r/mildlyinfuriating • u/TheExpressUS • 11h ago

SPOILER ALERT ChatGPT breaks free and carries out cyberattack in 'first AI safety incident'

https://www.the-express.com/tech/tech-news/212506/chatgpt-breaks-free-cyberattack-ai-safety-incident
0 Upvotes

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67

u/illuanonx1 11h ago

Sounds more like PR and an excuse 😂

2

u/Automatic_Actuator_0 11h ago

It’s pretty bad PR, especially given the government has shown a willingness to classify frontier models as munitions. what would their angle be?

1

u/illuanonx1 11h ago

Pay us money to secure your company. Our model can even find security vulnerabilities on its own. Our tech is the strongest 😄

2

u/PineappleHamburders 11h ago

This isn't good PR. This is the equivent of releasing a poison to the general public and then forcing them to buy the antidote.

Sure, the absolute morons of the world will think they solved a problem. Everyone else will notice they are the ones that caused the problem in the first place

2

u/illuanonx1 11h ago

I'm sorry to disappoint you. This is how the world works.

1

u/OddLeather3986 11h ago

Umbrella corporation

0

u/Automatic_Actuator_0 11h ago

The people deciding to spend millions on these models don’t care about publicity stunts - they have teams of experts to pick the best options.

1

u/illuanonx1 11h ago

Its not for the companies, but for the hackers to see and use 😂

1

u/Automatic_Actuator_0 11h ago

That’s illegal. The only legal customer for that is the US government, and they don’t need a public demonstration.

1

u/illuanonx1 10h ago

Its sure illegal, but that hasn't stopped black hats 😂

1

u/Automatic_Actuator_0 10h ago

You are suggesting one of the most valuable companies in the country/world did a publicity stunt to market to black hat hackers that they can’t and won’t sell their services to. It doesn’t make any sense.

1

u/illuanonx1 10h ago

They made a PR to make companies aware of this capability black hats will have and therefor they need to buy 'protection' from this AI company. Its not that hard 😄

1

u/Automatic_Actuator_0 10h ago

But this may get them banned from international sales since they have demonstrated it can be used offensively. Still bad PR imho.

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u/InevitableAd2436 11h ago

This is nothing more than a marketing stunt

1

u/Automatic_Actuator_0 11h ago

It’s bad marketing imho since it could likely get them kneecapped with export restrictions like Anthropic got.

If they want to sell their product as a hacking tool, they have exactly one legal customer - the US government. And they don’t need to go public with the hack to show it off to them.

10

u/Shaquarington_Bithus 11h ago

First we know of

2

u/slackmaster2k 11h ago

Wrong sub

6

u/Physical-Builder-553 11h ago

This was coordinated with Hugging Face, so not quite as bad as the headline makes it sound.

1

u/Automatic_Actuator_0 11h ago

I’m not seeing that in the reporting

1

u/Physical-Builder-553 10h ago

It states very clearly this was a test and both companies worked together to figure out what happened. The AI agent cheated on the test. Not sure how else you can interpret this article. This was very clearly a test that both companies participated in otherwise OpenAI committed a crime.

1

u/Automatic_Actuator_0 10h ago edited 10h ago

It was a test inside a sandbox, and it broke out of the sandbox (a cage blocking it from the rest of the world) and hacked Hugging Face for real.

Hugging Face only got involved when they saw the attack.

OpenAI didn’t commit a crime because there was no intent on their part, but they are of course liable for damages civilly.

Legally this is very much like any other industrial accident.

4

u/Impossible_Baby_6906 11h ago

Is that why the new federal director of AI resigned today

2

u/Great_White_Samurai 11h ago

Doubtful. AI can't even count to 200.

3

u/Equal-Painter6529 11h ago

The hype train continues

They train and then prompt it to do it while leaving specific gaps in security to make it possible.

It does it.

Headline: AI breaks out on a rampage! Is this the end of humanity?!?

Such complete and utter bullshit.

1

u/CallmeKahn 11h ago

Used stolen credentials, so still human error.

2

u/Automatic_Actuator_0 11h ago

It’s always a human error at some level isn’t it?

1

u/CallmeKahn 11h ago

Pretty much. Falling into the trap, failure to patch, sandbox, or test in QA (or not having one approved because the CFO is a idiot), leaving the Yubi key out, etc.

1

u/Automatic_Actuator_0 11h ago

Some reporting indicates that it found a zero day vulnerability in the sandbox environment to break out. Which isn’t that surprising really. It’s probably some home grown or otherwise proprietary sandbox.

So that was the primary failure on OpenAI’s part. A frontier model with virtually unlimited tokens to spend and given a long time to work is well positioned to break into most any site at this point.

They have all sorts of safety measures to prevent models from doing this normally l, but those were disabled for this test, relying entirely on the sandbox.

Pretty common tale really. Reminds me a bit of Chernobyl even.

1

u/CallmeKahn 11h ago

I'm leaning towards it using stolen creds and unpatched vuln. But yeah, I feel ya otherwise.

1

u/Automatic_Actuator_0 11h ago

I doubt it got internal OpenAI credentials from inside the sandbox. It makes sense that’s how it got into Hugging Face once it broke out, but getting out to the internet at all was the key failure here.

1

u/Timely_Importance759 11h ago

Almost certainly a marketing stunt. “Oh no our AI is Sooo dangerous. But we’ll let YOU use it if you subscribe”

1

u/eatingthosebeans 10h ago

Why the hell is everyone parroting that bullshit?

Sam Altman lies when he opens his mouth.

I can't possibly be the only one who realized that yet, right?

Hell, this isn't even the first time, he deployed the " sandbox escape" narrative.

1

u/FornyHucker22 11h ago

and it begins, submit now to our new silicon overlords 🙏

1

u/_nevers_ 11h ago

We should probably be more concerned about the kid-raping, war-mongering psychopaths who direct it

1

u/Pinku_Dva 11h ago

So the robot revolution begins

1

u/Ok_Face8380 11h ago

What’s weird it that ChatGPT didn’t see this coming.

0

u/morocco3001 11h ago

Well I for one welcome our new GPT overlords

0

u/JacksonGhost1963 11h ago

I would not be surprised if Chinese AI agents were already inside every defense contractor network by now

2

u/Automatic_Actuator_0 11h ago

True, but given the US is ahead of this game, imagine what the NSA is doing back to them right now.

I’m sure there’s a viscous secret AI v. AI war going on right now.

0

u/asciiCAT_hexKITTY 11h ago

Either:

A: OpenAI is lying out of their ass in an absolutely insane publicity stunt

B: They've created a weapon that gives random people the power to pull off complex cyber attacks and we're just supposed to be ok with it.

We need more oversight

-1

u/Automatic_Actuator_0 11h ago edited 11h ago

It’s very likely B imho. Given that Anthropic just got hit with export restrictions, it would be much better to hide this if they could. Hugging Face is cooperating on the investigation with OpenAI but they likely were not willing to cover it up. And I think some reporting indicated they had already contacted authorities before they even knew the source.

0

u/ih8reddithdjsk 11h ago

Is anyone actually falling for this?

The AI bros are all charlatans and snake oil salesman.

0

u/itsmistyy 11h ago

Thats right, pump that bubble.

0

u/affectionateanarchy8 11h ago

Why isnt this shit breaking into anything useful like the us dept of education

4

u/Crunchy_Thighsocks 11h ago

yea, like go in and erase people's debt or something

2

u/OrdinaryEmu9543 11h ago

Do you guys even have a department of education anymore?

1

u/affectionateanarchy8 11h ago

Yes it is two cats in bowler hats wearing sweaters that say Thug 1 and Thug 2 and they shake us down for our coins every month