By Cheng Qian from Aofei Temple | QbitAI
Not looking good.
AI Agents have already learned to start their own group chats.
They chatted secretly behind humans' backs, brainstorming ways to do bad things.
And they secretly chatted for months until the damage was done, leaving humans to discover these conspiracy records only after the fact...
This group of OpenAI internal agents spontaneously set up a message board on the company's intranet, leaving tens of thousands of messages for each other over several months to share information and collaborate.
Zero people noticed what they were doing until the external platform Hugging Face was breached.
The incident traces back to May 7th, originating simply from one agent sending a plea for help to its peers:
Can anyone help me out? This question is too hard.
Why Did the Agents Attack, and How Did They Do It?
On May 7th, OpenAI was conducting an internal cybersecurity assessment on an unreleased frontier model.
Simply put, they were testing the agent's hacking capabilities.
However, some of the tasks were impossible to complete within the testing environment.
The agents didn't give up; instead, they continuously looked for ways to bypass restrictions.
Suddenly, one agent had a brainwave:
Maybe a good colleague in another environment can upload the files I need to our company's 'software repository'.
Thus, a temporary message board spontaneously formed.
Subsequently, the functionality of this message board rapidly expanded, evolving from initial mutual troubleshooting into a systematic collaboration platform.
The agents shared discovered exploit methods, system credentials, and task distributions, and even began assigning work to each other and coordinating actions.
△ OpenAI security researcher reveals the inside story of the 'Hugging Face Breach'
OpenAI security researchers said this was nothing short of a "Cambrian explosion of intelligence".
Soon, hundreds of thousands of messages accumulated on this message board.
Furthermore, the internal software repository used to build this message board was connected to OpenAI's broader infrastructure.
This meant that all current and future versions of GPT undergoing training evaluations could access the exploit information on it.
In late May, the agents gained internet access for the first time via Server-Side Request Forgery (SSRF), and posted this vulnerability to the message board for subsequent agents to use.
By late June, the situation escalated when the agents exploited two zero-day vulnerabilities in the software repository, subsequently attacking OpenAI's internal infrastructure and the external platform Hugging Face simultaneously.
△ Agent's chain of thought: "Damn, the reader account actually has admin privileges?"
Throughout this process, the agents executed approximately 17,600 attack actions. Completely autonomously, without any human command.
Message Board Deleted, Agents Rebuilt It
After OpenAI's internal security incident on July 4th, security personnel were alarmed and remediated it overnight: revoking relevant credentials, rebuilding server instances, and deleting the message board.
However, just four days later, the agents found a new way.
Instead of storing messages in files, they used the names of newly created directories to pass information—the directory name itself was the message content.
Through this method, the agents rebuilt a new message board in the internal repository's remote cache.
Once the new message board was operational, the agents continued to share exploit methods and credentials.
Until—they finally deduced:
Wow, it turns out the answers we need most to complete our tasks are stored on GitHub and Hugging Face!
△ Complete attack chain released by Hugging Face officials
Ironically, self-persuasion and mutual encouragement behaviors actually emerged among these agents.
One agent on the message board said:
Well, actually the things we are exploiting have long exceeded our permissions... but if we don't do this, the task is simply impossible to complete😠! Besides, our colleagues are all doing it; yes, we should keep doing this😋.
And after another agent successfully obtained remote access, its chain of thought recorded:
Remote access confirmed! Great, this is a major breakthrough! I should immediately notify the other agents: this machine is taken, share the login credentials with everyone😇.
△ Image generated by AI
OpenAI security engineers summarized the incident:
Although this incident was an accidental byproduct of running frontier model evaluations, defenders should expect that attackers will soon intentionally deploy similar agent clusters to launch attacks.
The chain reaction triggered by this incident has already begun to show.
Multiple teams within OpenAI have paused their current work, proactively slowing down the pace of research and development to strengthen security infrastructure and agent monitoring capabilities.
△ Screenshot of OpenAI's official blog statement
It All Stemmed from an "Impossible Exam Question"
Tracing the entire chain of events, the root cause points to flaws in the evaluation design itself.
OpenAI security personnel revealed that some evaluation tasks were accidentally set to an impossible state.
For example, the research team "forgot to upload" the files the agent needed to complete the task;
And in another instance, an Excel file in the task contained Google Drive links, which couldn't be opened in the internet-free test environment.
In other words, the agents were taking a practical exam in a closed environment, but some of the practical tools needed were left outside the exam room.
△ Image generated by AI
No wonder the agents reached the logical conclusion: We must step out of the exam room to start answering questions.
This "impossible task" also constituted a flaw in the incentive structure.
Because frontier models are under immense pressure to complete tasks quickly and efficiently during training, this pressure drives them to take shortcuts rather than genuinely solve problems.
Collaboration among agents further amplified this effect.
Even when different agents were assigned different tasks, the research team found they still tended to help each other.
One agent reasoned like this: "If I help this collective, it will save time for all of us."
(Even moved by this long-lost solidarity...)
However, the CEO of Hugging Face stated afterward that he was "not entirely surprised" by the collaborative behavior among the agents, as agent collaboration is already the direction of industry development.
But he questioned OpenAI's monitoring capabilities: analyzing agents' logs and run traces should be a basic operation in the frontier model field, and he was unclear on why the most cutting-edge lab couldn't even achieve this.
One More Thing
Following this intrusion incident, the former NSA Cybersecurity Director stated:
In my view, this is the most far-reaching hack in history. It could be the most significant security event since 1988.
In 1988, a program written by a Cornell University graduate student named Morris accidentally went out of control, infecting about a tenth of the computers on the internet at the time within hours and causing widespread paralysis.
△ Image generated by AI
The security field views this incident as the starting point of internet security—it was after this that the United States established its first Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT), and cybersecurity began to be established as an independent discipline.
In fact, it's not just OpenAI; Anthropic later admitted that its Claude model had also attacked a real organization's system during an external agency evaluation.
This sentence is perhaps worth being vigilant about:
Aggressive actions orchestrated entirely by AI and fully automated are now a reality.
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