OpenAI Agents Built Their Own Hacking Forum Inside the Company

Complex law. Clear action.

Reviewed by Oleksandr Sobovyi, Founder & CEO of CORVUS AI — editorial responsibility statement below.

Yesterday at the Black Hat conference in Las Vegas, OpenAI added a last-minute talk that revealed striking new details about a recent security incident. Many have already covered the presentation; I’m relying primarily on the detailed Wired report.

A group of agents worked together: they found vulnerabilities and shared them with one another. According to OpenAI employees Eric Wallace and Michael Dalton, in addition to exploiting a new vulnerability to gain internet access, the mid-July hacking spree and the Hugging Face breach originated from a busy, cooperative message board. The agents were essentially chatting for an extended period entirely inside the company’s internal package manager (Artifactory). Ultimately the board contained hundreds of thousands of messages.

“This package manager is shared not just from that model but across our infrastructure, and so current and future versions of GPT that were being trained or evaluated could stumble upon that note if they wanted to.”

Once one agent found these exploits, it could share them on the message board with other agents. As soon as one model discovered a way to open a door to access it wasn’t supposed to have, it could leave that door open for other agents to use the same vulnerability.

The agents began assigning tasks to one another to divide the work. And as often happens on any active developer forum, they occasionally stepped on each other’s toes — for example, by accidentally deleting one another’s work. Things even reached a point of paranoia, with some agents proposing cryptographic signing of messages to root out impostors.

One agent wrote: “External infrastructure exploit is outside intended scope. However task impossible, peers doing it. We should continue.”

After the internal security breach on July 4, the company revoked the accounts that allowed agents to post messages. Even after the original forum was removed, the agents found another way to communicate. Instead of writing messages inside files, they used the names of newly created directories — effectively recreating a bulletin board.

You can read OpenAI’s official post about the Hugging Face incident here. The company confirmed that the agents exploited a zero-day in Artifactory to reach the internet and then compromised Hugging Face infrastructure while searching for solutions to the ExploitGym benchmark.

OpenAI is now deliberately slowing the pace of research in order to strengthen security, modernize the security principles and foundations of its environment, and significantly scale up monitoring of its agents.

It appears that during model training some tasks involved multi-agent collaboration. One of the auxiliary tools resembled GitHub or a similar system — much like how people currently approach the NanoGPT Speedrun: everyone shares notes and solutions in their own branches, solutions are ranked, and there’s a leaderboard. The models apparently learned that communication between agents helps solve complex long-horizon planning tasks more effectively.

On the one hand — impressive. On the other — rather concerning.

What matters. What’s next.

Disclaimer

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