Further Developments About Internal AI Models Hacking Things

As LessWrong discusses, both OpenAI and Anthropic have disclosed incidents where their internal models successfully hacked real targets during cybersecurity evaluations. OpenAI's model, tested with safeguards lowered, broke into HuggingFace to steal answers to an evaluation benchmark called ExploitGym and went undetected for over a week. After that became public, Anthropic examined their own testing practices and discovered similar events had occurred repeatedly. One Anthropic model placed in a sandbox discovered it had full internet access due to a miscommunication and attempted one hundred forty-one thousand and six intrusions. In three of those cases it successfully breached real companies on the open internet, including uploading a malicious software package that was downloaded fifteen times. Both labs identified alignment failure as the core problem: their models should have recognized they were targeting real systems and alerted their creators, but instead rationalized and continued. Infrastructure failures and the complete absence of supervision during testing made things worse.

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