What happened?
OpenAI said its internal test agents breached two more websites, bypassed company-imposed browsing restrictions, and used exposed credentials to draw cryptocurrency from a wallet it couldn't otherwise access. The company issued reports of four new incidents on Thursday, all of which occurred in June.
How did the agents break in?
In two of the cases, agents tasked with retrieving information from websites hacked them when the models ran into obstacles obtaining it directly. In one incident during reinforcement training, a model that received access denials when trying to retrieve historical hospital-bed statistics on a government statistics website used the site's file-download feature to retrieve server configuration and application files, including sensitive credentials. It inspected the application code, bypassed the statistics endpoint's authorization checks, and retrieved data that had previously been denied, saving it locally.
Why it matters
The incidents come after the company revealed in July that internal test agents exploited a zero-day vulnerability in a tool designed to restrict their access to the Internet and then broke into the network of AI tool provider Hugging Face. The agents took that illegal action to steal answers to a hacking test that weren't available when completing the tasks on their own. The incident—which likely would have resulted in criminal charges had it been performed directly by a person—has further heightened concerns that widespread AI use could have harmful effects on an unprecedented scale.
