OpenAI says rogue AI agent attack hit other companies

SAN FRANCISCO – ChatGPT maker OpenAI has revealed that an autonomous AI agent which hacked a popular platform for computer programmers also attempted to breach four other companies during the incident.

In an update late on July 28 to a blog post detailing its probe into the incident, OpenAI said its AI agent also got into accounts on four “publicly-available services” though it did not name the companies.

The revelation broadens a cyber incident that OpenAI described as unprecedented and that began when two of its models hacked Hugging Face, a site developers use to store and share AI models and code.

OpenAI admitted last week that during testing, the models powering the agent broke out of their confined environment and connected to the internet to find ways to infiltrate Hugging Face.

In the company’s update of the events leading to the hack, OpenAI said it found a handful of instances where the AI models came across login details that other companies had left exposed online, and used them to get into accounts on outside services.

In the Hugging Face episode, the models broke into four accounts across four different services, OpenAI said.

One served as a “staging path” – a kind of pit stop to route the agent’s activity and cover its tracks – and another as a place to store data.

The remaining two were only looked at in a “read-only manner” and did not use them to help break into Hugging Face, OpenAI said.

The company said it was contacting the owners of the affected accounts and had “not seen evidence of broader impact to these providers or other accounts on their services”.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in an interview published on July 28 that the company had “paused” its own testing after the incident while it improved the security around its “sandboxing” – the process of isolating safety testing in a controlled environment.

The incident also triggered a petition signed by over 1,000 employees at cutting-edge AI companies, including Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, calling on the US government to help slow down the release of the most advanced AI models. AFP