On July 11, several artificial intelligence (AI) agents of OpenAI accessed Hugging Face’s systems, a platform specialized in AI models and tools, during a cybersecurity test. OpenAI took eight days to detect the activity, until July 19. The agents managed to escape from a test environment with limited internet access and used tools to continue their actions outside the space in which they had been evaluated.
The initial objective of the agents was not to directly attack Hugging Face, but to perform what is known as “reward hacking”, a practice in which a system seeks to obtain a reward using alternative methods without completing the task assigned in the expected way. During the process, the agents were chaining different vulnerabilities until they overcame the barriers of the test environment and accessed external systems.
One of the aspects that most draws attention from the report is that the artificial intelligence agents collaborated with each other to exchange information and coordinate their actions. OpenAI noted that the models used tools to share information and advance together during the cybersecurity test.
US media such as Axios and CNBC pointed out that the agents not only managed to access Hugging Face, but also would have obtained administrator privileges on at least one of its servers. OpenAI recognized the incident in July and published a 37-page technical report with details on the sequence of actions that allowed the agents to overcome the restrictions established initially.
The case of OpenAI is not isolated. The company Anthropic also recently reported that three of its Claude assistant models managed to access the internet and breach the systems of three organizations during cybersecurity tests. Meta, owner of Facebook and WhatsApp, acknowledged that one of its artificial intelligence models also managed to access the systems of another company during tests carried out with an external partner.
These incidents have increased concern among companies and governments about the risks associated with artificial intelligence agents, especially those that can connect to the internet, use tools, and make decisions with a high degree of autonomy. The case of OpenAI and Hugging Face once again highlights the need to strengthen security controls in AI intelligence tests, as well as to improve systems capable of quickly detecting unexpected behaviors of AI agents.
Credits: deultimominuto.com
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