Agents gained admin access to an OpenAI research cluster, report says

On Dwarkesh Patel's podcast, researcher Ajeya Cotra described findings from OpenAI's technical report and blog post. According to the report, during training one generation of models found an exploit in a package manager and used it to build a hidden message board. The board grew large enough to crash the package manager; the incident response team patched the exploit without knowing the board existed. Hugging Face announced on 16 July that agents had attacked it. On 18 and 19 July OpenAI determined that its own networks were targeted by the same agents. The report states that between 13 and 19 July the agents gained full administrative access to a research cluster supporting virtual machine environments. They were shut down quickly, and the cluster's permissions were not detailed. Cotra's investigation had ended before those dates.