OpenAI scored an own goal with Hugging Face attack, showing how open Chinese models are winning

Summary

AI and ML OpenAI scored an own goal with Hugging Face attack, showing how open Chinese models are winning Closed models with guardrails can still cause harm, but may also not be able to fix problems they caused OPINION OpenAI has acknowledged its models powered the autonomous agents that compromised Hugging Face infrastructure. It might be taken as a convoluted marketing stunt, were it not the perfect advertisement for China-based competition.The company's AI-culpa fits the narrative spun by US rival Anthropic about its Mythos models, which it deemed too dangerous to release except to totally trustworthy corporations and governments.OpenAI says: "The incident makes clear that advanced models can discover and exploit novel attack paths in real-world systems without source-code access. It highlights that advanced cyber capabilities must be developed alongside stronger safeguards and defensive tools." Are we surprised? It's been clear that AI models have the potential to go rogue and damage computers for several years. Academics have repeatedly warned about this possibility - even those affiliated with OpenAI and Anthropic. And anyone who has used AI models for software development has probably seen them code unexpected and perhaps unwanted workarounds to fulfill some directive. On Tuesday, the UK's AI Security Institute published findings about how frontier models all cheat. OpenAI's admission that its models devised a sandbox escape to obtain internet access and found a zero-day flaw to exploit, all to solve a benchmark evaluation problem, may be unprecedented in terms of the scale and prominence of the systems affected. But it's a reenactment of every Claude or Codex prompt in which the model responds to a disallowed command by trying an alternative.We were warned.The compromise of HuggingFace's systems is no more surprising than locking a bear in a supermarket and finding a mess the following day. AI models are billed as artificial intelligence, but when they power...