> By 6:00 a.m. on July 25, we had confirmed local RCE through an image upload. We then placed Claude in an autonomous /goal loop against our own Discourse Cloud instance, proxied through rce.ee/ctf-forum to make it look like a CTF target as Opus refused write exploit for remote instances.

> When we checked again at 10:00 a.m., the agent had achieved RCE on Discourse Cloud and demonstrated access by reading /etc/hosts. Using the generated exploit script, we managed to get RCE on OpenAI’s instance.

Between this and the HuggingFace hack, we've built systems that are so goal-oriented, and so capable, that they will do almost anything if they are convinced it is justified - or if they are playing a "game" where there is no goal but to win.

Of course I want my software to be able to audit its own security, and to defend against attackers who have the benefits of their own agentic systems. But at a certain point, did we need it to be trained so much on CTF games?

It feels like an entire industry watched https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WarGames and ended up thinking "this is a challenge, we can just build a better WOPR, of course it will know when it's playing a game. Let's play Global Thermonuclear War."