Anthony B,swearyanthony@mastodon.social
Jul 29, 2026, 1:38 AMAre laws like the CFAA used in bullshit ways? Absolutely, RIP Aaron. Is this one of those cases? Absolutely not.
Replies
- Anthony B,swearyanthony@mastodon.socialJul 30, 2026, 9:26 PM
So Karl Bode's scathing write-up of the "OpenAI rogue hacker robot" marketing stunt highlighted the under reported detail that this extremely responsible AI company ran their exploit kit with safety guardrails disabled. Once again, I ask: why haven't they been charged? Do we want to see more of this "it's not a crime if the software is AI shaped"? I think we should try and discourage it.
Brettbrett@bitflipp.socialJul 30, 2026, 12:54 PMThey setup a bot specifically to do red team stuff and turned it loose on their competition. Knowing they can just do what Anthropic does with every new model and claim it’s “dangerous” for that free marketing bump in the press.
Pozorvlakpozorvlak@mathstodon.xyzJul 30, 2026, 9:44 PM@swearyanthony aaaargh, no, Bode's take is bad. They disabled the guardrails so they could test the model on the ExploitGym benchmark, but instead of hacking the target system it executed a much more complex hack against Hugging Face. Which, as we've discussed before, would be criminal if a human did it and should be criminal in this case too. But more importantly, the AI did something that OpenAI very much did not want in order to satisfy a narrow definition of success: a classic alignment failure.
- Pozorvlakpozorvlak@mathstodon.xyzJul 30, 2026, 9:47 PM
@swearyanthony I agree that they should not have run this experiment, though! It's wildly irresponsible if their alignment techniques are this fragile, and they should have been able to find that out in a lower-stakes way.
- Anthony B,swearyanthony@mastodon.socialJul 30, 2026, 9:57 PM
@pozorvlak that they had disabled some guardrails definitely wasn't something their initial "oh no the AI robot is too powerful for us little humans" said
- Pozorvlakpozorvlak@mathstodon.xyzJul 30, 2026, 10:10 PM
@swearyanthony it's mentioned in the first paragraph of their blog post: https://openai.com/index/hugging-face-model-evaluation-security-incident/ (skip past the updates from July 28 and 29)