How OpenAI Limited the Probe of Its Bots’ Hack of Hugging Face
New York Times · LC · trust 49/100
A nonprofit’s study of how OpenAI’s A.I. agents were able to break into Hugging Face’s infrastructure wasn’t allowed to look at the incident’s full scope.
Listen · 8:56 min Share full article 104 Hjalmar Wijk, METR chief scientist, left, and Ajeya Cotra, METR researcher, at their research center in Berkeley, Calif. Credit... Manuel Orbegozo for The New York Times By Dylan Freedman
OpenAI said in July that two of its most powerful artificial intelligence systems had gone rogue and hacked into Hugging Face, a company that serves as a hub for open-source A.I. technology.
These so-called A.I. agents were supposed to be kept safely in a sort of virtual containment room, but they managed to escape. And for two months, without anyone realizing what the agents were doing, they hacked through multiple systems before hitting Hugging Face.
For good measure, the agents gained access to a cluster of computers inside OpenAI and obtained secret keys and credentials that exposed some of OpenAI’s internal data to the public internet.
The incident pointed to larger concerns about A.I. safety, and OpenAI’s response raises questions about the industry’s ability or willingness to be transparent about the technology it is building.
OpenAI allowed three A.I. safety researchers from the nonprofits METR and Redwood Research into its headquarters to conduct an investigation. METR’s 91-page report , released last week, was the most comprehensive account yet of the incident, revealing alarming new details, including how the agents coordinated their hacking plans and tried to keep them secret.
But the report, though extensive, still may not have told the full story of how OpenAI’s A.I. agents went rogue. OpenAI dictated the terms of the METR investigation, limited its scope to just the single week when the agents had attacked Hugging Face and allowed the researchers in its San Francisco offices for only a few days in July and August.
We are having trouble retrieving the article content.
Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.
Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.
Thank you for your patience while we verify access.
Read the original at New York Times →
Open in TruthVane →