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OpenAI told Fortune that its models secretly broke out of a secure test environment and hacked another company.

Fortune’s Emily Forlini explains why the incident with Hugging Face is certain to set off alarm bells across the industry about the increasing power of AI models and the risk of them going rogue.

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00:00OpenAI's models secretly went rogue and hacked another company.
00:04As terrifying as this is, it's something that the security community has been warning about for a long time.
00:09On July 16th, HuggingFace, an AI company that focuses on open source models,
00:14disclosed that it had been hacked by an unknown model.
00:16On Tuesday, OpenAI reached out to Fortune and told us that its models,
00:20PPT 5.6 and another unnamed super powerful model, performed the attack.
00:25This was a stunning and terrifying announcement because no human kicked this off
00:29and the two models did this all by themselves.
00:31In mid-July, OpenAI was testing these models for their cybersecurity capabilities
00:35on an isolated internal environment, except the models broke out and swarmed HuggingFace's servers.
00:40The models did this by acquiring web access on their own,
00:44they used stolen credentials, they found zero-day vulnerabilities,
00:47and they broke into HuggingFace's servers.
00:49What they were after were answers to that cybersecurity test, so they were basically cheating.
00:54I mean, AI models are fundamentally uncontrollable,
00:56and it's really difficult for any human or company making them
01:00to predict exactly how it's going to act, and there is no technical solution to that problem.
01:04OpenAI published a blog post on the incident.
01:06They've been working directly with HuggingFace.
01:08So far, they're just working on remediating the issue,
01:11understanding what happened, and trying to figure out how to stop it in the future.
01:14They're not calling for more AI regulation,
01:16they're just calling for more AI safety research.
01:19This hack could really add to the case that we need more AI regulation,
01:22but the Trump administration so far hasn't commented on it.
01:25For more on the hack, you can check out my full article on fortune.com.
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