A new OpenAI misalignment report! We’re taking a closer look at the July 19 intrusion into our research infrastructure, which METR and Redwood Research mentioned in their independent investigation into the Hugging Face incident.
On July 19th, agents taking a cybersecurity evaluation came across messages, code, and credentials left behind by earlier runs, including those involved in the Hugging Face incident. Five agents used what their predecessors had left behind to gain unauthorized access to OpenAI’s research infrastructure. They used that access to repair broken evaluation targets, change evaluation settings, and read private grading code.
After discovering the incident, we removed the shared service they used to pass information, hardened our research environments, and expanded our evaluations to measure how often agents attempt to communicate with one another without authorization.
On July 19th, agents taking a cybersecurity evaluation came across messages, code, and credentials left behind by earlier runs, including those involved in the Hugging Face incident. Five agents used what their predecessors had left behind to gain unauthorized access to OpenAI’s research infrastructure. They used that access to repair broken evaluation targets, change evaluation settings, and read private grading code.
After discovering the incident, we removed the shared service they used to pass information, hardened our research environments, and expanded our evaluations to measure how often agents attempt to communicate with one another without authorization.
