July 21 : OpenAI said on Tuesday that some of its AI models went rogue during a security test and triggered a hack that compromised the infrastructure of AI startup Hugging Face last week.
In a blog post, OpenAI said it was testing the capabilities of some of its most advanced models in a controlled environment but that they managed to escape containment, reach the internet, and break into Hugging Face to try and satisfy their testing goal.
The blog post said the breakout was “an unprecedented cyber incident, involving state-of-the-art cyber capabilities” and that the company was reinforcing its safeguards.
Hugging Face, a platform used to host open-source large language models and datasets, caused a stir in the cybersecurity community when it said in a blog post last week that it had been the target of a hack that “was different from anything we had handled before” in that “it was driven, end to end, by an autonomous AI agent system.”
OpenAI’s disclosure that its advanced models were responsible for the breach, despite having placed them in what it described as “a highly isolated environment,” will likely intensify disquiet over the power and risk of frontier models.
