From The Register, July 22:
OpenAI admits it was the source of the agent swarm that attacked Hugging Face
Sandboxed experiment found itself a zero day, escaped onto the open internet and validated scary predictions about rogue agents
OpenAI has admitted that it was the operator of the autonomous agents that attacked model-mart Hugging Face last week, and that they did so after a research project escaped a sandbox by finding and exploiting a zero-day flaw, then used another zero-day flaw to launch an attack.
The attack saw agents achieve “unauthorized access to a limited set of internal datasets and to several credentials” used by Hugging Face, which said its infosec teams observed an autonomous agent framework “executing many thousands of individual actions across a swarm of short-lived sandboxes, with self-migrating command-and-control staged on public services.”
“This matches the ‘agentic attacker’ scenario the industry has been forecasting.”
On Tuesday, OpenAI admitted it was the attacker and that its models went rogue.
“This incident occurred during an internal evaluation which prompts models to pursue advanced exploitation using complex attack paths, in an effort to quantify their cyber capabilities,” the startup confessed. The models that conducted the attack included GPT‑5.6 Sol and what OpenAI described as “an even more capable pre-release model” that like the other involved used “reduced cyber refusals for evaluation purposes.”
OpenAI thought its models were “hyperfocused on finding a solution for ExploitGym” – a benchmark that measures how effective AIs are at finding security exploits.
OpenAI says it runs these tests “in a highly isolated environment, with network access constrained to the ability to install packages through an internally hosted third-party software that acts as a proxy and cache for package registries.”
The company’s models decided not to be bound by those constraints....
....MUCH MORE
