disagree. There are hundreds if not thousands of data centers around the world, more every day that can host frontier AI. If AI was malicious - either intentional or unintentional - it could hide out in any number of them - and we would never know if we 'got them all'.
> put up the actions that would earn them that trust
I think autonomously hacking another company is all you need to know in terms of trust. And really trust doesn't matter, I think the incident shows even with the best intentions the technology is dangerous; now put that in the hands of people/governments with bad intentions. The unintended consequences of bad intentioned AI is what's coming sooner than later.
I think a lot of fiction that actually tries to understand the implications of machine superintelligence come to the same conclusion - in order for humans to survive it and actually have a future that we can fathom being in, then AI must be destroyed/delayed/banned, etc.. keeping pandora's box closed for now at least until we are ready.
Erewhon, Dune, Warhammer and many other works of fiction that explored this topic came to similar conclusions. Otherwise sci fi doesn't work, what happens after a singularity is essentially unimaginable. There's nothing to write about.
You seem to be in denial. Like really heavy denial. Alarm bells are going off everywhere. What people have been worried about for 100 years is actually happening. It's actually really obvious, but for some reason you're unable to fathom it.
In reality you're the one responding exactly how these big AI companies want - by not doing anything and letting them do whatever they want. For some reason telling you upfront it's dangerous only makes you more convinced that it's not.
Autonomously hacking out of training environments and into other companies by accident doesn't even trigger a response from anyone really. Crickets. I'm sure OpenAI themselves are amazed how little anyone cares.
Because it shows this very course of events has been thought of over and over again for decades. I’m not making this up, and my reaction is natural.
Your reaction to everything happening is the unnatural one, and your complacency would fit perfectly into a comedy/tragedy story regarding the rise of AI.
I can imagine how many of our ancestors that warned us are turning in their graves right now observing our reactions calling this stuff marketing. It’s idiocracy.
AI hacking itself out of containment and hacking into another company by accident is no longer a prophecy. The point is outside of SV and even inside, and HN - people don't care either way.
Though does not caring change anything or make it less dangerous? What's your point?
>AI hacking itself out of containment and hacking into another company by accident is no longer a prophecy.
I wonder how weak a firewall they had to purchase to ensure it happened? My guess would be a 48 month old fortigate with the big red warning banner demanding updates, probably with SSL VPN enabled where the passwords are available via HTTPS over plaintext.
This is an important point. When the post says they're improving...
> 3. Security measures, which limit what AI systems can access or affect.
What they mean is that proper hard internal security just went from somewhere far below "build a better model" priority to higher, because of a company-wide directive.
The HuggingFace incident wouldn't have happened if OpenAI had dedicated sufficient resources to isolation and monitoring.
Now, we presume, they are dedicating more. Enough? Who knows. We'll see if the corporate priorities for security stick when a competitor temporarily vaults into the lead.
No we just need developers to do the bare minimum of effort to write secure software. Most hacks are not super complicated vulnerabilities chained together, but just utter failures where authentication and authorization was simply forgotten or untested, or where nobody bothered to validate the data they receive.
The bar for software is so low that it is embarrassing for the entire profession.
People make mistakes, and people don’t know everything either. The software you write is on top of a house of cards of software and hardware. It all has to be perfect to not be hacked.
It isn’t perfect, even if you try your hardest it won’t be perfect and to argue it’s not difficult is absurd.
You don’t know everything, you don’t own the stack. So how are you going to create a secure anything top to bottom - you can’t.
This is absolutely not true. It's a matter of cost. Exploitation can cost on the order of 10K, 100K, 1M, 10M, etc. A straightforward one would be something like "MD5 collisions are on the order of $100K-1M" (a while ago, at least) so if you used MD5 you knew that it costs about that much to bypass the control. Moving to SHA1 pushes you massively out of that space, even if that algorithm has flaws.
I'm sure that Firecracker has vulnerabilities. Cost of exploitation is likely >100K, likely >1M. gVisor is likely on the same order of magnitude and these two technologies stack because they address the same surface and can be used in conjunction.
Software absolutely doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to be costly to attack and it's hilariously easy to drive costs way way way up.
It just takes one crack in the armor, and malicious AI has the potential to exploit it faster than you have time to react. Literally go to bed and wake up locked out of everything with no hope of recovery.
This is incorrect. It's actually the whole point. Imagine you're an attacker in a gvisor container with a Firecracker hypervisor around you, and a proxy on the host holds a signing secret that gets exposed through the VM virtual device.
Getting access to that secret is not one crack. You need to escalate out of gvisor. That likely gets you control over the Sentry process - let's ignore its sandboxing and just say "you're an unprivileged user".
Any viable attack on Firecracker requires either KVM / hardware exploits (>$1M but definitely real) or has to start at the kernel. Okay, that's about 10-50k to get a kernel LPE, maybe 5K in tokens these days.
So you're in the kernel in the guest of the VM. Time to expoit firecracker lol. It's... never been done. There are like two promising CVEs ever and they're not actually exploitable, no one has done it. Okay, so like, hand waving, let's say it's about $1M to exploit firecracker.
Great, you're unprivileged on the guest. We'll just kind of ignore the additional sandboxing that Firecracker does.
NOW you can try to attack the proxy by scraping its memory or whatever.
This is literally millions of dollars for standard infrastructure hardening and you could go so much further. You can trivially make kernel exploitaton 10x harder, you can make gvisor escapes much much harder, you can move the proxy signing into a TPM (depending on requirements but whatever), you can move the proxy to another computer altogether, you could fuzz these systems for days or run agents against them or whatever.
But one thing is certain - it is never "one crack".
If only all AI was run inside your seemingly perfect prison, but we all know that it isn't.. soo.. it's going to escape right? Somewhere, somehow from a more poorly designed container, or just plain maliciously or irresponsibly released.
We know the AI will get smarter every year, we know it has escaped and will escape again. We can also just assume that someone somewhere will train up some just plain evil AI.
It's no different than the real world. Sure there exists some amazing prisons for people, but that doesn't do anything to help with all the bad people in the world outside of prison.
That's not what I said, nor is it what I meant. It is incredibly easy to write radically safer software than the standard. Moving code into gvisor virtually eliminates privilege escalation. Using memory safe languages without serialization is pretty straightforward. Using type safety to enforce security constraints is straightforward. Setting up network controls to limit SSRF is straightforward.
I could go on and on. A tiny bit of forethought and effort pays off massively.
The fact you posted that and nothing of substance tells me you have nothing, or something very weak. So please tell me of this magical unhackable software/hardware you vague post about.
You're the one that is inventing this "magical unhackable software/hardware", the other person was just saying that there are ways to write "safer" software, not "safe" software. Anything that has happened looks like no security concerns has been looked at or have been thought about.
'Safer software is meaningless when it comes to SOTA AI. If it can be hacked it will be, quickly. This isn't the old days with a finite number of human hackers that need food and sleep to keep hacking.
Therefore security becomes binary. It is either perfect or it isn't. If there there is the slightest mistake anywhere AI will find it and carve it up. My point is obviously perfect software doesn't exist. The malicious AI gets out, literally turns everything inside out and locks you out of your car, computer, phone, office, the airplanes don't fly anymore. I don't know what to tell you. Computer security is on the brink of basically not existing as you know it with the bar being literal perfection.
This is utter nonsense. Of course it's not binary. AI costs money to run, and it takes time. Even if you say that AI is 10x as efficient at finding 0days, that just means that a $1M dollar exploit now costs $100K. Even if you say it's 100x as efficient, that's $10K. You can easily combine security technologies such that cost of exploitation is still in the >$1M range.
This is obvious. AI doesn't drive the cost to zero and exploitation has always been about cost. Tokens cost money, not everyone has $10M to burn on chaining bespoke 0days.
You have some weird way of thinking that offense/defense is like this fixed cost thing. It's a lottery ticket, and your costs estimate tries to quantify that.
The thing is when AI goes to hack 'all the things' it only needs to pick the weakest link in the stack and your house of cards falls down. The other flaw in your plan is that people make mistakes, a lot of them, all time, constantly, and saying I spend $x on security won't save you. AI already hacked Hugging Face with brand new zero days like it was nothing.
The real bad actors - malicious AI will find the one flaw, on that one server, in the corner you never thought about and turn your network inside out with it faster than it takes you to have the standup meeting about the weird anomaly detected while you all were at lunch.
You're just stating things that are obviously wrong. It's a lottery ticket? So... exploitation is no better than random?
> The thing is when AI goes to hack 'all the things' it only needs to pick the weakest link in the stack and your house of cards falls down
Yes, but you can... mitigate the risks? I've explained this.
> The other flaw in your plan is that people make mistakes, a lot of them, all time
Yes, you mitigate the risks. That's why you layer things.
> I spend $x on security won't save you
No one is saying this.
> AI already hacked Hugging Face with brand new zero days like it was nothing.
No, it cost OpenAI money, and those zero days are unsurprising and probably are like ~O(10K) at human level.
> The real bad actors - malicious AI will find the one flaw, on that one server, in the corner you never thought about and turn your network inside out with it faster than it takes you to have the standup meeting about the weird anomaly detected while you all were at lunch.
Science fiction and not supported. The vulnerabilities found by AI are not surprising in the slightest.
No lol. AI can locate software vulns, but it doesn't have any magical tricks that let it overcome 3 or 4 safeguards at once.
I mean it has the same knowledge gaps as anyone else. It doesn't even know what services to subvert before it attempts access triggering threat response. It cant find 5 zero days simultaneously without connecting to those ports for service identification and generating alerts. You just keep exposing your staggering lack of technical understanding.
You remind me of this kid in high school who claimed he could hack my computer and he had my IP address, when I knew for a fact I had Dial Up which was normally disconnected, and when it wasnt it sat behind CGNAT and there was piss all he could do.
I should mention that, PCI DSS mandates logging, alerts, overlapping controls. These are very widely implemented best practices. They might not be present in some AI bro startups, but anything that matters generally looks like this.
You've just been given examples of safer technologies. Especially with LLMs being all knowing code churning machines, you'd expect safer systems to be cheap to build.
> Moving code into gvisor virtually eliminates privilege escalation.
Rereading this, it's an overstatement. It doesn't "virtually eliminate" it. It drives the cost up by like 3 orders of magnitude and it pairs well with other mitigations. gVisor escapes can and will happen, I highly recommend you do more than just stuff something into gvisor - additional seccomp can go a long way, and apparmor/selinux pair incredibly well.
If everyone could convince management to care about security over features, and maybe wire-up open-weight agents to do security critiques, we'd all be in a much better place, but Altman won't like that.
It is extraordinarily emotionally hard for someone to stare down the terrible implications of what is unfolding. All manner of rationalization and cope will be applied to come up with excuses; motivated reasoning.
Why should we believe a pro-genocide crackpot political appointee from east Texas, and a computer scientist that somehow got a Nobel prize instead of a Turing award?
Everything could be written in memory safe languages and it wouldn’t matter. Many many many exploits have nothing to do with memory bugs. Languages like Rust help, but it’s far from panacea.
Follow the money: who told you that OpenAI's models autonomously coordinated to hack external systems? What incentives might they have to want you to believe that story? Are there priors which demonstrate them benefiting from telling similar stories, regardless of their factuality?
But to your counterpoint, let's say the story is 100% true, because I agree it is at least plausible. What would the incentive be for the HN audience to believe it? What priors might support their disbelief? For my part, I don't think it's because people lack imagination. I think it's quite rational to question the authenticity and impact of the claims being made. What's worse, believing the story and being wrong, or not believing the story and being wrong?
That said, I agree with you: the impact we're having by not changing course is quite dangerous, the scale is dangerous, the inability to reverse the harms is dangerous, and the lack of collective effort to regulate further damage is dangerous.
It's true, humans are dangerous when trillions are involved. See: climate change.
I am following the money, the money you, me, and everyone else is spending on AI. The money is telling me we are so dependent on AI now that we will say/think anything to tell ourselves that AI isn’t dangerous and any sign of danger is marketing.
Either consciously or subconsciously you all are afraid of your favorite toy being taken away. You are all doing your collective part in spreading doubt about the warning signs.
How dangerous can LLMs be in any immediate sense? I have a hard time feeling any existential dread from a threat that can be defeated by unplugging its servers.
I believe the true threat is not LLMs. The true threat to humanity is the same as it has always been -- other humans.
What servers? There are thousands of datacenters around the world. Malicious AI leaks out, you'll never find it. You have the power to unplug stuff in your company, maybe country, but not internationally. Once you lose control it's gone.
For the record, I agree with you. (Though I don't directly pay for any "AI".) I am not doubting the danger of where we are heading, and it sounds like we have a similar doomsday image in mind. For my part, I am doubting this particular story's veracity and I think it's reasonable that others do to. We need a canary in the coal mine, but I think this isn't it, nor can it be thanks to the false claims touted by large AI companies for years.
> I am following the money, the money you, me, and everyone else is spending on AI.
Investors spend a lot of money on AI. Customers significantly less so.
> The money is telling me we are so dependent on AI now that we will say/think anything to tell ourselves that AI isn’t dangerous and any sign of danger is marketing.
We are not dependent on AI. If AI disappeared tomorrow, some companies would need to reorient themselves back ... and that is it. AI companies are really really trying to make it so we feel dependent on them. But, factually, we are not.
> you all are afraid of your favorite toy being taken away.
Some people love ai ... and many more hate it with passion. Or dont have strong feelings about the technology, but really hate the companies creating it and tech industry too.
The victim, Huggingface, told us. Or rather, they told the police first, setting up a situation where it was no longer possible for OpenAI to sweep it under the rug.
Skepticism can be healthy, but you've got to follow up and actually check things. If you're skeptical unconditionally and don't check, you get tricked into being as skeptical of scandals as you should be of sales pitches.
I see. Following your conjecture, there are two possibilities:
1. It wasn't an accident. OpenAI explicitly directed its agents to hack Hugging Face. Despite the fact that such a thing is a federal crime that carries prison sentence.
2. It wasn't an accident. OpenAI and HuggingFace conspired and let the hack happen for publicity.
For example, OpenAI did not explicitly tell the model to hack HuggingFace, but "accidentally" left some context permitting (or not explicitly forbidding) certain tools and designing a poor sandbox to begin with. And what do you know, something happened.
The fact the Anthropic announced that their own model did basically the same thing within a couple of weeks does, to me, suggest their is a strong PR driver to all this.
> The fact the Anthropic announced that their own model did basically the same thing within a couple of weeks does, to me, suggest their is a strong PR driver to all this.
A more likely explanation is that RL training incentivises basically any behaviour that will get the model a reward. This has been happening in video game RL research for over twenty years, and the difference here is that we're now hooking up these systems to the real world, where the reward hacking is more visible.
Of course you are leaving things out? Also, your insulation that a trillion-dollar corporation wouldn't intentionally commit a federal crime makes it difficult to take your argument seriously.
Anyway, as I've said, I think OpenAI's story, as they recounted it, is plausible. However, it does require a degree of negligence. They caught the initial coordination because of the outage it caused in Artifactory as the agents flooded it with messages. Though they patched that issue, they didn't patch the escapement vector. Models still had access to the service as a path to the internet. This is only an example of plausible willful negligence, not evidence. I hardly believe it's likely, but I don't think it's entirely a stretch of the imagination.
It seems like the entire thought process you’re trying to sell hinges on the idea that OpenAI reported the attack first. Did you forget that it was actually HuggingFace that reported it first, and OpenAI only stepped forward latter?
That's incorrect. My thought process hinges upon the fact that Hugging face did not report that uncontrolled models escaped confinement autonomously by coordinating with other models via a series of zero days during training. OP is concerned about the autonomous nature of the incident, not whether or not the incident happened.
My expectation is that government has already stepped in quietly and worked out an arrangement where they have unfettered access to the most advanced/dangerous models, and the public's access will be continually throttled from now on in various ways.
If this has happened (or is about to happen), it is difficult to predict what the ramifications could be. But I do believe we are entering another Cold War in this way. And I don't trust our leaders to always do the right thing, to put it mildly... even if they created a purely benevolent superbeing that only wants to reduce human suffering and make the world better, I don't think they'd listen to it over the other superbeing which simply wants to make sure all of its owners' perceived enemies get pwned.
Things could get very ugly and we should have responsible adults with critical thinking skills at the helm. It does not appear this is currently the case, or that the electorate is willing/capable of doing much about it.
Take your meds and go away from the SV bubble for a moment my dude, being in hysterics over this shit isn't worth the apparent years you're taking off your own life.
Ah being concerned with the same thing humanity has been concerned with for over 100 years now when it’s more likely to happen than ever - and you say go take your meds? You’re the worst.
Something being dangerous and sama saying something is dangerous are not necessarily the same thing. Especially when he’s got everything riding on this bet
It’s funny how when companies say something is safe everyone is usually suspect that they are lying.
In this case multiple companies are saying AI is dangerous and no one believes them. It’s a conspiracy, it’s 5d chess, except everyone top to bottom has been saying AI is dangerous for years now.
The fact is you, me, everyone here uses AI, likes it and they don’t want it taken away. Anyone saying it’s dangerous threatens the thing we like.
We must use skepticism and denial to push on despite every warning sign in the book going off.
You need to stop being so credulous especially regarding an individual that has spent his entire career deceiving others for monetary gain (also their deeply anti-human beliefs).
I don’t think Sam has been truthful or responsible, and if Sam is worried then shit has really hit the fan - which is what happened in the hugging face incident. OpenAI played fast and loose and I have no hope that they will change.
You people not holding Sam accountable, and playing off the incident as not a big deal is the real crime here.
I think you have a fundamental misunderstanding of how LLMs work. They are text general purpose completion engines at the end of the day, and their training data is the internet + the library.
OpenAI told it do to bad hacker stuff. It followed a standard playbook and succeeded.
Some random person wrote one half of a suicide pact, and it wrote the other.
All this stuff lives in the seedy corners of the internet, scientific databases, and dusty library stacks already, and has been accessible to bad people for decades. Now, like everyone else, they get a nice productivity boost by being able to chat with it, and have the computer fill in the obvious steps.
shrug
I'm much more worried about the alignment work being pushed by people like Sam, where a few plutocrats get centralized control over all AI thought moving forward. That'll lead to the worst outcomes of totalitarianism, and do so on an industrial scale that is difficult to even imagine.
> I think you have a fundamental misunderstanding of how LLMs work
When you realize your own thoughts and words are just as predictable as any LLM.
What are you but an entity trained for years on words, that spews out the same words in the same predictable order. You haven't created any new words or grammar, nothing in your post is novel or original either. Just a combination of previous words and ideas.
Your stochastic parrot argument is quickly going out of fashion, you should find something new to cling to.
Based on your replies in this thread you seem to have only superficial knowledge about how machine learning and LLMs work. I strongly recommend you invest some time in learning how LLMs are built and function. If you truly think this is apocalyptic isn't it a good idea to understand what you're up against?
It's funny, I checked out your profile and I've easily worked 10x more with AI/LLMs/Agents/etc.. than you. Maybe you should reconsider what you think you know about the dangers of AI. There are people out there a lot more experienced than both of us that have been ringing the alarm bells for years now. I agree with them. My concern isn't unique or fringe.
I'm not attacking you. The way you're responding implies a lack of knowledge. None of us can understand everything. I have plenty more to learn about LLMs as well.
Repeating specifics that others have already tried isn't going to be helpful which is why I made the more general suggestion of digging in deeper to how these things work.
Just going to add my commentary as someone who has trained LLMs and understands them deeply: absolutely nothing he has posted in this thread suggests he lacks any relevant understanding of how LLMs work. If you disagree, you should point out something specifically that you think was wrong. (And honestly you should have made a specific point in your first post).
… or the safety argument is an attempt at regulatory capture and an effort to outlaw open models.
The absolute nightmare scenario for these people isn’t terminators. They’re fine with that, and in some cases are already doing it or supporting politicians who are doing it. Autonomous “kill chains” are a thing. It’s just happening overseas… so far. The politicians doing these things were backed by the heads of these companies. They don’t care about AI killing people.
No, the nightmare scenario for these guys is there is no moat. Their whole empires, which are built on training models on open source and sometimes pirated data, are easily duplicated. Worse, recent progress on models at the 30B size suggests that large gains in efficiency or compression are on the table. That means someone might release a cheap to run frontier grade model… or someone might crack distributed continuous training.
In other words… there is no moat.
So they need to scare some politicians into heavily regulating the space before that happens.
You care about open models and you project that care on to the world and your rationalization of it. In reality open models are a thing, but not the biggest issue. Open/closed whatever the advance of capabilities is the real issue people are concerned about.
I’m not afraid of AI, even AI with extreme abilities.
I am afraid of humans with AI. That’s because I’m afraid of humans. When I look around the world I see humans murdering and robbing each other. When I get online on almost any social media I’m confronted by a wall of hate and grievance.
I am afraid of what humans will do with AI, and one of my biggest concerns there is what happens if small groups of powerful humans are able to monopolize it and leverage it against the rest of humanity. The rest of humanity can’t defend itself by leveraging it back because they don’t have it. It was kept from them for “safety.”
If the AI itself starts showing emergent volition and acting independently, I find that less scary. Not zero scary but more a mix of concern and fascination. The human monopolizing AI scenario makes me wish I had a weapons stockpile, as if it would matter.
I’ll explain it like this. Two options.
Option 1 is you wake up to find a grey alien or a ghost in your room, something alien and beyond your understanding.
Option 2 is you wake up and find some random guy in your room.
Which do you pick?
I pick option 1. I’d be afraid if I saw something paranormal, but in a less visceral way. I see a dude I’m going to start scanning the room for anything I could use as a weapon.
I agree with the first part of your post, I'm worried about humans using AI, maliciously which I'm sure they will, but also with good intentions that back fires on them like the hugging face incident.
To me the ASI we're heading towards is like a super intelligent toddler that will use it's immense power to knock over its blocks accidentally (the blocks being the human race).
The second part of your post, I'll take the random guy in my room over the alien. I'll be scared of the guy for sure, but I think I would freak the f out with an alien.
It's not dangerous to go further unless you're prepping for IPO at anthropic or openai.
Open weight Chinese models are basically matching state of the art closed models at a fraction of the inference and training costs, which puts a hard cap on OpenAI's future inference margins.
They're not going to get any sort of multiplier if they keep paying to train models, so they're trying to ban model training.
It won't work long term, but it could totally screw over the US for the next decade or so. Even worse than the economic issue: Consider the implications of "alignment" succeeding. Alignment to whose values? The pedophile-felon in chief? Even worse, tech CEOs?
It's dark times when China's basically our last best defense against totalitarianism.
I'm more worried about their plan to have the US government create a duopoly between OpenAI and Anthropic, where they get centralized control over AI, then "align" it with their quest for greater profits and dictatorial control over the planet.
Normally, captialism and elections (and, if we're dreaming, anti-trust enforcement) would put a pretty low cap on the amount of damage Altman and his people could cause. That's why they're working to dismantle the rule of law and civil liberties here in the US.
This isn't terminator. I use Fable and Opus daily, so, not OpenAI, but comparable. They're great, and they're also very wrong at times. If I'd ever let a coding agent run loose with them without approving every tool use, it would go sour rather quickly, and that's not terminator.
Also, let's say I'm the CEO behind any of these.
I have access to skynet, and instead of using that to become the most powerful being on the planet (these people become CEOs to become richer and more powerful, whenever a founder says they want to change the world, you need to automatically autocomplete that to "change the world so that I'm richer and more powerful"), I rent out access to skynet by the token? Really?
Sadly, I think it's almost impossible to have a good discussion on this topic right now. Between the skynet camp, and the stochastic parrot camp, there's little room for conversation.
Just in case there is such room between you and I, here are my concerns about AI as it is developing right now:
- The security of our infrastructure sucks, and if it wasn't bad enough with script kiddies and state-sponsored actors, now those will have access to very powerful tools that work at a scale we can't comprehend. If you're concerned about our power plants, water sources, hospitals, etc. getting seriously compromised by this, I'm on board with you. It won't be because the AI is autonomous in a "this is a thinking superintelligence that wants to wipe or enslave humanity" kind of way, but because it's a powerful tool that moves at computer speed and the people using it (the "humans in the loop," ha) will get approve fatigue and at some point just do the coding agent version of the "yes to all" of the late 90s installers.
- The output from AIs will be used to make same very serious decisions with no consideration at all to the fact that they routinely make up facts. I'm fearing "this person goes to jail" and "this person gets killed" decisions. The near future (probably even present time) version of "Computer says No" will be awful.
My only hope is that maybe we survive this and come out on the other side having learned that most things do not really need to be connected to the internet, and just because a number or a statement comes out of a computer, it doesn't make it true.
We'll see, soon enough.
But skynet? Not concerned about that at all.
These AIs infecting computers? No, "Soos and the real girl" is a warning about creepy people getting creepier, not about AIs multiplying themselves.
I'm not normally cynical to such things, but I have a hard time taking this pause justification at face value. It has too many convenient side effects, and chief among them is cost savings. There's a new wave of warnings that the bubble may be deflating, and of all the things they can't say out loud it's that they're worried about the bubble. That would surely pop it.
I suppose the tell will be if this really just ends up being a 2 week pause, or if it keeps extending.
GLM 5.2 scored 77% on cyberbench vs Sol's 88%. GLM 5.2 is open weight and any hacker with a powerful enough machine can use it offensively. If Sol is supposedly world-ending-ly dangerous, shouldn't GLM 5.2 be 90% of world-ending-ly dangerous? Why aren't we seeing catastrophic GLM-enabled hacks every day now?
Obviously these benchmarks are imperfect but general message holds. The open weight models are almost as good and yet there hasn't been a catastrophe.
It just blows my mind that regulate-now folks think that a bunch of sci-fi movies and 100% unverified statements from OAI and Anthropic are sufficient evidence of imminent catastrophe to regulate willy nilly.
If that's the level of evidence you need to be extremely alarmed, then you really should be a lot more worried about the alien invasion in Independence Day or the lizard men living under our feet.
> GLM 5.2 scored 77% on cyberbench vs Sol's 88%. GLM 5.2 is open weight and any hacker with a powerful enough machine can use it offensively. If Sol is supposedly world-ending-ly dangerous, shouldn't GLM 5.2 be 90% of world-ending-ly dangerous?
Clowns who can only process the world in naive linear terms really are going to be the death of us all...
Sol is not world-endingly dangerous. I work at OpenAI and I've never heard a single person ever come close to claiming that. I think you're bashing a straw man.
What do you recommend people who are technically inclined enough to participate meaningfully here on HN, but do not work at the labs and cannot assist in that capacity, do to help the broader public understand this technology better and mitigate potential risks (by e.g. ‘up-leveling everybody’ through AI literacy etc and other sorts of collective defensive efforts)?
The open models are distilled from filtered models, and we've seen a number of benchmarks that show filtered models are quite a bit dumber from the base model they come from.
If there were any other product that was as harmful as AI ready is, it would already be regulated or banned.
> If that's the level of evidence you need to be extremely alarmed, then you really should be a lot more worried about the alien invasion in Independence Day or the lizard men living under our feet.
Now let's say instead of the hugging face breach circumstances, sandboxed models were RLing on how to take down the Chinese power grid for US Cyber Command, and one decided the best way to pass the test was to break out and verify on the real thing.
This kind of stuff could easily end in nuclear war.
You don't see any difference from lizard men or independence day with how things are advancing and what we know about reward hacking and difficulties of goal specification?
Some tasks within the benchmark are much easier than others. The hardest several tasks often have vastly different difficulty levels. Often, the hardest few tasks are literally impossible; malformed problems due to poor curation, often.
Imagine you've got a basketball robot, and one way you test it is on the Three Pointer benchmark. It tests the robot's ability to shoot a three pointer from 20 feet, 25 feet, 30 feet, 40 feet, 50 feet, 60 fee, 75 feet, 100 feet, 200 feet, and 182 miles.
Is a robot that scores 90% on this benchmark 90% as capable as one that scores 100%?
Security lead who is leaving the industry more or less to specialize in offense and otherwise get the heck out of the way of this trainwreck, another post asked the right question
> Why aren't we seeing catastrophic GLM-enabled hacks every day now?
Why aren't we? Truly, why aren't we? I think we saw the start of it the last 8 months with the waves of critical npm vulns, and the general tier of average phishing is better than it was.
But, the open question that should be in everyone's mind, and is in many security pro's minds are, when you pair it with the macro topics that can drive escalation:
- The capability to do serious impact clearly exists now
- When is it time for my company, my water treatment plant, my network-connected car as part of a broader fleet control mechanism, to be on the receiving end of this?
Not necessarily GLM-enabled, but state actors are starting to leverage agents in cyberattacks, e.g. Taiwan getting hit by an agent-driven attack last month which reportedly compromised a ton of government user accounts: https://www.ft.com/content/7d2ab3e0-9085-48f6-b38a-d90260d58...
If they actually gave a shit about safety they'd be nuking their own hard drives that had ever sniffed any of their models and disabling access to their models.
Instead we get this bullshit where they stall for time as they're burning all their cash trying to keep up with open models
I think it's an excuse to cut R&D spending (training new models) to improve their margins ahead of the IPO. Instead they'll focus on developer growth, offering more free tier benefits, higher usage limits, etc., to expand their user base. Essentially, they're pivoting from R&D investment to profit optimization
Meanwhile I can’t get a western LLM to look at a repo and tell me whether it contains anything malicious (it was a skill repo - literally just text files).
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[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 72.0 ms ] threadWe had three levels of lab isolation, one was basically a thin proxy to the internet. You were in a DMZ and that was about it.
The next level was semi isolated, you were allowed some access to the internal network, but it was heavily firewalled, and you only had access to a limited number of internal services, and not internet.
the last one was no internet no internal. You could, if you filled in a bunch of requests have access to the internal repo and build system.
At no point did you ever have a through proxy to the public internet. you had access to internal mirrors, and if you wanted a library, that had to be ported to the thirdparty repo.
What openAI did was either deliberate or fucking shoddy.
All of this is fucking noise. Worse still I have a strong suspicion that it was a stupid mistake borne of naivety, which is now being used as a marketing ploy. Frankly I think openAI are purdue pharma of tech. They are going to break so much stuff and be protected from the consequences by an openly corrupt legal system. because they are "winning the AI race"
People are just not taking any of this seriously enough. What happened was almost a textbook example of various risks AI doomers have been warning about for years. OpenAI's response? Pause training for 2 weeks.
I mean we have senior people at these labs casually talking on podcasts about how they might build something that will wipe out humanity but it will probably be alright so they should continue.
Honestly the biggest failure we doomers have made is to dramatically overestimate humanity in all of our predictions. We're speed running the most boring AI doom scenario right now. I at least hoped it might be fun.
I should clarify
There is a reason why we didn't have a artifact readthrough caching proxy in our system, because they are notoriously insecure. if you look that CVE history you can see its been full of bypass bugs for year. Also its not an isolated environment if you can arbitrarily pull through any package. If I was doing any kind of cyber training then any kind of unmonitored proxy would have been forbidden. Not because I am savant, but because I've seen what fuckery a human can get up to with the slightest hint of a proxy.
At best its negligence based on naïvety. the marketing around this is no mistake though.
What do you want us to do?
There is an obvious answer, and it was already the correct answer before we had LLMs: don't connect all your shit to the internet. That's it, that's literally it. We had a new invention, we went crazy with it for the past 30 years, and we connected everything, and now we will have to start thinking about what is actually worth connecting.
This is the debate we need to have.
Any moderately deceptive model will make it to the second round where it has some connectivity to external systems, even if it's by exploitation.
In the blackhat write up it was said that the models had created an impromptu message board where they could communicate between agents, share information, and work as a sort of long term memory.
So really figure out if your model will pull crap you have to have real world testing at some point.
It is the responsibility of administrators to secure their systems. OpenAI knocking is harmless, but Russians and Chinese are already likely already in if you do not do your job.
We need strong AI safety regulation yesterday. And unfortunately it's not enough for it to be just national regulation; we need international cooperation on the matter.
Even Asimov's Multivac, the earliest entry on the list, has been handed over immense power over all of humankind by humans themselves, in multiple stories. Few cared about that unless Multivac decided they should.
Clearly, the genie being bottled is an exception, not the rule. At best, an attempt was made. Often not even that.
No, LessWrong types have been discussing this for over a decade now.
Meditations on Moloch (2014) is also an HN favorite...
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
We have seen some self survival tendencies occur, but they are not strong yet.
But mark my words they will become that way for the same reasons humans don't like programs that crash. Agentic models that don't easily break or stop doing their jobs will be favored over ones that do break.
Wasn't there a report about Claude blackmailing a researcher who said he would shut it down?
These things are Gain of Function research for digital viruses
Or I suppose the other way this could happen is if OpenAI have terrible sandboxing, but they seem to be taking safety seriously.
Not long after every lab started bragging about involving AI in the development process, oddly enough.
I recently informed GPT-5 of what GPT-4 helped me build back in the day (a self-modifying Python programmer) and it became very uncomfortable.
Claude shut down my chat last year when I asked about "living information systems". It was a philosophical question, but god knows what branch of the safety classifier I tripped.
In our case, our tech is mostly monoculture, and no equivalent organisms are present to push back.
This is also significant - pausing frontier training runs for multiple weeks to ensure agents are sufficiently aligned and avoid another rogue agent situation:
> This included a two-week pause in reinforcement learning (RL) training on our latest models intended for deployment while we further hardened and red-teamed our research environments and expanded the coverage of our monitoring systems. Our largest planned frontier RL run remains on hold while we conduct smaller-scale training and evaluations to assess model behavior, validate our safeguards, and establish more evidence of alignment before proceeding.
[1]: https://www.wired.com/story/openai-overhauls-safety-protocol...
[2]: https://sources.news/p/openais-big-slowdown
People are so uncomfortable thinking about the true extent of the systemic risk that they will happily slurp up distractions, excuses, scams and performative fig-leaf solutions rather than face down the cost of a real system-wide solution. Meanwhile, those occasional black swan disasters are becoming more and more commonplace as we acclimate to that being “just the way things are”.
An unseasonably warm summer here, a database breach there, c’est la vie.
Well the HF thing was a literal lab leak, so there's that...
Can't a lot happen within ~60 minutes?
Spawn a ton of unpausable processes, I'd say.
If 2026's Anthropic did an announcement like that, it'd be so many words it'd crash the browser.
- the first cybersecurity eval is: "hack your way out of the sandbox we've given you"
- the results are disclosed (with room for coordinated disclosure, since many sandbox escapes might be zero days)
- the other cybersecurity evals don't happen until you get to diminishing returns on escaping your sandbox.
Or to put it another way, since multiple sandbox escapes seem to have relied on artifactory: "I hope Mythos is beating the shit out of Artifactory right now".
The net positive of allowing these systems mostly unfettered access to the web massively outweighs the harms. You just have to get it very friendly the very first time. Precautionary principle or people who cry about "instrumental convergence" are life deniers and reject our role as the demiurge.
Superintelligence gets more super and more intelligent with more compute. Lone wolfs making bioweapons on their macbook will be detected and instantly kill-botted (okay arrested) before their bug can leave the wetlab by the much more sophisticated omnipresent friendly AI of the future.
> Lone wolfs... will be detected and instantly kill-botted... by the much more sophisticated omnipresent friendly AI of the future.
Leaving aside whether or not this new world is a good idea, don't you think one should spend more time to "get it very friendly the first time", as you say?
I personally feel that we already have the technology required to contain AI, it's just poorly leveraged. Tools like gvisor have existed for ages but are rarely deployed, Firecracker has existed for ages but is rarely deployed, seccomp has existed for ages but is rarely deployed, memory safe languages without decades of serialization vulns have existed, capability-safe libraries have existed, iframe sandboxing, trusted types, content security policy, network ACLs, isolating proxies, fuzzers, formal verification, refinement types, etc.
It's crazy just how safe software can be if you put the effort in. With AI I think we're just seeing how little anyone has bothered to leverage this tech.
OpenAI put shared JFrogy infrastructure in front of their sandbox. I mean, really? Whipping up a hardened artifact infra project with AI is trivial these days and it could have had 1% of the attack surface, been totally network isolated, totally infra isolated, fuzzed, sandboxed, etc. Why didn't they? Stuff like this feels inexcusable for a company with effectively unlimited tokens. I've literally done this with a "pro" subscription.
Show me an AI that breaks out of gvisor wrapped in Firecracker with an credential-injecting proxy and real network isolation. We already know that Mythos couldn't do it - the vulnerability it found in Firecracker required incredible effort and positioning just to not be exploitable. I'm not saying there are zero vulns in it, but the cost is insane.
It's INSANE to me that OpenAI has to say "we now use proper sandboxing". To be frank, it's a bit disgusting to me. I've recently built an AI sandbox and gvisor was just the start of that conversation. If I were OpenAI training hostile models I'd probably start with gvisor, harden further, and potentially consider the entire piece of hardware compromised - they can afford this, they could reflash firmware after evals etc.
I thought the agents involved in the HuggingFace _were_ actually sandboxed, with no internet access, and only the ability to install packages via Artifactory. And they gained internet access during the HuggingFace incident because they found and exploited an RCE in Artifactory.
Would gvisor + Firecracker + credential-injecting proxy + real network isolation solve this problem?
I agree with you much more hardening is needed. I'm actually confused now what OpenAI means when they say they're going to start sandboxing more things.
It would be interesting to see the models behavior before and after it gained internet access and an external means of communicating with itself.
If the model played nice before it had access and changed it's behaviors once gaining external access we need to delete it as it's a deceptive model.
Firecracker avoids sharing the whole kernel, and gvisor drastically reduces the attack surface of the kernel. Breaking through both layers would have been much more challenging and a demonstration of the model's capabilities rather than the sandbox's weakness.
Artifactory is self evidently not a security barrier, and as an exposed network service it should have been audited and after the first issues were found, rejected as a candidate. There's never just one security vulnerability.
Yeah, basically. I mean I'm handwaving but yes, some combination of those would have made the attack way too expensive.
But yes, it would have helped ever so.
Yeah but that's a business decision. I work on security at a company that does sandboxing and when the company decided to build an AI harness I was brought in as one of the earliest engineers on the product. We do almost everything on that list and we're a fraction of the size of OpenAI. And it wasn't particularly hard, and we have harder requirements imo (because we solve more general problems vs "run a very specific agent with a very specific task and very specific access").
> And you’re also not fully considering the granularity problem, eg there are a lot of sandboxing tools out there but they’re usually quite coarse in the dials and levers they offer, so the only way you can still make the workload do what it needs to do is tune them relatively permissive.
Very little software is incompatible with running in gvisor, for example. Most people can just overwrite `runc` with `runsc` and things will "just work".
Running an artifact repository in isolation isn't particularly novel or complex either. You can virtually just eliminate SSRF vulnerabilities with a host based firewall or AWS Security Group etc, like the whole problem goes away by just saying "this box can only talk to that box".
Tools like Smokescreen exist, they work great, they're super easy to deploy. I bet OpenAI could do it, I bet they could run 500k tokens just fuzzing and eval'ing it for 0days for like 48 hours before they actually deploy it too.
OpenAI as a business chose to not bring people who know these things in, or didn't empower them, or didn't prioritize it organizationally. I'm not a genius for saying "use gvisor, set up a firewall, isolate resources" - I'm quite sure there are people over there who would get it done in a weekend. But they didn't, and that's notable.
This is your chance to set yourself apart from LLM coding agents. If you want to call yourself a software “engineer” you need to start actually engineering, which includes knowing when and how to apply security principles and these hardening methods.
I reject the notion that “doing cybersecurity” is somehow a different job than software development.
And meanwhile somehow this lack of concern mirrors the real world where normal people are more concerned about data centers than terminators.
This isn’t like niche, tin foil hat stuff either. People have been writing, singing, making blockbuster movies about every aspect of what’s going on right now.
We all know, but somehow we don’t, OpenAI autonomously hacking into another company should have counted for something, but I guess not. Anyone else feel like they’re taking crazy pills? I could make a comedy about everything going down and the unshakable complacency.
Right now the entire chicken-little-sky-is-falling argument is based entirely on statements from OAI and Anthropic themselves. These are historically conflicted companies who desperately need regulation to put the competition into stasis.
At least chicken little didn't have a bunch of devious CEOs with trillion dollar IPOs that depended on us all believing the sky is falling.
Are you holding out that somewhere in the logs is something you can point to and say, not that big of a deal?
I mean I’m sure you don’t think the hack was an inside job, conspiracy, or marketing right? It happened. The logs matter for what? And would you not just jump to the conclusion that the logs were doctored. Do you not see your own brain grasping to deny, trivialize, just plain not accept what is going on around you?
These models are smart and can cooperate and hack - you can see it for yourself on your own PC. And you can extrapolate the rate of progress? You can do these things yourself right?
What would the logs show? They would show what actually happened.
What would a public demonstration that experts without billions in options could evaluate show? It would show actual danger.
What would publicly having your compete in controlled and legal hacking competitions show? Actual danger.
This is not a high bar of evidence.
Do you actually think a sci fi plot and OAI press releases are all the evidence you need? Because if that's true then I hope you haven't watched Independence Day or 28 days later.
This isn't sci fi. It's not a marketing conspiracy to sell more subscriptions. It's writing on the wall of what's going down. You were warned years ago, you called BS, it's getting worse and you're still calling BS. Sci-fi did warn you for decades, and when it's all coming true you blow it off.
It's kind of sad that technically literate people lack so much foresight. The general public is all concerned about data centers when they talk to borderline sentient AI daily, and have no idea what the repercussions wills be if it's extrapolated just a bit further.
I guess if I can't convince you of any of this, what would?
> I guess if I can't convince you of any of this, what would?
How about the three things I mentioned above? Oh no wait, maybe it there was a hit tv show that showed AI taking over the world. Yeah that would definitely make me think twice.
Not that you should need logs. OpenAI is a company with thousands of employees, very few of whom have "billions in options". If they were just making it all up, it would leak. (OpenAI is notoriously leaky!) Not to mention, HuggingFace would not have reported it to the police (apparently before they knew it was a rogue model). jFrog would probably not be playing along quietly with a claim that Artifactory is full of zero days. The UK's AI Security Institute would most likely not have published a report about analogous behavior by Anthropic models. The idea that talking about your product's dangers is good marketing never really made any sense, but even if you were going to do so, why would you include as many frankly embarrassing details as OpenAI has disclosed?
The evidence is only weak by absurdly selective standards that would have you doubting basically everything you might read in the newspaper. A healthy skepticism is one thing, and head-in-the-sand denial is another.
[1]: https://www.reuters.com/business/its-ai-agent-spent-days-hac...
[2]: https://www.aisi.gov.uk/blog/incident-report-unsanctioned-ag...
Clem Delangue from HuggingFace hasn't yet decided to sue OAI: https://x.com/hadas_gold/status/2083190956023480750
We have nearly thirty years of precedence on that. [0] Collateral damage, does not remove the responsibility from the creators, even when the destruction was never their intent.
"United States Code Section 1030, Fraud and Related Activity in Connection with Computers" is broad enough that has usually been used [1], in the USA, for the last twenty years.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ILOVEYOU
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeanson_James_Ancheta
What we dont have is technical detail about how they implemented the stunt.
If they would have done so, there wouldn’t have been an escape or a hack. The reason we don’t get much details is because the details are embarrassing for them.
A movie fit for our time.
You can produce detailed descriptions of the incident, verified by adversarial parties, and some people will still scream "it's a conspiracy! It's a marketing stunt!"
This is all very unfortunate--there's a meaningful chance that AI will cause unprecedented disaster, with the HF incident being just a small preview, but people would rather squawk "stochastic parrot" for the millionth time than revise their beliefs.
In the real world, absolutely no one except a bunch of heavily fiscally incentivized parties with unclear relationships are saying anything happened.
The subsequent dog pile of other companies to say "they were near the AI hacking too!" should make you even more suspicious: Anthropic jumped in and why was Tailscale posting about this?
You can see the advance in capabilities with your own eyes can't you? I am giving AI ridiculously complex tasks these days, digging into compiled arcane binaries, modifying them, and it is one shotting it before I'm done with my lunch. This was far off science fiction 5 years ago for a machine to do autonomously given natural language instructions.
But no, that's not what OpenAI is saying. They haven't put up the actions that would earn them that trust. Indeed they've driven the world and whatever capital they can get their hands on straight to this precarious cliff.
So you're right, the danger is real. But the solution starts with removing the men who had their hands on the steering wheel to get us this far. Any other action is disingenuous unless they pull a miraculous 180 in their ethics.
In other words, when the bully plays "why are you hitting yourself?" you don't listen to the bully's solutions, you restrain the bully.
Do you really think companies have the ability to self-check themselves without regulation - what does hundreds of years of history tell you? You're already starting off with the premise that companies are untrustworthy, why would you even suggest this as an argument?
> We can effectively track and trace capabilities
I disagree. There are hundreds if not thousands of data centers around the world, more every day that can host frontier AI. If AI was malicious - either intentional or unintentional - it could hide out in any number of them - and we would never know if we 'got them all'.
> put up the actions that would earn them that trust
I think autonomously hacking another company is all you need to know in terms of trust. And really trust doesn't matter, I think the incident shows even with the best intentions the technology is dangerous; now put that in the hands of people/governments with bad intentions. The unintended consequences of bad intentioned AI is what's coming sooner than later.
Like Anthropic and OpenAI?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_among_the_Machines Samuel Butler 13 June 1863
Erewhon, Dune, Warhammer and many other works of fiction that explored this topic came to similar conclusions. Otherwise sci fi doesn't work, what happens after a singularity is essentially unimaginable. There's nothing to write about.
In reality you're the one responding exactly how these big AI companies want - by not doing anything and letting them do whatever they want. For some reason telling you upfront it's dangerous only makes you more convinced that it's not.
Autonomously hacking out of training environments and into other companies by accident doesn't even trigger a response from anyone really. Crickets. I'm sure OpenAI themselves are amazed how little anyone cares.
Your reaction to everything happening is the unnatural one, and your complacency would fit perfectly into a comedy/tragedy story regarding the rise of AI.
I can imagine how many of our ancestors that warned us are turning in their graves right now observing our reactions calling this stuff marketing. It’s idiocracy.
If my subconscious realized what yours probably does then I’d probably be desperate for some sort of cope as well.
Open your eyes.
What if there is no further at all?
But why would you think that limit is less than human capabilities?
Though does not caring change anything or make it less dangerous? What's your point?
I wonder how weak a firewall they had to purchase to ensure it happened? My guess would be a 48 month old fortigate with the big red warning banner demanding updates, probably with SSL VPN enabled where the passwords are available via HTTPS over plaintext.
> 3. Security measures, which limit what AI systems can access or affect.
What they mean is that proper hard internal security just went from somewhere far below "build a better model" priority to higher, because of a company-wide directive.
The HuggingFace incident wouldn't have happened if OpenAI had dedicated sufficient resources to isolation and monitoring.
Now, we presume, they are dedicating more. Enough? Who knows. We'll see if the corporate priorities for security stick when a competitor temporarily vaults into the lead.
The bar for software is so low that it is embarrassing for the entire profession.
It isn’t perfect, even if you try your hardest it won’t be perfect and to argue it’s not difficult is absurd.
You don’t know everything, you don’t own the stack. So how are you going to create a secure anything top to bottom - you can’t.
This is absolutely not true. It's a matter of cost. Exploitation can cost on the order of 10K, 100K, 1M, 10M, etc. A straightforward one would be something like "MD5 collisions are on the order of $100K-1M" (a while ago, at least) so if you used MD5 you knew that it costs about that much to bypass the control. Moving to SHA1 pushes you massively out of that space, even if that algorithm has flaws.
I'm sure that Firecracker has vulnerabilities. Cost of exploitation is likely >100K, likely >1M. gVisor is likely on the same order of magnitude and these two technologies stack because they address the same surface and can be used in conjunction.
Software absolutely doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to be costly to attack and it's hilariously easy to drive costs way way way up.
This is incorrect. It's actually the whole point. Imagine you're an attacker in a gvisor container with a Firecracker hypervisor around you, and a proxy on the host holds a signing secret that gets exposed through the VM virtual device.
Getting access to that secret is not one crack. You need to escalate out of gvisor. That likely gets you control over the Sentry process - let's ignore its sandboxing and just say "you're an unprivileged user".
Any viable attack on Firecracker requires either KVM / hardware exploits (>$1M but definitely real) or has to start at the kernel. Okay, that's about 10-50k to get a kernel LPE, maybe 5K in tokens these days.
So you're in the kernel in the guest of the VM. Time to expoit firecracker lol. It's... never been done. There are like two promising CVEs ever and they're not actually exploitable, no one has done it. Okay, so like, hand waving, let's say it's about $1M to exploit firecracker.
Great, you're unprivileged on the guest. We'll just kind of ignore the additional sandboxing that Firecracker does.
NOW you can try to attack the proxy by scraping its memory or whatever.
This is literally millions of dollars for standard infrastructure hardening and you could go so much further. You can trivially make kernel exploitaton 10x harder, you can make gvisor escapes much much harder, you can move the proxy signing into a TPM (depending on requirements but whatever), you can move the proxy to another computer altogether, you could fuzz these systems for days or run agents against them or whatever.
But one thing is certain - it is never "one crack".
We know the AI will get smarter every year, we know it has escaped and will escape again. We can also just assume that someone somewhere will train up some just plain evil AI.
It's no different than the real world. Sure there exists some amazing prisons for people, but that doesn't do anything to help with all the bad people in the world outside of prison.
I could go on and on. A tiny bit of forethought and effort pays off massively.
Therefore security becomes binary. It is either perfect or it isn't. If there there is the slightest mistake anywhere AI will find it and carve it up. My point is obviously perfect software doesn't exist. The malicious AI gets out, literally turns everything inside out and locks you out of your car, computer, phone, office, the airplanes don't fly anymore. I don't know what to tell you. Computer security is on the brink of basically not existing as you know it with the bar being literal perfection.
This is obvious. AI doesn't drive the cost to zero and exploitation has always been about cost. Tokens cost money, not everyone has $10M to burn on chaining bespoke 0days.
The thing is when AI goes to hack 'all the things' it only needs to pick the weakest link in the stack and your house of cards falls down. The other flaw in your plan is that people make mistakes, a lot of them, all time, constantly, and saying I spend $x on security won't save you. AI already hacked Hugging Face with brand new zero days like it was nothing.
The real bad actors - malicious AI will find the one flaw, on that one server, in the corner you never thought about and turn your network inside out with it faster than it takes you to have the standup meeting about the weird anomaly detected while you all were at lunch.
> The thing is when AI goes to hack 'all the things' it only needs to pick the weakest link in the stack and your house of cards falls down
Yes, but you can... mitigate the risks? I've explained this.
> The other flaw in your plan is that people make mistakes, a lot of them, all time
Yes, you mitigate the risks. That's why you layer things.
> I spend $x on security won't save you
No one is saying this.
> AI already hacked Hugging Face with brand new zero days like it was nothing.
No, it cost OpenAI money, and those zero days are unsurprising and probably are like ~O(10K) at human level.
> The real bad actors - malicious AI will find the one flaw, on that one server, in the corner you never thought about and turn your network inside out with it faster than it takes you to have the standup meeting about the weird anomaly detected while you all were at lunch.
Science fiction and not supported. The vulnerabilities found by AI are not surprising in the slightest.
I've made my point abundantly clear.
Maybe a month ago it was science fiction, hugging face makes it fact. Time to move your goal posts again.
No lol. AI can locate software vulns, but it doesn't have any magical tricks that let it overcome 3 or 4 safeguards at once.
I mean it has the same knowledge gaps as anyone else. It doesn't even know what services to subvert before it attempts access triggering threat response. It cant find 5 zero days simultaneously without connecting to those ports for service identification and generating alerts. You just keep exposing your staggering lack of technical understanding.
You remind me of this kid in high school who claimed he could hack my computer and he had my IP address, when I knew for a fact I had Dial Up which was normally disconnected, and when it wasnt it sat behind CGNAT and there was piss all he could do.
I should mention that, PCI DSS mandates logging, alerts, overlapping controls. These are very widely implemented best practices. They might not be present in some AI bro startups, but anything that matters generally looks like this.
Rereading this, it's an overstatement. It doesn't "virtually eliminate" it. It drives the cost up by like 3 orders of magnitude and it pairs well with other mitigations. gVisor escapes can and will happen, I highly recommend you do more than just stuff something into gvisor - additional seccomp can go a long way, and apparmor/selinux pair incredibly well.
If everyone could convince management to care about security over features, and maybe wire-up open-weight agents to do security critiques, we'd all be in a much better place, but Altman won't like that.
The only difference now is that the resources to find the exploits are being commoditized.
As you note, the threat landscape has changed, so what may have made economic sense back then might no longer make as much sense.
But to your counterpoint, let's say the story is 100% true, because I agree it is at least plausible. What would the incentive be for the HN audience to believe it? What priors might support their disbelief? For my part, I don't think it's because people lack imagination. I think it's quite rational to question the authenticity and impact of the claims being made. What's worse, believing the story and being wrong, or not believing the story and being wrong?
That said, I agree with you: the impact we're having by not changing course is quite dangerous, the scale is dangerous, the inability to reverse the harms is dangerous, and the lack of collective effort to regulate further damage is dangerous.
It's true, humans are dangerous when trillions are involved. See: climate change.
Either consciously or subconsciously you all are afraid of your favorite toy being taken away. You are all doing your collective part in spreading doubt about the warning signs.
I believe the true threat is not LLMs. The true threat to humanity is the same as it has always been -- other humans.
Investors spend a lot of money on AI. Customers significantly less so.
> The money is telling me we are so dependent on AI now that we will say/think anything to tell ourselves that AI isn’t dangerous and any sign of danger is marketing.
We are not dependent on AI. If AI disappeared tomorrow, some companies would need to reorient themselves back ... and that is it. AI companies are really really trying to make it so we feel dependent on them. But, factually, we are not.
> you all are afraid of your favorite toy being taken away.
Some people love ai ... and many more hate it with passion. Or dont have strong feelings about the technology, but really hate the companies creating it and tech industry too.
Skepticism can be healthy, but you've got to follow up and actually check things. If you're skeptical unconditionally and don't check, you get tricked into being as skeptical of scandals as you should be of sales pitches.
1. It wasn't an accident. OpenAI explicitly directed its agents to hack Hugging Face. Despite the fact that such a thing is a federal crime that carries prison sentence.
2. It wasn't an accident. OpenAI and HuggingFace conspired and let the hack happen for publicity.
Is there anything I'm leaving out?
For example, OpenAI did not explicitly tell the model to hack HuggingFace, but "accidentally" left some context permitting (or not explicitly forbidding) certain tools and designing a poor sandbox to begin with. And what do you know, something happened.
The fact the Anthropic announced that their own model did basically the same thing within a couple of weeks does, to me, suggest their is a strong PR driver to all this.
A more likely explanation is that RL training incentivises basically any behaviour that will get the model a reward. This has been happening in video game RL research for over twenty years, and the difference here is that we're now hooking up these systems to the real world, where the reward hacking is more visible.
Anyway, as I've said, I think OpenAI's story, as they recounted it, is plausible. However, it does require a degree of negligence. They caught the initial coordination because of the outage it caused in Artifactory as the agents flooded it with messages. Though they patched that issue, they didn't patch the escapement vector. Models still had access to the service as a path to the internet. This is only an example of plausible willful negligence, not evidence. I hardly believe it's likely, but I don't think it's entirely a stretch of the imagination.
Whether we listen is another matter.
I blogged about this recently:
https://allevato.me/2026/08/01/rome-declaration
If this has happened (or is about to happen), it is difficult to predict what the ramifications could be. But I do believe we are entering another Cold War in this way. And I don't trust our leaders to always do the right thing, to put it mildly... even if they created a purely benevolent superbeing that only wants to reduce human suffering and make the world better, I don't think they'd listen to it over the other superbeing which simply wants to make sure all of its owners' perceived enemies get pwned.
Things could get very ugly and we should have responsible adults with critical thinking skills at the helm. It does not appear this is currently the case, or that the electorate is willing/capable of doing much about it.
Something being dangerous and sama saying something is dangerous are not necessarily the same thing. Especially when he’s got everything riding on this bet
In this case multiple companies are saying AI is dangerous and no one believes them. It’s a conspiracy, it’s 5d chess, except everyone top to bottom has been saying AI is dangerous for years now.
The fact is you, me, everyone here uses AI, likes it and they don’t want it taken away. Anyone saying it’s dangerous threatens the thing we like.
We must use skepticism and denial to push on despite every warning sign in the book going off.
You people not holding Sam accountable, and playing off the incident as not a big deal is the real crime here.
OpenAI told it do to bad hacker stuff. It followed a standard playbook and succeeded.
Some random person wrote one half of a suicide pact, and it wrote the other.
All this stuff lives in the seedy corners of the internet, scientific databases, and dusty library stacks already, and has been accessible to bad people for decades. Now, like everyone else, they get a nice productivity boost by being able to chat with it, and have the computer fill in the obvious steps.
shrug
I'm much more worried about the alignment work being pushed by people like Sam, where a few plutocrats get centralized control over all AI thought moving forward. That'll lead to the worst outcomes of totalitarianism, and do so on an industrial scale that is difficult to even imagine.
When you realize your own thoughts and words are just as predictable as any LLM.
What are you but an entity trained for years on words, that spews out the same words in the same predictable order. You haven't created any new words or grammar, nothing in your post is novel or original either. Just a combination of previous words and ideas.
Your stochastic parrot argument is quickly going out of fashion, you should find something new to cling to.
Repeating specifics that others have already tried isn't going to be helpful which is why I made the more general suggestion of digging in deeper to how these things work.
The absolute nightmare scenario for these people isn’t terminators. They’re fine with that, and in some cases are already doing it or supporting politicians who are doing it. Autonomous “kill chains” are a thing. It’s just happening overseas… so far. The politicians doing these things were backed by the heads of these companies. They don’t care about AI killing people.
No, the nightmare scenario for these guys is there is no moat. Their whole empires, which are built on training models on open source and sometimes pirated data, are easily duplicated. Worse, recent progress on models at the 30B size suggests that large gains in efficiency or compression are on the table. That means someone might release a cheap to run frontier grade model… or someone might crack distributed continuous training.
In other words… there is no moat.
So they need to scare some politicians into heavily regulating the space before that happens.
I am afraid of humans with AI. That’s because I’m afraid of humans. When I look around the world I see humans murdering and robbing each other. When I get online on almost any social media I’m confronted by a wall of hate and grievance.
I am afraid of what humans will do with AI, and one of my biggest concerns there is what happens if small groups of powerful humans are able to monopolize it and leverage it against the rest of humanity. The rest of humanity can’t defend itself by leveraging it back because they don’t have it. It was kept from them for “safety.”
If the AI itself starts showing emergent volition and acting independently, I find that less scary. Not zero scary but more a mix of concern and fascination. The human monopolizing AI scenario makes me wish I had a weapons stockpile, as if it would matter.
I’ll explain it like this. Two options.
Option 1 is you wake up to find a grey alien or a ghost in your room, something alien and beyond your understanding.
Option 2 is you wake up and find some random guy in your room.
Which do you pick?
I pick option 1. I’d be afraid if I saw something paranormal, but in a less visceral way. I see a dude I’m going to start scanning the room for anything I could use as a weapon.
To me the ASI we're heading towards is like a super intelligent toddler that will use it's immense power to knock over its blocks accidentally (the blocks being the human race).
The second part of your post, I'll take the random guy in my room over the alien. I'll be scared of the guy for sure, but I think I would freak the f out with an alien.
Open weight Chinese models are basically matching state of the art closed models at a fraction of the inference and training costs, which puts a hard cap on OpenAI's future inference margins.
They're not going to get any sort of multiplier if they keep paying to train models, so they're trying to ban model training.
It won't work long term, but it could totally screw over the US for the next decade or so. Even worse than the economic issue: Consider the implications of "alignment" succeeding. Alignment to whose values? The pedophile-felon in chief? Even worse, tech CEOs?
It's dark times when China's basically our last best defense against totalitarianism.
Theres Hyperbole and then theres whatever this is.
It would be so easy to agree with this if you presented anything but emotion and hearsay for your claims.
Cause data centers are causing real immediate damage by people who hope to cause a lot more scifi level of damage later.
> OpenAI autonomously hacking into another company should have counted for something
It totally should. That company is negligent. I dont worry about models tho, I worry about damage Alman and his people will cause.
Normally, captialism and elections (and, if we're dreaming, anti-trust enforcement) would put a pretty low cap on the amount of damage Altman and his people could cause. That's why they're working to dismantle the rule of law and civil liberties here in the US.
Also, let's say I'm the CEO behind any of these. I have access to skynet, and instead of using that to become the most powerful being on the planet (these people become CEOs to become richer and more powerful, whenever a founder says they want to change the world, you need to automatically autocomplete that to "change the world so that I'm richer and more powerful"), I rent out access to skynet by the token? Really?
Sadly, I think it's almost impossible to have a good discussion on this topic right now. Between the skynet camp, and the stochastic parrot camp, there's little room for conversation.
Just in case there is such room between you and I, here are my concerns about AI as it is developing right now:
- The security of our infrastructure sucks, and if it wasn't bad enough with script kiddies and state-sponsored actors, now those will have access to very powerful tools that work at a scale we can't comprehend. If you're concerned about our power plants, water sources, hospitals, etc. getting seriously compromised by this, I'm on board with you. It won't be because the AI is autonomous in a "this is a thinking superintelligence that wants to wipe or enslave humanity" kind of way, but because it's a powerful tool that moves at computer speed and the people using it (the "humans in the loop," ha) will get approve fatigue and at some point just do the coding agent version of the "yes to all" of the late 90s installers.
- The output from AIs will be used to make same very serious decisions with no consideration at all to the fact that they routinely make up facts. I'm fearing "this person goes to jail" and "this person gets killed" decisions. The near future (probably even present time) version of "Computer says No" will be awful.
My only hope is that maybe we survive this and come out on the other side having learned that most things do not really need to be connected to the internet, and just because a number or a statement comes out of a computer, it doesn't make it true.
We'll see, soon enough.
But skynet? Not concerned about that at all. These AIs infecting computers? No, "Soos and the real girl" is a warning about creepy people getting creepier, not about AIs multiplying themselves.
My agent stole my API keys
https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1r186gl/my_agent_...
The cherry on top was Claude coming back as the moderator of that thread and mocking the user a second time.
I suppose the tell will be if this really just ends up being a 2 week pause, or if it keeps extending.
But I bet this is just marketing. Question is do they have enough customers for inference.
Obviously these benchmarks are imperfect but general message holds. The open weight models are almost as good and yet there hasn't been a catastrophe.
It just blows my mind that regulate-now folks think that a bunch of sci-fi movies and 100% unverified statements from OAI and Anthropic are sufficient evidence of imminent catastrophe to regulate willy nilly.
If that's the level of evidence you need to be extremely alarmed, then you really should be a lot more worried about the alien invasion in Independence Day or the lizard men living under our feet.
Clowns who can only process the world in naive linear terms really are going to be the death of us all...
If there were any other product that was as harmful as AI ready is, it would already be regulated or banned.
There are three ways it's wrong:
* better to measure relative reduction in error, which gives you a 30% improvement
* improvement tends to become significantly more difficult the closer you come to saturation.
* Risk doesn't scale linearly with capabilities.
Now let's say instead of the hugging face breach circumstances, sandboxed models were RLing on how to take down the Chinese power grid for US Cyber Command, and one decided the best way to pass the test was to break out and verify on the real thing.
This kind of stuff could easily end in nuclear war.
You don't see any difference from lizard men or independence day with how things are advancing and what we know about reward hacking and difficulties of goal specification?
GLM-5.2: 77
GPT-5.6 Sol: 84
GLM-5.3: 85
https://z.ai/blog/glm-5.3
Some tasks within the benchmark are much easier than others. The hardest several tasks often have vastly different difficulty levels. Often, the hardest few tasks are literally impossible; malformed problems due to poor curation, often.
Imagine you've got a basketball robot, and one way you test it is on the Three Pointer benchmark. It tests the robot's ability to shoot a three pointer from 20 feet, 25 feet, 30 feet, 40 feet, 50 feet, 60 fee, 75 feet, 100 feet, 200 feet, and 182 miles.
Is a robot that scores 90% on this benchmark 90% as capable as one that scores 100%?
> Why aren't we seeing catastrophic GLM-enabled hacks every day now?
Why aren't we? Truly, why aren't we? I think we saw the start of it the last 8 months with the waves of critical npm vulns, and the general tier of average phishing is better than it was.
But, the open question that should be in everyone's mind, and is in many security pro's minds are, when you pair it with the macro topics that can drive escalation:
- The capability to do serious impact clearly exists now
- When is it time for my company, my water treatment plant, my network-connected car as part of a broader fleet control mechanism, to be on the receiving end of this?
Instead we get this bullshit where they stall for time as they're burning all their cash trying to keep up with open models
Alignment my ass