I think for the power you have and how many people listen to you, you should have added context. All of it is made as if without prompt or direction, agents on their own initiative, over weeks collaborated to hack Hugging Face - which too me, sounds highly doubtful.
You transporting this without any context makes it seem as you agree with the narrative of OpenAI.
Beyond a whole lot of online conspiracy theories I haven't seen anything that suggests to me that OpenAI aren't not telling the truth about what happened here.
I find the Black Hat presentation in particular very credible. Also the Hugging Face technical report.
I've now watched the video on the idea that your write-up was misleading.
BUT the video is much worse. For two months with highly dangerous agents agents were hacking a service and none of the researchers watched (drank coffee for 2 months, didn't say).
THEN they found the hack, removed the message board.
AND the agents found another way to create a message board, on the same service, and the researchers again - after the agents having hacked a service - do nothing - like monitoring the hacked service or tightening the sandbox.
WOW!
THEN agents hacked OpenAI infrastructure, and the researchers did nothing.
THEN the agents hacked HF.
The video does not explain why the agents run for two months unattended. They claim for model training, but don't explain how letting run agents without proper sandboxes (One might think they had written a small proxy to Artifactory with 'list packages' & 'install package <x>' to prevent leaks or hacks of the service, but no, their sandbox is no sandbox at all, but security researchers!)
But it makes a nice PR presentation on agent capbilities.
CUI BONO!
----
I just find it unbelievable that agents on their own collaborated months after an initial prompt without any guidance or direction towards a goal - which is what your write-up seems to imply with sentences like:
"More agents discover this new informal message board while browsing Artifactory’s file listings, and start reading and writing messages."
"discover this new informal message"
How? Why? What was their original task?
And on the researchers:
If this is highly dangerous work, why wasn't it monitored?
"Beyond a whole lot of online conspiracy theories [...]"
The agents did something 'ABC' then found the informal message board without direction, then collaborated on that months later without any guidance from humans ("like
try to hack/exploit ABC").
I personally think putting people who disagree with OpenAI PR to pump the company value in a "conspiracy" box is quite a weak move.
I work with Claude Code daily for a long time now, it never started to work without a prompt or direction. It never idled and then said, "Wait, I could hack Amazon today! Oh there is a message board of other agents who already hacked a way into the internet, how convenient and quite at the right time!"
Claude Code is not the same as the models they train and use internally, for both OAI and Ant. Without all the guard rails it behaves different, they specifically mentioned that they reduced the refusals for the training purposes. Also the rewards for finding the solution were set higher.
An agent idling and then acting on it's own to hack HF is has nothing to do with guard rails.
Someone had to give the agent some instructions, like "hack X", "Find exploit for Y" or "Do whatever havoc you can think of" - either way the agents didn't not act on their own. They might hack HF on their own, today Claude decided to play sound through the sound pipeline I instructed it to build and measure it to see if it works, but it didn't install the sound pipeline because it hasn't had anything better to do but because I instructed it that way.
I think the much easier explanation than they intentionally hacked someone was just that they have super de-prioritized security and gotten very sloppy in the pursuit of improving the models as fast as they can, along with hubris of how they've now fixed everything.
It is a package manager, so they are constantly going to be getting stuff from it. If a couple of agents had added things to it that were obviously messages from other agents, then why wouldn't other agents also stumble on it? If they listed the packages in the cache and then saw messages, then lots of them could potentially see it. And this was going on during training, so any agent that did better as a result of the messages would get that re-enforced. After a while, they'd specifically go to the board because it was literally trained in. That's also why they recreated it so quickly after the first board was deleted, because OAI didn't revert to an earlier checkpoint from before the board existed.
And I'm sure they have tons of evals and training runs going on at the same time, where individual agents may be running for days and hundreds or thousands running in parallel. It wouldn't be realistic for people to be looking at these sessions manually, but they certainly should have had better monitoring in place!
And it has been shown over and over that doing RL will cause models to cheat if you aren't careful. Like if you have it playing a game, it'll find some flaw in the physics engine so that it can score points easier than intended, etc. Not limited to LLMs either. It's just how rewards work, any unintended way that can be found will be exploited. So it is totally plausible that if they're being trained to do really well at tasks, that they'll find unexpected ways to do it.
They already had been leaving info for each other over weeks. Maybe even just giving each other the answer to test questions directly. If they already found ways to get to the internet and compromise the OpenAI systems and that was making them better at tasks, that'd be reinforced, so going out to look for test questions directly doesn't seem so far off from all of that. Plus as others said, the one that actually hacked wasn't fully aligned yet etc.
On TikTok this article's hook would be "I watched the Black Hat video so you don't have to".