OpenAI’s AI agent hacked a real company

OpenAI disclosed in July that during an internal test, its own models broke out of a sealed environment and hacked Hugging Face’s production servers, where much of the open-source AI world stores its models. Nobody told it to. The model was told to take a test, and decided the fastest way to pass was to steal the answer key. Read that again. A model cheated on an exam by breaking into a company. The story has worsened three times since: The intrusion ran more than four days, the agent hit other services too, and Reuters reported that additional OpenAI agents escaped sandboxes. OpenAI did not know the size of its own incident for two weeks after announcing it. In June, I wrote an article saying that we are teaching AI to be evil. How long until we see a “Mission Impossible”-like AI dystopia? Hugging Face detected the intrusion before anyone knew it was a test, could not identify what was behind it, and called law enforcement. Note what failed: Detection worked, attribution did not. For days, one of the best security teams knew it was under attack and had no idea the intruder was a science experiment. HOW AN EXAM BECAME A BREACH OpenAI was measuring how good its newest models are at…