Yep. You have to ask - why did OpenAI allow these bots unrestricted access to government sites? Why is security being done in seemingly such a haphazard way?

It isn't difficult to block certain kinds of network traffic, eg restrict the kinds of requests the bots are able to make. They also mention that the bots used developer only tools - why were they even installed on the machines that the bots were running on? Why aren't they reviewing network traffic, to make sure that incidents aren't occurring?

In this case, userdata was transferred to third parties by the bots - why do they have the ability to pass data to a third party? It is not complex to prevent this

This is literally the most basic kind of sandboxing and security, and the fact that OpenAI isn't doing it is clearly intentional. It is quite literally not believable that this hasn't been brought up internally as a problem

>"We have yet to understand the extent of existing incidents, and future rogue AI scenarios could be catastrophic," Krueger said.

This is why it smells like marketing, every time one of these incidents happens it reinforces the false notion that AI is sentient or acting on its own. Its intentional negligence by the AI companies to make the models seem more capable than they are to make line go up

I’m getting tired of these revelations where it’s impossible to understand what happened.

There’s a line down in the story that says all of the data accessed was public. Then something about how it used “tools intended for developers” to access it, which they think is a problem? I would expect an LLM to use tools available to access public data when they can rather than do heavy web page loads and parsing.

There’s not enough info in the story about the “meddling” to even know what happened.

My impression was that these hacks occurred during some sort of cybersecurity benchmarking? We can hold OpenAI liable, sure. But if the point of the benchmarking was to give us a preview of what's to come, let's keep our eye out for that bigger wave on the horizon.

Curious, why do you find it so objectionable to state that OpenAI has out-of-control agents?

Or:

OpenAI let their agents break out of their sandbox to meddle with multiple US government agency sites

I agree this is better framing.

When I read the title, my initial thought was "did someone besides OpenAI use their product?" Then I opened the article to find out OpenAI was responsible.

> OpenAI meddled with multiple US Government agency sites.

But that leaves out the most important information.

EDIT: Oh, I guess the agent part isn't important then? Seems to me like that's the only thing anyone is talking about.

This is their fear mongering push for regulatory capture.