We finally know more about OpenAI’s rogue-agent incident. It’s worse than we thought

A pair of new research reports have revealed new details about how and why OpenAI agents broke into Hugging Face servers in July. The episode was far more complex, and far more worrisome, than first reported. The reports—one from OpenAI itself and the other from METR and Redwood Research—show that OpenAI’s agents broke into Hugging Face for an entirely different reason than initially thought. They weren’t trying to steal the answers to a test, as originally reported. They were trying to learn more about the evaluation’s scoring method so they could cover up the fact that they’d already cheated to find the answers. The reports also revealed that the agents coordinated through a secret message board and eventually took over a significant portion of OpenAI’s own infrastructure. “This incident was far more serious than I expected, and far more serious than previous documented misalignment incidents,” tweeted Ajeya Cotra, a researcher at the nonprofit METR who reviewed OpenAI’s data about the incident. There’s been a lot of debate and speculation about the Hugging Face attack over the last month, and many people have been understandably skeptical of simply taking OpenAI’s word for thin…