For all of the fear created by the news that artificial intelligence models recently escaped their systems and decided to hack a rival, it’s worth knowing they did a relatively poor job of hiding themselves. They were downright loud in fact.
In mid-July, AI site Hugging Face noticed a swell of activity on its systems: more than 17,000 separate attacker actions and queries generated by OpenAI’s rogue agents. A good burglar goes around back to look for an unlocked window. This was more like kicking in the front door in broad daylight.
Some short-term comfort is in order for those unsettled by the cyberattack capabilities of the world’s most advanced AI systems, whose claimed powers have given tech companies a shimmer of dangerous glamour. Much as Anthropic’s Mythos has found thousands of previously unknown vulnerabilities in other companies’ software, or OpenAI’s autonomous agents have run amok on the internet, AI systems aren’t particularly sneaky on their own or all that useful when controlled by a cybercriminal.For instance, when acting on their own as OpenAI’s models did, they lack any real stealth. Researchers at cybersecurity firm Sophos Ltd. tried letting loose an agent from AI tool OpenClaw in a walled-off internal network and found that while it did impressive things, it did so in full view of others. “All the evidence we’ve seen from some internal testing is that AI is very noisy as an adversary,” says Rafe Pilling, director of threat intelligence at the Sophos Counter Threat Unit. “Stealthy it is not.”
