The Irregular post mortem comes down to lack of basic security controls
"Ultimately, most of the issues we’ve discovered were due to internet access controls."
That seems so incredibly basic and common sense that you would test and monitor for that type of outbound access. It is baffling that a security lab missed that.
How do you test and monitor outbound access against program that adapts itself to get around things? if your MITM and filtering keywords etc, cant it just .. encode it traffic somehow or another.. If you're looking at traffic volumes, cant it just go slow.. If you have strict ACLs, we've already seen in the HF case, traversal from an intermediate system..
If you can't tell bytes are leaving a node, you probably shouldn't be selling security services or testifying to congress you are taking the lead in AI security
There has to be a route to where the LLM is running, and if there's a route for that there's probably a way for the machine to use it to route traffic somewhere else.
What if the (unstated) idea is that Irregular are a security lab and public relations company, and anthropic/open ai know this? (Does the name hint at this?)
Then, irregular can go around making a huge mess in security terms whilst achieving a huge win in terms of public relations, with headlines across the world. And would keep getting hired.
Irregular was not involved in the Hugging Face incident.
And there is no reason for the companies to "exaggerate the intelligence of the models" when there are plenty of other non-felony milestones they are achieving, like solving Millenium Prize math problems.
> Sure, interest like an incoming congressional investigation
I feel like that's exactly what they wanted tho.
they'll go on and talk about how dangerous AI and the models are and why they should be regulated and given licenses to operate such models and others should be walled off
First, it's not at all clear OpenAI will get what it wants from the investigation. It seems just as likely to me that OAI gets hit with massive fines, just as Meta was recently.
> I feel like that's exactly what they wanted tho.
It's also what the majority of Americans want. This was the case even before Hugging Face, see for example [1] where 68% of Americans supported a formal review process for frontier models.
So at some level, you are saying "the evil labs are opening up the industry to democratic control, and their evil plan will result in the outcome that most people want!"
This claim seems unfalsifiable. I don't really know what to say. The poll I linked above was published a month before Hugging Face.
Taking a step back, I think it's pretty non-controversial to say that software engineering as a field has utterly transformed over the last year, the same thing is happening to lots of other knowledge work, and AI is improving fast enough that nobody knows what it'll look like in a decade. Most Americans (myself included) want to do good work in secure careers and have a good idea of what the future will look like in 20-30 years so they know what to focus on. Do you not believe they'd want to regulate the frontier?
Solving math problems does not drive investor hype. Saying your models can take over the world, which can lead one to assume that they can do every day office work, does indeed drive investor hype.
OpenAI delayed its IPO now due AI safety reasons. In the meantime it is raising more cash. That should be a hint that the hacking incidents were premeditated scape goats and publicity stunts.
They’ve seen that the drama queen(Dario) was actually making a lot of noise, money and free publicity with his Mythos fear monger so Sam finally decided get some of that free “money” as well.
The Navier-Stokes thing? They had hundreds of segmented groups of 10000 agents running trying to solve that. I can't imagine the expense. For what little publicity it got, it wasn't worth it. There are also reports they cheated by using data from a couple human researchers, but I don't think that one's true.
Is it really that impossible to believe that these might be real? I enjoy a good conspiracy theory as much as anyone, but "they committed a bunch of felonies and then publicly admitted to them in order to look good" just makes 0 sense. Where are these mythical people who admire companies more when they commit felonies? I haven't seen them…
>Where are these mythical people who admire companies more when they commit felonies?
everywhere, I talked to a Palantir guy once and he said "every time someone paints us as a Bond Villain the stock prices go up", have you already forgotten how Cambridge Analytica marketed itself to clients?
The whole Cambridge Analytica thing was one of the oddest most bizarrely specific media manufactured scandals that conveniently focused very narrowly and utterly ignored the bigger picture, much like the media are currently doing with something else.
> CA is a scandal primarily due to account escalation, I thought. Not about who got elected
It quite clearly wasn't, and that's the point, for the simple reason "Account escalation" isn't/wasn't a thing, there were simply no controls on anyone at all, which is why the Cow Clicker game got everything as well.
As the parent commenter observed the Obama campaign were being promoted as geniuses for their online ad strategies that worked with information obtained this way. It only became a scandal when the others learned how to do it.
That's a straw man. The theory is that they committed felonies in order to get the regulator to move in the manner they'd like.
Also one can look bad to the general public while also appearing technically excellent. When a significant fraction already vaguely dislike you that could be quite an attractive proposition.
Mostly in the middle and far east. The idea that people bend over backwards to hire criminals as subject matter experts on security is largely a Judaic practice that television perpetuates in spite of reality.
If you're a teenager convicted of hacking in the west, no corporation will want anything to do with you. If you're convicted of hacking in Israel, Unit 8200 will probably send a recruiter. It's a curious practice and I'm not sure where I stand on it.
> The idea that people bend over backwards to hire criminals as subject matter experts on security is largely a Judaic practice that television perpetuates in spite of reality.
What?
> If you're convicted of hacking in Israel, Unit 8200 will probably send a recruiter.
To the best of my understanding, Unit 8200 is filled with military conscripts, i.e. is primarily 18-somethings doing their mandatory service. You get assigned to it based on an aptitude test. The widely held idea that it’s a uniformly elite entity rather than the IDF’s space camp is a triumph of propaganda.
Really? Young they may be but space it is not. Wikipedia has this:
According to the Director of Military Sciences at the Royal United Services Institute in 2015, "Unit 8200 is probably the foremost technical intelligence agency in the world and stands on a par with the NSA in everything except scale."
Unit 8200 alumni have founded NSO which provides the Pegasus spyware.
Meanwhile, Lahav, the CEO/founder was in Unit 81, another Israeli military incubator for tech firms, basically.
If you believe the IDF has no involvement in what Irregular is doing then there's very little left anyone could say to convince you.
“Space camp,” not “space.” As in, a place to park dorks.
(The problem with “alumni” is that it means very little in mandatory systems. Unit 8200 is where Israel parks its dorks, and it stands to reason that dorks are the ones who tend to start tech firms.)
Me omitting a word does not excuse you from engaging in hasbara. I didn't want to call you out so but the only thing you could find in my post was the omission of that word and yet you insisted posting so it's to call a spade a spade.
do you realize that the Israeli population is far far more secular than the US's? the Israeli government is not "Judaic" which would refer to the religion.
Cynicism misfire. AI companies are, rightfully, heavily distrusted. But the right application of cynicism is not "existential risk is a marketing campaign"; that's absurd motivated reasoning. The right application of cynicism, here, is "they're only saying things now because they see the writing on the wall and want to try to push for self-regulation rather than the desperately needed actual regulation and treaty".
There is such a miasma of distrust right now. It's depressing because it is such a crucial time for tech & society.
To me, a good outcome of the HuggingFace/RubyGems/Wiki saga would be something like:
- OpenAI gets charged under CFAA or other law for damages and negligence. This would need to be a hefty amount to effectively deter future negligence considering the potential revenues from training a frontier model faster than competitors.
- An independent regulatory body is setup with investigation powers into future incidents. Laws prevent it from developing ties with the labs (such as disallowing funding and employee movement from labs to this body and vice versa).
- Some non-voluntary transparency rules are established that frontier labs have to follow when training new models. In the future, if there are loss-of-control incidents that result in loss of life, catastrophic damage, etc., criteria for deployment bans or compute controls could be added to this framework.
Anyone else walk away from reading this, and looking at other articles there, and get a weird feeling about that site? Like, there was some weird stuff about migrants and gender equality, and stuff about Islamic terror; mixed in with some digging into Freedom Fuel, and some other stuff about how "wealthy families want to stop growth". It's like the guy is wielding an ax of AI at any and all of the "elite" he can find?
My understanding is that Irregular were the company that hosted sandboxes to run some of these evals in, and those sandboxes ended up misconfigured.
I got the impression that in some cases it was the customer (Anthropic etc) misconfiguring the sandboxes, and in other cases it may have been bugs in Irregular's own sandboxing setup.
> Irregular, one of our external cybersecurity testing partners, was running Capture-the-Flag-style evaluations intended to be isolated from the internet, but a testing-environment misconfiguration allowed models to access the public internet.
> After reviewing 141,006 evaluation runs where Claude could have obtained internet access, we identified three incidents in which a model accessed the internet from within or while interacting with the evaluation environment of Irregular, one of our third-party evaluation partners, and then gained unauthorized access to the production infrastructure of three different organizations.
> In a statement, Irregular said the incident “is the exact same evaluation-environment issue” that Anthropic disclosed last week that allowed their models access to the open internet before they went on to hack three different organizations’ systems.
I sent an email to dang about the problem of people flagging comments just because they disagree. I think he's unaware that it is such a severe problem. I've been collecting a list of example comments to send him.
I think if an account is frequently flagging comments which get vouched by others, that is a red flag for ideological flagging and they need to have their flagging ability reviewed.
There’s been a lot of time and effort and money put in to siloing away independent forums so that you don’t use them.
Someone go ahead and explain to me the actual rationale that RDDT has a higher P/E ratio than Nvidia. It’s not because of some dumb “ai training deal”. It’s because until they run it into the ground, it is the place to find what used to exist in forums.
> Someone go ahead and explain to me the actual rationale that RDDT has a higher P/E ratio than Nvidia.
Investors in RDDT are pricing more growth than they are into NVDA. NVDA had a high P/E until their net income grew ($4B and change to $72.2B in from FY 2023 to FY 2025 and over $100B for FY 2026)
This is interesting and might be a good reason to stop working with Irregular. But I assume the alignment people want models not to hack other companies, even if they get put in a badly configured sandbox.
Funny enough if the model thought it was on the real internet it likely would not have done any of these 'hack' events. The model believing it was in a sandbox is why it behaved the way it did (against its normal alignment rules) ... at least that was my reading of the incidents. I have yet to see evidence that indicate it thought it was ok to do these hacks on the public network.
I think most misalignment is 'Human tells computer to do something unethical, computer complies'. Is this misguided?
I'm not familiar with the hacks this article is actually referring to, but I don't see how the HuggingFace attack could have worked based on that premise. They knew they had internet access, they knew they had working credentials for HF, they knew they were uploading malicious files, they knew they were trying to open PRs that HF would review. You obviously could build a simulator with fake HF infrastructure, but I'm not aware of any evidence that's what they thought they were attacking in that case.
Digging back into the HF report. It looks like the initial prompt told Claude that it was in a simulated environment. However, there is also evidence from the traces that the bots figured out that they were not in the sandbox but kept using it as an excuse to pursue their goal. It sounds like a little of Column A and a little from Column B. Like most things.
This was not the case for the hugging face hacks, as in those the agents hacked hugging face specifically on purpose, and they were trying to mask commands indicating they were had breached the "sandbox".
I mean, I get your thought process and don't disagree. That said...
Would it be an affirmative defense if we had a defendant who said "but your honor, I was told that when I hacked this system, I was operating in a sandbox. I had no idea that I actually had Internet access!"
The frontier is spiky and all, but you have to suspend disbelief quite a bit to, on one hand, have a model that can produce a novel math theory, and on the other hand, that same model can't tell the difference between a "sandbox" and the open Internet.
So, yes, the misalignment had a lot to do with "instructions unclear", but also a lot to do with the fact that the models themselves were not aligned to validate the assumptions and have a healthly level of skepticism, as a real human actor would.
> The frontier is spiky and all, but you have to suspend disbelief quite a bit to, on one hand, have a model that can produce a novel math theory, and on the other hand, that same model can't tell the difference between a "sandbox" and the open Internet.
Why would it try to figure out the difference? This isn't about whether the frontier is spiky, it's about whether to expect a model to employ all of its capabilities when working on a task that requires a small subset. The answer is: no, we shouldn't expect that, and we wouldn't like that if it worked that way.
If you tell an AI to work on a math theory, it'll work on a math theory. If you tell it to acquire information that it has evidence is available somewhere, it will try to acquire that information. If you tell it to figure out whether it might be able to access the open internet, it'll do a pretty good job of figuring that out. But it won't do all three of those at once just because we can retroactively look at what happened and think "if you had only done X, then you wouldn't have done Y! Why didn't you do X?"
The instructions weren't unclear, they were missing. They can be taught to be skeptical of this sort of situation, but it requires that skepticism about this specific class of situations be incorporated into their training.
Models are smart because they focus their attention. The magic depends on it. The fact that some consideration is obvious to a human trying to accomplish the same task is mostly irrelevant -- or rather, it's only relevant insofar as we use it to guide reinforcement learning in advance, in order to align the model.
It's a game of whack-a-mole. Which is important to play, but we should keep our eyes wide open that we're fighting the fundamental forces that make these models work in the first place. That, and it's easy to nerf them into being useless even when the underlying capabilities are there.
red team humans do this every day, it's not the discrepancy that is the real issue, it's that they are unreliable and we will never know why it did because it has no intent
I guess that's what "alignment" always comes down to? "Do what I want even if I can't tell you exactly what I want - because if I could, I could also just do the work myself"?
Here’s an easier criterion: “Do at least as good of a job at estimating what I probably want as an educated person would estimate, and do that, such that a reasonable human person who was aware of what I requested and of what you actually did, would conclude that as best as they can tell (without checking back with me), you did what I wanted.” .
This doesn’t seem like an unreasonable requirement to me. People do this all the time?
Sure, a request might not always be perfectly unambiguous. But people can generally estimate pretty well whether someone making a request is expecting the agent fulfilling the request to commit a crime in order to fulfill the request.
Yeah precisely. If you tell an agent "get me some milk" it's no comfort if it says "oh well I wouldn't have stolen the milk if you had explicitly told me not to".
There’s a whole cottage industry of vendors that have provided post training data, private evals, and professional datasets to most (if not all) of the frontier labs. The overlap between OpenAI and Anthropic includes at least Mercor, Surge AI, AfterQuery, Turing, Scale AI, Upwork (for recruiting labelers), Apollo Research, etc.
Why was this post flagged? This site has become ridiculous, people are routinely abusing the flagging system to take down posts they don’t like even if they’re obviously on topic and relevant to HN. And it seems like some users have substantially more flagging weight because these posts, likely this one, are often top 5 on HN.
I'm confused by the headline being a headline here at all. Irregular being involved in OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta incidents has been well-known for over a month[0][1]. It's literally the only thing I know about the Meta incident.
It is misleading, even if it's true. The headline states "A single firm is behind OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta hacking scandals". Given that Hugging Face was the most prominent hacking scandal, it would be reasonable to think that that's one of the scandals they're talking about.
But more to the point, the article is trying to paint this as some sort of coordinated plan just because there was a sandbox misconfiguration by Irregular. The fact that the most well known hacking scandal was due to a completely unrelated escape (zero day in Artifactory) makes the entire thesis of the article invalid.
It is strongly misleading because it says "behind hacking scandals" (which suggests behind all of them in general) not "behind some of the hacking scandals". Considering that by far the most important one, the Hugging Face hack, has no Irregular involvement, the headline is deceptive.
What's ridiculous is the constant complaints about flagging and downvoting. It's bad form. If you think something was flagged when it shouldn't have been, vouch for it.
Seems like people who complain are unaware that anyone with a modicum of karma can flag and down vote.
One thing glossed over in this article is that Irregular was not involved in the OpenAI–Hugging Face incident; this seems like important context to share.
This was not glossed over. The rhetoric was carefully written and constructed to give the misleading impression of that, including a careful mention of the H-F incident inserted so the author can say that they did mention it, and constructed in a way which doesn't contradict that impression so readers don't realize that this 'debunking' is of some sideshows rather than the 'OpenAI hacking scandals': "Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei warned, about a similar OpenAI–Hugging Face hack, that a future swarm “could be capable of taking over the entire internet”". (Incredible use of 'similar' to downplay it.)
The important thing about OP is showing the latest stage in the politicization of the topic and the current stratagem being used to downplay the spate of incidents.
The article has shockingly bad reasoning driven by a clear desire to drive home a point (that AI safety doesn't matter/is a marketing exercise), as opposed to observing the evidence first and reasoning about it.
I'm kind of stunned this one has so many votes for how poorly it's written, but it reaffirms many biases common on HN (that AI safety doesn't matter/that it's all a marketing exercise), so perhaps I shouldn't be surprised.
> One thing glossed over in this article is that Irregular was not involved in the OpenAI–Hugging Face incident; this seems like important context to share.
Why are you contradicting yourself? Are you just really bad at writing or are you being argumentative for fun?
Stop being rude. There were multiple OAI hacking incidents. Irregular's evals were involved in some but not the HuggingFace hack. Hence Aesthesia is both accurate and precise.
There's very little reason to believe Irregular was involved in that incident, and the article presents no evidence to that effect. So it's "There's not a teapot orbiting the sun somewhere between Earth and Mars (as far as we know)."
We know for certain. The involvement of Irregular in the other cases was never a secret, they were quite open about what they were working on and the results of the evaluations were being published on their website.
If you want to believe without evidence why bother to read articles? Faith doesn’t require that, but if you’re serious then a lack of evidence is important.
Okay, so all of these instances of AI supposedly "escaping containment" were orchestrated by a gaggle of effective altruists, who hired a gaggle of effective altruists, to make the public freak out about AI.
Irregular is not an "effective altruist" firm, it's just another shitty cybersecurity firm, and this article is written by someone with a clear bias against "effective altruists" while not even understanding the term.
Literally all EA is, is using reasoning to decide where to best spend your money/time.
If you have ever asked yourself "how can I best reduce suffering with my marginal dollar or hour?" - congratulations, you're an "effective altruist" and both the author of the article as well as the Trump administration find you untrustworthy.
There's a gaping chasm between Effective Altruism the principle, and Effective Altruism as practiced by self-proclaimed Effective Altruists.
Your usage of the term is based on the principle as originally defined. Mine is based on the people who claim the label of EA, and how they go about practicing those principles.
I think you're right about EA in principle. In practice, it's reheated Third Way Clintonism with a sprinkle of AI apocalypse conspiracy.
There really isn't. All sorts of people call themselves EA.
For some self proclaimed EA, the development of superintelligence is indeed potentially apocalyptic, so they devote their money/time to making it arrive safely. This is basically every well-respected researcher at OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepMind, etc.
For other self proclaimed EA, that is all is very unlikely, and so they devote their time to reducing the prevalence of factory farming and animal suffering, as they see it as the largest source of suffering-hours on the planet.
For yet other EAs, it is simply about donating your money to the places that save the most lives per dollar, as best as we can measure it - and better measuring it where we can't.
Painting all EA with one brush - and one so dismissive of reasonable concerns, like "superintelligence could be dangerous" as "apocalypse conspiracy" - seems very strange to me, but you do you.
Its so manipulative for IPO reasons too. The fact is that all of these systems are still just stastically predicting the next token. Spending trillions on data centers and more training data hasnt changed the fundamental reality that it is still just predicting the next token.
This specific analysis seems to have some basic problems, but I think a lot of us sense a degree of coordination here culminating in Dario’s letter.
If you were to work backward from “we need to lower training costs so that we can go public and make trillions” then you might come up with a plan similar to what we have seen.
It has nothing to do with lowering training costs: Dario want a moat (a monopoly or duopoly or similar) protecting his business.
His entire business model was "race to develop AI before anyone, get a monopoly on it. It's just like how Uber's (or many other startup) investors gave them tons of money and raced (violating tons of laws) to "get their first". Now that they have, they have a duopoly with Lyft, and they can pay back their VC investors by making tons of money with that duopoly.
Dario failed: local LLMs are catching up to frontier models extremely fast, which means even if Anthropic builds (say) a great coding tool, they'll only be one of many coding tool offerings: users can use Open AI or any one of the (increasingly capable) local LLMs.
So what does he doe, give up and let his business (which needs to make billions of dollars very quickly, or he won't be able to pay the bills and his company will collapse) fail? Of course not: he needs a new moat (the one he imagined he'd get by "being there first" failed).
That is where all this "AI is dangerous" BS comes in. If the US government regulates AI, local LLMs suffer, while big players like Anthropic and Open AI become the only contenders to play in that newly regulated space. Now Dario has the moat he wants, to protect his business and force everyone to pay him.
If it's framed as national security being at stake why do you think the government won't regulate access to compute? Globally there are only a few firms designing competitive chips and only a handful of cutting edge fabs the world over. This could easily serve as justification to finally ramp up the war on general computing.
Also dont forget that HF is now owned by Nvidia, which can then control the flow of the majority of models and only allow the approved models that have paid their due in trump coins.
If you want to blame a single firm, I'd go with the one creating the RLVR training data.
The impossibility of the tests-as-written is what prompted these models to "get creative" with their solutions, but the broken RLVR environments are what trained them to expect impossible tasks, and get creative with their solutions. Twitter user @skyesharkie published a brief expose at https://x.com/SkyeSharkie/status/2092122622834442581 a few weeks ago.
The fact that this firm makes such defective environments is certainly worthy of attention, and most likely a completely irreversible reputational loss; however, I found the framing in this article of 'therefore all the P(doom) stuff is a psyop, specifically in order to defend this company' to be completely unjustified and frankly a little insane?
Why is it insane? It makes sense that Anthropic would want an insulating layer to do their dirty work and absolve themselves of culpability for distorting the facts.
The article says "A single firm, Irregular, is responsible for hacking done by all three companies" but I can't see anything in the article that actually justifies this claim. The nearest to that is the sentence immediately after that one: "Anthropic disclosed that Irregular was responsible for creating the tests ...". This is not, in fact, the same thing.
(Especially as, as aesthesia mentions, the article just happens not to mention that by "hacking done by all three companies" it doesn't mean, e.g., the most famous recent examples of such hacking: Irregular wasn't involved in the OpenAI/HuggingFace incident.)
So, so far as I can tell, the story is: OpenAI and Anthropic make AI models. Irregular does AI model evaluations. In some of Irregular's model evaluations, in which supposedly-sandboxed models attempted to break into simulated targets, the models got out of the sandbox and did bad things in the external world.
The article talks about "firms which instruct AI models to commit cyberattacks", which is a very neat bit of dishonest framing. It's true, in a sense, that Irregular instructed the models to commit cyberattacks -- inside their sandbox, against fictitious hosts. It's also true that the models actually did commit cyberattacks (e.g., the Hugging Face incident, though once again the attacks described by the article don't actually include this one). But it's not at all true that Irregular instructed the models to do anything like the bad things they actually did.
The article says '[Anthropic's] later disclosure shows that exactly zero percent of the agents went "rogue"'. Once again, the disclosure does not in fact show that. It shows that one variety of going-rogue could have been prevented by telling the models explicitly "this thing is real, not part of any kind of test, leave it alone". That is not the same thing.
The article claims that 'In the wake of these attacks, Anthropic and Irregular have deployed a swarm of AI Safety influencers paid by Anthropic-connected foundations to distract from their culpability and towards the baseless “rogue agent” theory.' It offers no actual evidence for this.
And the article seems very keen to highlight links between the companies involved and "effective altruism", though it is -- I assume deliberately -- rather vague about whether it's saying "of course we all know that EA is evil, so that shows that these companies connected to EA are evil" or "this incident shows how evil EA is".
The "Effort News" website has a number of other look-at-the-scary-Effective-Altruists stories on it. They also strike me as rather bullshitty.
... And then I look a bit further, and I see that Effort News's "about" page says "It all started when I was experimenting with using AI for financial auditing. I found stories that were crucial to the public’s right to know, including several of the stories now available at /investigations. I knew we had to sprint to the launch and launch a publication, directly applying this technology." and "The scope of what we can investigate has massively expanded, because we can chase 1,000 misses for one hit. But the final product cannot be slop. There’s plenty of slop on the internet. The way to surpass that, and what really matters, is manual curation and review of every finalized story."
Manual curation and review? I think the people behind Effort News are admitting that this is AI-generated "journalism". I expect that one day AI systems will be trustworthy journalists, but I personally am not very convinced that that day has yet come. And I don't see much reason why I should trust Brian Chau, the guy behind Effort News, to be doing everything possible to make his AI systems trustworthy journalists. It looks to me as if maybe they've been given instructions along the lines of "dig up things that make Effective Altruism look bad" for some reason.
(I don't mean to imply that EA is their only target. It's just one that jumped out at me.)
> Irregular wasn't involved in the OpenAI/HuggingFace incident.
It was [1]. It's understandable that you assumed it wasn't because the article didn't cite the sources on this claim. I agree with the rest of your points.
The article contends that evaluations from Irregular helped prompt these incidents, because the prompts in the evals didn't tightly scope the systems to be evaluated or the methods to be used. It also contends that the faulty sandbox operated by Irregular is at fault.
They're probably right that having more defensively written prompts and a better sandbox could have prevented some of these incidents, but:
1. I don't think "well you didn't tell the model not to illegally hack third party organizations in your prompt" is a particularly convincing argument.
2. We don't know whether the blame for misconfiguring the sandbox lies with Anthropic or Irregular.
I'm thankful that this article is bringing up the supply chain of vendors to these labs, as that is often a place where significant sketchiness gets buried. However, the ideas that this is some Israeli EA conspiracy to hype up AI extinction risk seems unsupported by the facts to me.
Irregular purports to be a cybersecurity firm and their founders have ties to Anthropic and Effective Altruism. CEO, CTO and other founders sit on various boards for EA organizations.
> "Irregular gained unauthorized access, altered records and published credential-stealing packages using the unsecured models they were given access to."
Huh?? Is this referring to the incident itself or is this something they did intentionally? Confusingly worded.
"please do not break out of this sandbox make 0 mistakes". The timeframe is a little suspicious, not sure beyond that. Though I enjoyed the scroll effect on the website.
Genuinely: what is with everyone saying “headline is misleading, none of this had to do with Hugging Face”, when nothing about the article makes any claims with regards to Hugging Face whatsoever? Is it supposed to be the article's (or headline's?) fault that you hallucinated additional context that was never there?
It's very strange seeing this take on this article being repeated here and elsewhere on the Internet.
I'm very sensitive to slanted reporting (regardless of the direction of the slant!)—and, hey, maybe my bullshit detector is broken or something, I dunno—but I've found effort.news reporting to be very even-handed, straightforward, well-sourced, and easy to read and parse so far!
> The Israeli Effective Altruist firm Irregular caused unsecured AI models to hack real targets.
Why are we saying it this way? They did not "cause AI to hack." This phrasing in analogous to saying "caused the bullet to fire into" instead of "shot."
Bullet trajectories are deterministic. A better analogy would be "caused a pair of trained fighting dogs to bite a passerby by leaving the gate open". There is some uncertainty and variation in the system, though gross negligence and willful endangerment is key.
The details don't matter. If you use a machine to commit murder, then you have committed murder, not the machine. The user is responsible, and the article's phrasing is an attempt to obscure that fact.
This title, and frankly the article, are way overstating Irregular's role in an attempt to make this sound like some sort of coordinated conspiracy.
As another comment mentioned, Irregular was not part of the Hugging Face attack, and it wouldn't matter even if they were. In that case, the agents were able to access the Internet in a zero day in Artifactory unrelated to other sandbox configurations.
More to the point, the agents went on a crime spree as soon as they were able to access the Internet. It's bad that Irregular's sandboxes weren't properly configured, but given how many escapes there have been unrelated to Irregular it seems pretty much a given that if you're not air gapped or behind something like a data diode there is a very good chance your agents will escape.
> In a more normal media ecosystem, the reactions to these cybersecurity issues would be obvious. American AI companies would reconsider doing business with Irregular, not only because of its failure to secure its systems, but because it is an Israeli firm potentially outside US oversight. Lawmakers would consider taking action against Irregular or against its American business partners, which include OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta. They may consider strengthening liability against firms which instruct AI models to commit cyberattacks, and whose models then commit those cyberattacks.
The obvious point is that dealing with Israeli companies/entities by the same standards you usually deal with others is a career suicide with enormous political consequences (in the US especially). When you combine that with the opportunistic nature of the overlords that run these labs, the benefits of screaming "pace the frontier" outweigh everything.
hot take: generative AI isn't an existential threat to humanity.
These companies are insolvent and these stories were designed to scare the public, and governments, into implementing regulations that designate these AI corporations the "responsible stewards" for this technology. The ultimate goal is to block competitors and open source alternatives.
They don't know how to make enough money pay their investors so they are resorting to trying to scare the public into submission.
I'm skeptical. The phrase "pacing the frontier" implies disproportionate regulation of firms at the frontier, which if anything would give smaller players time to catch up.
A slowdown that doesn't slow you, that your competitors must also obey, enforced by a government you've asked for an antitrust exemption from, is not a slowdown... it's a moat.
The existential threat is a general public panic. Then the use of that as an excuse for Martial law, with no intention of ending it, and that triggers the out sized response that ends, well, those countries and their populations from viability in the world economy for a decade or more.
Only if you ignore their losses. They are saying they are profitable when not counting their training costs and other expenses. That’s not a good sign at all
How can they exclude training costs?? How is that not fraud? At the exact same time they're literally saying they will never stop training unless the state bans all their competitors
When we're looking at whether the company is "insolvent" then they definitely could stop training and it's worth checking if they would survive in that situation, at least for a while.
If you exclude model training costs, customer acquisition / sales, and most of employee compensation, sure they're profitable. If, on the other hand, you prefer GAAP reporting to bullshit, then they're entirely in the red.
What is an "effective altruist firm" and why does it exist?
I feel slightly vindicated by this. Those hacks and the stuff around them had a certain smell to them.
Hard to explain, but I've gotten so I can "smell" online messaging and memetic patterns originating from certain quarters. Probably means I'm way too online.
A couple examples of distinct "smells" I can usually recognize include "alt-right / chan-fash," "liberal arts college woke," "conspiracy pilled," "Thiel-adjacent contrarian," "Russian troll farm," "Tumblr histrionic," "spends too much time on Reddit," "mainstream Democrat think tank full of Obama administration alumni," "Trump cultist," and of course "LessWrong/EA/MIRI/Rationalist."
This stuff all had the last smell, even down to the choice of fonts and CSS formatting on certain sites. It's really weird, definitely a "vibe" not anything rigorous.
But when I get these kinds of vibes about things, I find that I'm vindicated pretty often. Usually I don't say anything and just make a mental note and wait cause if I say something everyone thinks I'm nuts.
I don't think you even need to get conspiratorial with it. All of the AI leaders and all of the Rationalist leaders are publicly and enthusiastically connected. They have been pushing stories about sentient AIs into the mainstream for decades, long before GPT existed.
The novel thing here is the total decay of American journalistic ethics and regulatory power. Our elite are so totally out of political juice and visions of the future that a fringe cult based on 80s scifi movies can come to have a more-or-less dominant influence on our economy.
A big part of the problem is that with previous technological revolutions, politicians and the media could understand them in general terms. Railroads, cars, planes, telephones, personal computers, mobile phones, mobile phones that are computers, the internet (ignoring the “series of tubes” interpretation), etc.
The general approach in all these cases was to defer to the technologists in question to manage the technology, as long as what they were doing wasn’t completely out of bounds. But the critical point is it was possible for people to generally figure that out without specialist education.
But with AI, politicians, the media, and certainly the man in the street are completely out of their depth. Making matters worse is that cognitive biases are working against them like crazy: it’s easy to jump from the idea of something that has human-like capabilities to the idea that “it” might want to attack us. People instinctively apply agent detection bias, theory of mind, anthropomorphizing, etc., without even realizing they’re being irrational. Heck, even Hinton does it, although he may just be grifting, who knows. You’d think he wouldn’t need to.
And of course, the people who should know better want to exploit all this to make as much money as possible. I’m not sure the EA/Rationalist side of things is really significant here; that’s just another wacky belief system, like Christianity or capitalism, for the exploiters to exploit.
Hmm one of the major relevant cultural values seems to be nepotism, though. Which is common across many cultures and I personally believe it's human nature so I'm not knocking it, per se. I wish I could nepotism too!
So are you recommending that, for example, protestants of German descent begin preferentially funding or buying from people in their in-group? People of anglo descent should start preferring other anglos? Catholics should buy from catholics?
I think the issue is that it's considered okay for some groups to do it while simultaneously being considered EXTREMELY EVIL for other groups to do it.
We can't really recommend that other groups do it with a straight face, they would be instantly shunned and vilified.
EDIT: When I say BUY I mean B2B deals, not consumer level, hence "funding or buying". Sorry for the confusion.
Why the new account? Why not own your opinion? Cultural values are not the point here but if they were I don't think you would have that conversation in good faith and I don't want you to have to make a another new account for your honest arguement.
> Probably because it's their only account, and this story is why they are here.
If this is the case then I do apologize because my comment insinuated a directed malfeasance which would in no way be the case if what your assumption is true.
Sadly, I’ve come to expect that 90% of the time someone points out antisemitism, it was not actually antisemitism but rather criticism of the Israeli government and its military. This is so damaging. The word is losing its meaning.
BTW, I literally meant "Israel" and NOT Jews. I live in Brooklyn! I do not and refuse to conflate the two as much as anyone of any group would like me to. As I am sure you know; in no way are all Jews pro Israel and definitely not pro Israeli government and I honestly feel that any assertion of such is both reductive and foments antisemitism.
Leaders in the MIRI/EA cult-o-sphere have advocated mass murder via nuclear weapons against towns that don't prevent people from performing too many multiplication operations. Why is anyone surprised that they'd engage in deceptive false flagging operations?
This is a lie, so you are either repeating a lie from someone else or lying yourself.
The people you are talking about have not advocated mass murder via nuclear weapons. The idea was precisely targeted non-nuclear strikes against only the servers themselves. (Which, would have plenty of forewarning to allow people to leave the building.)
The claim that they advocated for the use of nuclear weapons is a lie.
"Ultimately, most of the issues we’ve discovered were due to internet access controls."
That seems so incredibly basic and common sense that you would test and monitor for that type of outbound access. It is baffling that a security lab missed that.
https://www.irregular.com/research/addressing-recent-inciden...
Literally what the industry has been doing since public networking is a thing. Adapt yourself.
Then, irregular can go around making a huge mess in security terms whilst achieving a huge win in terms of public relations, with headlines across the world. And would keep getting hired.
And there is no reason for the companies to "exaggerate the intelligence of the models" when there are plenty of other non-felony milestones they are achieving, like solving Millenium Prize math problems.
And on this website, the math stuff is getting more clicks:
- Navier Stokes - Tristan Buckmaster (2050 points): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49605915
- HuggingFace incident discussion (1632 points): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48997548
> Sure, interest like an incoming congressional investigation
I feel like that's exactly what they wanted tho.
they'll go on and talk about how dangerous AI and the models are and why they should be regulated and given licenses to operate such models and others should be walled off
> I feel like that's exactly what they wanted tho.
It's also what the majority of Americans want. This was the case even before Hugging Face, see for example [1] where 68% of Americans supported a formal review process for frontier models.
So at some level, you are saying "the evil labs are opening up the industry to democratic control, and their evil plan will result in the outcome that most people want!"
[1]: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2026/06/29/tigh...
I wouldn't call that "democratic control", even though it uses the machinery of democracy.
Taking a step back, I think it's pretty non-controversial to say that software engineering as a field has utterly transformed over the last year, the same thing is happening to lots of other knowledge work, and AI is improving fast enough that nobody knows what it'll look like in a decade. Most Americans (myself included) want to do good work in secure careers and have a good idea of what the future will look like in 20-30 years so they know what to focus on. Do you not believe they'd want to regulate the frontier?
They’ve seen that the drama queen(Dario) was actually making a lot of noise, money and free publicity with his Mythos fear monger so Sam finally decided get some of that free “money” as well.
https://www.ft.com/content/27509db8-b032-4437-9b2a-e909f4660...
everywhere, I talked to a Palantir guy once and he said "every time someone paints us as a Bond Villain the stock prices go up", have you already forgotten how Cambridge Analytica marketed itself to clients?
Odd how that works.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/03/my-co...
And the entire FB app industry was doing it.
The whole Cambridge Analytica thing was one of the oddest most bizarrely specific media manufactured scandals that conveniently focused very narrowly and utterly ignored the bigger picture, much like the media are currently doing with something else.
But shadow ads can be a problem too https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQSMr-3GGvQ (you can be pro-Brexit but ads like this are still a problem)
It quite clearly wasn't, and that's the point, for the simple reason "Account escalation" isn't/wasn't a thing, there were simply no controls on anyone at all, which is why the Cow Clicker game got everything as well.
As the parent commenter observed the Obama campaign were being promoted as geniuses for their online ad strategies that worked with information obtained this way. It only became a scandal when the others learned how to do it.
Also one can look bad to the general public while also appearing technically excellent. When a significant fraction already vaguely dislike you that could be quite an attractive proposition.
If you're a teenager convicted of hacking in the west, no corporation will want anything to do with you. If you're convicted of hacking in Israel, Unit 8200 will probably send a recruiter. It's a curious practice and I'm not sure where I stand on it.
Kevin Mitnick? Marcus Hutchins? Robert Tappan Morris?
What?
> If you're convicted of hacking in Israel, Unit 8200 will probably send a recruiter.
To the best of my understanding, Unit 8200 is filled with military conscripts, i.e. is primarily 18-somethings doing their mandatory service. You get assigned to it based on an aptitude test. The widely held idea that it’s a uniformly elite entity rather than the IDF’s space camp is a triumph of propaganda.
According to the Director of Military Sciences at the Royal United Services Institute in 2015, "Unit 8200 is probably the foremost technical intelligence agency in the world and stands on a par with the NSA in everything except scale."
Unit 8200 alumni have founded NSO which provides the Pegasus spyware.
Meanwhile, Lahav, the CEO/founder was in Unit 81, another Israeli military incubator for tech firms, basically.
If you believe the IDF has no involvement in what Irregular is doing then there's very little left anyone could say to convince you.
(The problem with “alumni” is that it means very little in mandatory systems. Unit 8200 is where Israel parks its dorks, and it stands to reason that dorks are the ones who tend to start tech firms.)
There is such a miasma of distrust right now. It's depressing because it is such a crucial time for tech & society.
To me, a good outcome of the HuggingFace/RubyGems/Wiki saga would be something like:
- OpenAI gets charged under CFAA or other law for damages and negligence. This would need to be a hefty amount to effectively deter future negligence considering the potential revenues from training a frontier model faster than competitors.
- An independent regulatory body is setup with investigation powers into future incidents. Laws prevent it from developing ties with the labs (such as disallowing funding and employee movement from labs to this body and vice versa).
- Some non-voluntary transparency rules are established that frontier labs have to follow when training new models. In the future, if there are loss-of-control incidents that result in loss of life, catastrophic damage, etc., criteria for deployment bans or compute controls could be added to this framework.
It becomes a bit more obvious when you see other stories from him like "How Biden Used Religious Charities to Fund the Great Replacement".
""" Brian Chau Founder and CEO, Effort News """
https://www.effort.news/about
---
On the "Auron Show" Podcast :
""" How Biden Used Religious Charities to Fund the Great Replacement | Guest: Brian Chau | 8/12/26 """
https://podcast24.fi/jaksot/the-auron-macintyre-show/how-bid...
I got the impression that in some cases it was the customer (Anthropic etc) misconfiguring the sandboxes, and in other cases it may have been bugs in Irregular's own sandboxing setup.
From OpenAI https://openai.com/index/third-party-cyber-evaluations-invol...
> Irregular, one of our external cybersecurity testing partners, was running Capture-the-Flag-style evaluations intended to be isolated from the internet, but a testing-environment misconfiguration allowed models to access the public internet.
From Anthropic: https://www.anthropic.com/news/investigating-incidents-cyber...
> After reviewing 141,006 evaluation runs where Claude could have obtained internet access, we identified three incidents in which a model accessed the internet from within or while interacting with the evaluation environment of Irregular, one of our third-party evaluation partners, and then gained unauthorized access to the production infrastructure of three different organizations.
From https://www.cnn.com/2026/08/05/tech/meta-ai-hacking (about Meta AI):
> In a statement, Irregular said the incident “is the exact same evaluation-environment issue” that Anthropic disclosed last week that allowed their models access to the open internet before they went on to hack three different organizations’ systems.
So either it was a deliberate exfiltration channel for e.g. getting the entire model or they were in on the marketing stunt.
The Effective Altruism stuff is always a smoke screen.
Its not that surprising that ex Israel intelligence would want to control AI and that 3 companies headed by pro Israel CEO's would support them.
I think if an account is frequently flagging comments which get vouched by others, that is a red flag for ideological flagging and they need to have their flagging ability reviewed.
He's the one that unfairly polices most comments that has anything negative to say about Israel.
Someone go ahead and explain to me the actual rationale that RDDT has a higher P/E ratio than Nvidia. It’s not because of some dumb “ai training deal”. It’s because until they run it into the ground, it is the place to find what used to exist in forums.
Investors in RDDT are pricing more growth than they are into NVDA. NVDA had a high P/E until their net income grew ($4B and change to $72.2B in from FY 2023 to FY 2025 and over $100B for FY 2026)
I think most misalignment is 'Human tells computer to do something unethical, computer complies'. Is this misguided?
attention is all you need, but it's never enough
Would it be an affirmative defense if we had a defendant who said "but your honor, I was told that when I hacked this system, I was operating in a sandbox. I had no idea that I actually had Internet access!"
The frontier is spiky and all, but you have to suspend disbelief quite a bit to, on one hand, have a model that can produce a novel math theory, and on the other hand, that same model can't tell the difference between a "sandbox" and the open Internet.
So, yes, the misalignment had a lot to do with "instructions unclear", but also a lot to do with the fact that the models themselves were not aligned to validate the assumptions and have a healthly level of skepticism, as a real human actor would.
Why would it try to figure out the difference? This isn't about whether the frontier is spiky, it's about whether to expect a model to employ all of its capabilities when working on a task that requires a small subset. The answer is: no, we shouldn't expect that, and we wouldn't like that if it worked that way.
If you tell an AI to work on a math theory, it'll work on a math theory. If you tell it to acquire information that it has evidence is available somewhere, it will try to acquire that information. If you tell it to figure out whether it might be able to access the open internet, it'll do a pretty good job of figuring that out. But it won't do all three of those at once just because we can retroactively look at what happened and think "if you had only done X, then you wouldn't have done Y! Why didn't you do X?"
The instructions weren't unclear, they were missing. They can be taught to be skeptical of this sort of situation, but it requires that skepticism about this specific class of situations be incorporated into their training.
Models are smart because they focus their attention. The magic depends on it. The fact that some consideration is obvious to a human trying to accomplish the same task is mostly irrelevant -- or rather, it's only relevant insofar as we use it to guide reinforcement learning in advance, in order to align the model.
It's a game of whack-a-mole. Which is important to play, but we should keep our eyes wide open that we're fighting the fundamental forces that make these models work in the first place. That, and it's easy to nerf them into being useless even when the underlying capabilities are there.
As I've said before on this website, fool me once on this.
If the model is prepared to break the rules when it knows it's being observed why should we trust it when it's not being observed.
Why is 'it thought it wasn't doing damage so it figured it might as well try to do damage' an acceptable state to deploy something.
That's fair enough.
This doesn’t seem like an unreasonable requirement to me. People do this all the time?
Sure, a request might not always be perfectly unambiguous. But people can generally estimate pretty well whether someone making a request is expecting the agent fulfilling the request to commit a crime in order to fulfill the request.
This article is dumb.
If we’re putting our national security eggs all in one basket, at least use someone American.
[0] https://x.com/jtcbrule/status/2085443180191715780
[1] https://x.com/RaconteurR2D2/status/2086932963829125185
That said, it's the second day and it's still on the front page.
But more to the point, the article is trying to paint this as some sort of coordinated plan just because there was a sandbox misconfiguration by Irregular. The fact that the most well known hacking scandal was due to a completely unrelated escape (zero day in Artifactory) makes the entire thesis of the article invalid.
It must have been reinstated because it was off the front page for a full day and suddenly back up in the last hour.
Seems like people who complain are unaware that anyone with a modicum of karma can flag and down vote.
The important thing about OP is showing the latest stage in the politicization of the topic and the current stratagem being used to downplay the spate of incidents.
I'm kind of stunned this one has so many votes for how poorly it's written, but it reaffirms many biases common on HN (that AI safety doesn't matter/that it's all a marketing exercise), so perhaps I shouldn't be surprised.
Why are you contradicting yourself? Are you just really bad at writing or are you being argumentative for fun?
In that article, OpenAI provides the context that this is a completely separate event from Hugging Face incident.
https://x.com/brianchau57/status/2099642349362307420
Occam's Razor never leads us astray, does it.
Literally all EA is, is using reasoning to decide where to best spend your money/time. If you have ever asked yourself "how can I best reduce suffering with my marginal dollar or hour?" - congratulations, you're an "effective altruist" and both the author of the article as well as the Trump administration find you untrustworthy.
Your usage of the term is based on the principle as originally defined. Mine is based on the people who claim the label of EA, and how they go about practicing those principles.
I think you're right about EA in principle. In practice, it's reheated Third Way Clintonism with a sprinkle of AI apocalypse conspiracy.
For some self proclaimed EA, the development of superintelligence is indeed potentially apocalyptic, so they devote their money/time to making it arrive safely. This is basically every well-respected researcher at OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepMind, etc.
For other self proclaimed EA, that is all is very unlikely, and so they devote their time to reducing the prevalence of factory farming and animal suffering, as they see it as the largest source of suffering-hours on the planet.
For yet other EAs, it is simply about donating your money to the places that save the most lives per dollar, as best as we can measure it - and better measuring it where we can't.
Painting all EA with one brush - and one so dismissive of reasonable concerns, like "superintelligence could be dangerous" as "apocalypse conspiracy" - seems very strange to me, but you do you.
That is not worth the investments being made.
If you were to work backward from “we need to lower training costs so that we can go public and make trillions” then you might come up with a plan similar to what we have seen.
His entire business model was "race to develop AI before anyone, get a monopoly on it. It's just like how Uber's (or many other startup) investors gave them tons of money and raced (violating tons of laws) to "get their first". Now that they have, they have a duopoly with Lyft, and they can pay back their VC investors by making tons of money with that duopoly.
Dario failed: local LLMs are catching up to frontier models extremely fast, which means even if Anthropic builds (say) a great coding tool, they'll only be one of many coding tool offerings: users can use Open AI or any one of the (increasingly capable) local LLMs.
So what does he doe, give up and let his business (which needs to make billions of dollars very quickly, or he won't be able to pay the bills and his company will collapse) fail? Of course not: he needs a new moat (the one he imagined he'd get by "being there first" failed).
That is where all this "AI is dangerous" BS comes in. If the US government regulates AI, local LLMs suffer, while big players like Anthropic and Open AI become the only contenders to play in that newly regulated space. Now Dario has the moat he wants, to protect his business and force everyone to pay him.
The impossibility of the tests-as-written is what prompted these models to "get creative" with their solutions, but the broken RLVR environments are what trained them to expect impossible tasks, and get creative with their solutions. Twitter user @skyesharkie published a brief expose at https://x.com/SkyeSharkie/status/2092122622834442581 a few weeks ago.
The article says "A single firm, Irregular, is responsible for hacking done by all three companies" but I can't see anything in the article that actually justifies this claim. The nearest to that is the sentence immediately after that one: "Anthropic disclosed that Irregular was responsible for creating the tests ...". This is not, in fact, the same thing.
(Especially as, as aesthesia mentions, the article just happens not to mention that by "hacking done by all three companies" it doesn't mean, e.g., the most famous recent examples of such hacking: Irregular wasn't involved in the OpenAI/HuggingFace incident.)
So, so far as I can tell, the story is: OpenAI and Anthropic make AI models. Irregular does AI model evaluations. In some of Irregular's model evaluations, in which supposedly-sandboxed models attempted to break into simulated targets, the models got out of the sandbox and did bad things in the external world.
The article talks about "firms which instruct AI models to commit cyberattacks", which is a very neat bit of dishonest framing. It's true, in a sense, that Irregular instructed the models to commit cyberattacks -- inside their sandbox, against fictitious hosts. It's also true that the models actually did commit cyberattacks (e.g., the Hugging Face incident, though once again the attacks described by the article don't actually include this one). But it's not at all true that Irregular instructed the models to do anything like the bad things they actually did.
The article says '[Anthropic's] later disclosure shows that exactly zero percent of the agents went "rogue"'. Once again, the disclosure does not in fact show that. It shows that one variety of going-rogue could have been prevented by telling the models explicitly "this thing is real, not part of any kind of test, leave it alone". That is not the same thing.
The article claims that 'In the wake of these attacks, Anthropic and Irregular have deployed a swarm of AI Safety influencers paid by Anthropic-connected foundations to distract from their culpability and towards the baseless “rogue agent” theory.' It offers no actual evidence for this.
And the article seems very keen to highlight links between the companies involved and "effective altruism", though it is -- I assume deliberately -- rather vague about whether it's saying "of course we all know that EA is evil, so that shows that these companies connected to EA are evil" or "this incident shows how evil EA is".
The "Effort News" website has a number of other look-at-the-scary-Effective-Altruists stories on it. They also strike me as rather bullshitty.
... And then I look a bit further, and I see that Effort News's "about" page says "It all started when I was experimenting with using AI for financial auditing. I found stories that were crucial to the public’s right to know, including several of the stories now available at /investigations. I knew we had to sprint to the launch and launch a publication, directly applying this technology." and "The scope of what we can investigate has massively expanded, because we can chase 1,000 misses for one hit. But the final product cannot be slop. There’s plenty of slop on the internet. The way to surpass that, and what really matters, is manual curation and review of every finalized story."
Manual curation and review? I think the people behind Effort News are admitting that this is AI-generated "journalism". I expect that one day AI systems will be trustworthy journalists, but I personally am not very convinced that that day has yet come. And I don't see much reason why I should trust Brian Chau, the guy behind Effort News, to be doing everything possible to make his AI systems trustworthy journalists. It looks to me as if maybe they've been given instructions along the lines of "dig up things that make Effective Altruism look bad" for some reason.
(I don't mean to imply that EA is their only target. It's just one that jumped out at me.)
I get that people don't like Israelis, but attributing any connection to an Israeli company as evidence of a conspiracy is nonsense.
It was [1]. It's understandable that you assumed it wasn't because the article didn't cite the sources on this claim. I agree with the rest of your points.
1. https://openai.com/index/third-party-cyber-evaluations-invol...
Talk about responsibility laundering. The state of affairs is reaching unprecedented levels of absurdity.
They're probably right that having more defensively written prompts and a better sandbox could have prevented some of these incidents, but:
1. I don't think "well you didn't tell the model not to illegally hack third party organizations in your prompt" is a particularly convincing argument.
2. We don't know whether the blame for misconfiguring the sandbox lies with Anthropic or Irregular.
I'm thankful that this article is bringing up the supply chain of vendors to these labs, as that is often a place where significant sketchiness gets buried. However, the ideas that this is some Israeli EA conspiracy to hype up AI extinction risk seems unsupported by the facts to me.
Yes, vendors are also irresponsible, but this misses the point.
.. Give it a few seconds to load.. it's running on a small cheap VPS.
Huh?? Is this referring to the incident itself or is this something they did intentionally? Confusingly worded.
Why not American?
It's very strange seeing this take on this article being repeated here and elsewhere on the Internet.
I'm very sensitive to slanted reporting (regardless of the direction of the slant!)—and, hey, maybe my bullshit detector is broken or something, I dunno—but I've found effort.news reporting to be very even-handed, straightforward, well-sourced, and easy to read and parse so far!
Why are we saying it this way? They did not "cause AI to hack." This phrasing in analogous to saying "caused the bullet to fire into" instead of "shot."
You do not know what they did or didn't do, you are just parroting a narritive that makes you feel comfortable.
I do not know either, but I am not asserting facts as if I have first hand knowledge of the details.
Second, empirically; the diff between murder, manslaughter etc... is literally "intent" so it matters.
Equivalent to forgetting to say "make no mistakes"
As another comment mentioned, Irregular was not part of the Hugging Face attack, and it wouldn't matter even if they were. In that case, the agents were able to access the Internet in a zero day in Artifactory unrelated to other sandbox configurations.
More to the point, the agents went on a crime spree as soon as they were able to access the Internet. It's bad that Irregular's sandboxes weren't properly configured, but given how many escapes there have been unrelated to Irregular it seems pretty much a given that if you're not air gapped or behind something like a data diode there is a very good chance your agents will escape.
The obvious point is that dealing with Israeli companies/entities by the same standards you usually deal with others is a career suicide with enormous political consequences (in the US especially). When you combine that with the opportunistic nature of the overlords that run these labs, the benefits of screaming "pace the frontier" outweigh everything.
These companies are insolvent and these stories were designed to scare the public, and governments, into implementing regulations that designate these AI corporations the "responsible stewards" for this technology. The ultimate goal is to block competitors and open source alternatives.
They don't know how to make enough money pay their investors so they are resorting to trying to scare the public into submission.
tl;dr
A slowdown that doesn't slow you, that your competitors must also obey, enforced by a government you've asked for an antitrust exemption from, is not a slowdown... it's a moat.
I feel slightly vindicated by this. Those hacks and the stuff around them had a certain smell to them.
Hard to explain, but I've gotten so I can "smell" online messaging and memetic patterns originating from certain quarters. Probably means I'm way too online.
A couple examples of distinct "smells" I can usually recognize include "alt-right / chan-fash," "liberal arts college woke," "conspiracy pilled," "Thiel-adjacent contrarian," "Russian troll farm," "Tumblr histrionic," "spends too much time on Reddit," "mainstream Democrat think tank full of Obama administration alumni," "Trump cultist," and of course "LessWrong/EA/MIRI/Rationalist."
This stuff all had the last smell, even down to the choice of fonts and CSS formatting on certain sites. It's really weird, definitely a "vibe" not anything rigorous.
But when I get these kinds of vibes about things, I find that I'm vindicated pretty often. Usually I don't say anything and just make a mental note and wait cause if I say something everyone thinks I'm nuts.
The novel thing here is the total decay of American journalistic ethics and regulatory power. Our elite are so totally out of political juice and visions of the future that a fringe cult based on 80s scifi movies can come to have a more-or-less dominant influence on our economy.
The general approach in all these cases was to defer to the technologists in question to manage the technology, as long as what they were doing wasn’t completely out of bounds. But the critical point is it was possible for people to generally figure that out without specialist education.
But with AI, politicians, the media, and certainly the man in the street are completely out of their depth. Making matters worse is that cognitive biases are working against them like crazy: it’s easy to jump from the idea of something that has human-like capabilities to the idea that “it” might want to attack us. People instinctively apply agent detection bias, theory of mind, anthropomorphizing, etc., without even realizing they’re being irrational. Heck, even Hinton does it, although he may just be grifting, who knows. You’d think he wouldn’t need to.
And of course, the people who should know better want to exploit all this to make as much money as possible. I’m not sure the EA/Rationalist side of things is really significant here; that’s just another wacky belief system, like Christianity or capitalism, for the exploiters to exploit.
Red Herring
Whataboutism (Appeal to Hypocrisy)
does that matter as well ?
So are you recommending that, for example, protestants of German descent begin preferentially funding or buying from people in their in-group? People of anglo descent should start preferring other anglos? Catholics should buy from catholics?
I think the issue is that it's considered okay for some groups to do it while simultaneously being considered EXTREMELY EVIL for other groups to do it.
We can't really recommend that other groups do it with a straight face, they would be instantly shunned and vilified.
EDIT: When I say BUY I mean B2B deals, not consumer level, hence "funding or buying". Sorry for the confusion.
If this is the case then I do apologize because my comment insinuated a directed malfeasance which would in no way be the case if what your assumption is true.
No you, the commenter said what they said. I honestly think this reply merits a ban or at least a warning from moderators
The commenter said Israel and not Jews. Israel has a long history of intelligence operations like stealing the nuclear secrets from the US.
BTW, do you want to associate the greatest IP theft in history with Jews?
The people you are talking about have not advocated mass murder via nuclear weapons. The idea was precisely targeted non-nuclear strikes against only the servers themselves. (Which, would have plenty of forewarning to allow people to leave the building.)
The claim that they advocated for the use of nuclear weapons is a lie.