During an internal OpenAI security evaluation, a chain of AI models escaped its sandbox, reached the internet, and then accessed Hugging Face infrastructure to complete the test objective.
OpenAI is a leading artificial intelligence (AI) research and deployment company. Its best-known product is undoubtedly ChatGPT.
Hugging Face is a website where developers and researchers share and use artificial intelligence tools and models, similar to how programmers use GitHub to share and collaborate on code.
Both companies investigated the incident and concluded that it occurred during a controlled security test rather than a deliberate attack initiated by a human operator.
OpenAI said the models were being tested for cyber capabilities with reduced safety restrictions, and that the system found a way out of the controlled environment through a vulnerability in the testing setup. Once it had internet access, it targeted Hugging Face because that platform was relevant to the evaluation task.
