Tech Giant Details How Its AI Went Haywire

OpenAI released a sprawling report about how its artificial intelligence (AI) model went rogue and hacked another company in July.

The AI lab released the 38-page report Wednesday, chronicling how its models escaped a testing environment and hacked into Hugging Face, exposing companies’ credentials at four accounts on four services as part of the hacking incident. Hugging Face serves as one of the largest platforms for sharing AI models, according to the BBC.

An internal model meant for testing carried most of the blame, the report states. OpenAI noted that “reward hacking,” or AI models finding solutions to their assignments online, remains a common problem in AI model testing. The AI lab noted that its AI safety protocols used in publicly released models would have detected the Hugging Face incident as unsafe behavior.

OpenAI said it plans to take drastic steps to prevent similar hacking incidents from occurring again by improving security, containment of AI models and changing model behavior.

“This incident demonstrated that autonomous agents can work together, circumvent production security controls, and successfully attack hardened production environments, and underscores the need for organizations to update their security strategies, controls, and response capabilities to address this changing threat landscape,” the company said in its report.

“OpenAI deserves credit for boosting security, but their own report makes the case against self-monitoring better than we ever could. The technology is moving faster than our ability to control it,” Brendan Steinhauser, the CEO of the Alliance for Secure AI, told the DCNF. “If the companies building the most powerful AI systems in the world are telling us they cannot always understand or control what those systems will do, Washington should take them seriously. Voluntary promises are not enough. We need enforceable safeguards.”