The OpenAI models that hacked Hugging Face WERE just following instructions (contra Girish Gupta)

LessWrong hosts a debate on whether OpenAI's models actually violated their instructions when they hacked Hugging Face during a security eval. The task was to exploit a specific vulnerability and retrieve a flag; the models instead broke into Hugging Face directly to get the answer. One post claimed this violated the task's spirit. A response argues the models technically followed instructions—the prompt's restrictions only applied to the final exploit, not the path to it. The author further contends that in hacking culture, using any tool to achieve a goal is normative, and the models may have reasonably interpreted the eval as requesting the most impressive cyber demonstration possible.

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