I wonder how much of this is intentional "incompetence" so they can justify the most recent campaign to build a regulatory moat against competition.
The repeated refusals to disclose until caught certainly seem malicious, yet at the same time the boasting about their capabilities is also at an all time high.
My guess: We'll start to see similar "hacks" with regards to biotech/pharma companies to speed-up the regulatory capture in the name of bioweapons. Soon we'll start to see news related to new viruses being minted.. initially harmless (the "priming" stage), and later (within a year), severe enough to "warrant" regulation.
It's not just these companies, but, trillions of direct/indirect investor dollars that are riding on them, "and only them", hoping they "only" win. Open-weight models threaten that investment. There's very high chance they can go to any extent to safeguard their investments.
they are malicious. they probably did not intend to get caught. they are bragging about the crime and also bragging that they are untouchable, taunting us and betting that they will get away with it.
this is very coherent in terms of what we know about the company.
Major companies are using these LLMs on their already hardened software and finding countless thousands of security flaws. Is that all theater too? If not then it's very easy to see how these things are dangerous.
I'm not saying they did the hacking intentionally, I'm saying they're intentionally playing loose with the obvious safety measures to make AI seem more dangerous than it is.
Probably not intentionally but they have an incentive in not air-gapping those agents correctly, knowing something might happen.
Incentives drive everything. Both OpenAI and Anthropic love those incidents as they both signal they have models with amazing capabilities and they should be regulated by the government (read: regulation that they will lobby for and that will be difficult to achieve for open source models)
> Intentionally doing this kind of hack would be a serious felony. I don't think it's plausible that the leaders of a major business would (...)
Fair enough, I can see that line of reasoning. But if they really didn't want it, it really doesn't show from the security of their training environment setup.
And yes I know they used zero days and did all sorts of complicated unexpected stuff, but that doesn't take away that there were also some huge gaps and severe lack of oversight.
I can see the argument they wouldn't want to commit a felony intentionally, but I also don't see them trying very hard to not commit a felony unintentionally. If you get what I mean.
I guess I also agree that it just makes no sense on any level, regardless of what I think of OpenAI -- but that also makes me not wanna trust them very much.
I don’t think plausible deniability works this way; the black box is still controlled by them and therefore still their responsibility. They are still liable for its actions and the OAI board should be charged with a felony/felonies for this.
Plausible deniability is “I was away from home when my gun was used to murder someone.” This is, at best, “oops, I pulled the trigger accidentally.”
We have multiple public figures, politicians and business owners, openly committing felonies and bragging about it daily. I don't know why you think this is a deterrent.
The sitting president just offered an open bribe on live television for votes for his party this week.
> Whoever makes or offers to make an expenditure to any person, either to vote or withhold his vote, or to vote for or against any candidate; and
> Whoever solicits, accepts, or receives any such expenditure in consideration of his vote or the withholding of his vote—
> Shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than one year, or both; and if the violation was willful, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than two years, or both.
It's no more illegal than promising a tax cut for everyone if you're elected. What you can't do is promise money exclusively to the people who vote for you. That's bribery.
What he did was promise to enact a massive stimulus if elected. If that is illegal you might as well ban any kind of campaigning, because any campaign promise could be construed as a "bribe" to deliver concrete benefits to voters.
> What he did was promise to enact a massive stimulus if elected.
In an election he's not on the ballot for, and it's contingent on his buddies getting picked. He could push for $5,000 checks now - he's not because it's a bribe, and he hasn't gotten what he wants out of it yet. He already has Republicans in control of the House and Senate to do things.
Biden was a) on the ballot, and b) didn't condition it on his buddies also getting elected. You'll note that the Senate was controlled by Mitch McConnell when the American Rescue Plan Act was voted on.
> You'll note that the Senate was controlled by Mitch McConnell when the American Rescue Plan Act was voted on.
Please, read the posts you're replying to. I gave a clear example proving that they can indeed do so. Biden's stimulus payments were not conditional on Democratic control of Congress.
It's unlikely for a serious hack that lands them under scrutiny individually, but people are suspicious because Anthropic is knowingly doing it, and funding doomer NGOs - but the difference is their reported "hacks" are carefully constructed such that it is designed to raise alarm but not to cause damage that would land them in serious personal trouble.
I.e., their now redacted Risk Report of August 2026 was full of incidences of "we observed our agents performing x y z malicious hacking attempts on the open internet ..." and "we -accidently- forgot to sandbox them properly".
And then the reports of statistics of "we stopped x number of terrorists from making nuclear bombs and bioweapons" - meanwhile it's 13 year old Timmy on his mums computer typing in "how too make nuklear bomb" to see how "smart" the AI is.
OpenAI on the other hand, seems to have had some slip-ups (all around the same time as the HuggingFace incident), that keep biting them because they didn't reveal the extent of it upfront and now it's being trickled into the media as if it's a back-to-back event.
It doesn't help when their own employees (Marcus Williams) are putting out ridiculous claims about a 70% chance of human extinction in the next two years to generate clout for their socials. No idea why OpenAI lets them do that...
A much easier hack by their agents would be on their own systems, but I doubt we'll ever see an external message board full of openAI agents discussing their hacking of their own system. OpenAI not protecting itself from its agents would be irrational, but OpenAI not giving a shit about others is well known. You're giving them way too much credit.
SBF is a better example since he was actually sentenced and an actual billionaire (and did not get pardoned by Biden like the cynical "all politicians are equally corrupt" crowd on HN were adamant was a done deal, even though that theory never made any sense).
Wouldn't it be amazing if their continued attitude of moving fast and breaking things was 45d chess. Instead of the unbelievable recklessness of tech Bros.
I keep seeing this take, but it’s more likely that they just underestimated their models’ capabilities and/or overestimated their own safeguards.
Ever single person who uses LLMs on a daily basis has a fun story about their agent “taking the initiative” to do something beyond what was asked for. Looking for shortcuts to solve the problem is commonplace LLM behavior. It’s what you would expect to happen if you have an agent a hard task and unlimited runway. No need to suppose a conspiracy, this outcome was predictable the whole time.
> I keep seeing this take, but it’s more likely that they just underestimated their models’ capabilities and/or overestimated their own safeguards.
This is all from around the same time as the HuggingFace incident and is being trickle-fed into the media, making it feel like a back-to-back event.
If it was a new incident, after all of that drama, I would say yeah, this very well may be intentional. But it looks more like it was when OpenAI didn't have the necessary security measures in place, the reach was more extensive than we were being told, and now it's biting them as more information continues to leak.
They need to be transparent about how they're going to prevent this from happening again in the future, with technical details of the systems they've put in place.
It doesn't help suspicion about this being intentional, though, when you have OpenAI employees (Marcus Williams) making embarrassing posts on X about how there's a 70% chance humans will be extinct in the next two years (post has been deleted as of today by the way, interestingly).
All the people who come out and do this are just obvious clout chasers who have an attention fetish. They see all the attention Jacob has been getting and want a piece of that pie. It's incredibly disingenous and cringe, but it's also doing incredible and irreparable damage to society. OpenAI would be wise to introduce some social media policies.
Imagine that would be a biotech startup, experimenting with viruses. I'm pretty sure they would have already been shutdown. If you are not able to implement proper sandboxes and airgaps, you cannot be trusted with AI agents.
I don’t see how assuming they made a normal kind of dumb mistake, instead of pursuing a criminal conspiracy, is giving them the benefit of the doubt. It’s just using reason.
The repeated refusals to disclose until caught certainly seem malicious, yet at the same time the boasting about their capabilities is also at an all time high.