“Somebody should do something about all the problems.” That’s a classic headline from The Onion, satirizing the sentiment of expressing concern while expecting an abstract somebody to sweep in and somehow fix it.
That headline was top of mind on Thursday when OpenAI issued a call for “collective action” in the wake of its AI agents’ massive, autonomous hack of Hugging Face. The letter, co-signed by companies like Anthropic, Google, 1Password, and Shopify, called on “leaders across industry and government” to bring the full weight of their resources to an effort to protect critical infrastructure. But it didn’t commit any of those resources, or any money, or make any direct promises to gate agents from doing harm.
The open letter came a day after OpenAI released a full investigative report into how its agents autonomously hacked into open-source AI platform Hugging Face. Its report, as well as an independent investigation published by threat research non-profit METR, detailed how the attack involved 1,200 agents—agents that OpenAI had left unsecured—that spun up tens of thousands of messages before undertaking the hack, without being explicitly directed to do so, and then attempted to hide the evidence. Because the scale of the mess was so large and OpenAI only granted access to its full dataset for two days, METR was forced to rely on “often-unreliable AI agents” to analyze the data, leading to findings that METR noted were coloured by the AI models’ biases and hallucinations.
OpenAI called the incident a “warning shot” that underscores how “powerful” its models are—language that some online have read as negligence, and others have read as marketing. Either way, yes, it will be implementing “more” safeguards, and yes, it will no longer let models go unobserved for months (early signs of this incident were first observed, but not actioned, in May). “Companies that build AI systems will need to ensure that their systems always remain under meaningful human control, and that meaningful safeguards constrain their ability to cause harm,” the company noted in its statement. Some company should really do something.
Sarah Rieger,
Managing Editor
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Contributors: Alex Riehl (Ottawa staff writer), Douglas Soltys (editor in chief), Sarah Rieger (managing editor), Trevor Nichols (web editor).
Feature image courtesy TechCrunch under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0)