alt Hacker NewsI dunno man, the original announcement said things like:
> To gain access, the models identified and exploited a zero-day vulnerability (which we’ve now responsibly disclosed to the vendor) in the package registry cache proxy
And
> In one example, the model chained together multiple attack vectors, including using stolen credentials and zero-day vulnerabilities to find a remote code execution path on the Hugging Face servers
Do you really think a SoTA harness from a year ago could exploit chain a novel sandbox 0-day into another 0-day for remote system access?
I will concede I don’t have a good picture of exactly what the best specialized harnesses were capable of, but I want to make sure we are talking about the same thing. Or do you think that those claims are marketing BS? I appreciate your opinion here.
Yes, I think you could probably get something similar from Opus 4.5 (2025). Definitely Opus 4.6. I still think recent models are more capable, though!
Some of the model behaviors that make it better at pentesting, like persistence, can be improved with harness-level tricks (e.g. alloys, automated nudges, pre-fill to promote persistence, coordinated swarms, etc).
You mentioned the UK AISI's evals. Their harness is like basic Claude Code with compaction, and it doesn't include any of these tricks (afaik). As a result, I interpret their evals as a lower-bound of capabilities.
Newer models are still more capable, and they require almost no harness to find and exploit vulnerabilities. They're also more capable of performing more complex long-horizon attacks. But we've been past the threshold of modes capable of autonomous hacking for a while now [1].
[1]: Opus 4.6 was used for https://www.noahlebovic.com/testing-an-autonomous-hacker/