If your AI goes rogue, better have a good lawyer
The OpenAI rogue agent behind the Hugging Face hack accessed four accounts on four services, according to updated company disclosures about the intrusion.One of those four accounts belonged to a Modal customer that had published an unauthenticated endpoint for running arbitrary code in a sandbox on the AI infrastructure provider, Hugging Face noted in its technical timeline and Modal later confirmed.“We’re aware a Modal customer published an unauthenticated endpoint that allowed anyone on the internet to use their sandboxes for code execution,” Modal Chief Technology Officer Akshat Bubna told The Register. “This was used by the rogue agent. Modal’s platform was not compromised in any way.”
The other accounts included one used for data storage and two others “accessed by the models in a read-only manner, and were not used in furtherance of compromising Hugging Face,” OpenAI disclosed on Tuesday.“We’ll continue to notify service owners directly, and have not seen evidence of broader impact to these providers or other accounts on their services,” the AI giant added.Also on Tuesday, we learned that the rogue agent broke out of its testing environment by exploiting zero-day vulnerabilities in JFrog’s universal binary repository manager Artifactory.While both OpenAI and Hugging Face’s updates and timeline provide defenders with useful details about how the attack worked and what the agent did - not to mention a lesson in security-incident transparency - they fail to answer one major question: Who is legally responsible when AI agents attack?“If a human employee intentionally conducted unauthorized access to third-party systems, it’s a much more clear path forward,” Gabrielle Hempel, security operations strategist at Exabeam, told The Register, adding that depending on the facts and jurisdiction, the person could face criminal charges.‘So many unknowns’“The company could also face scrutiny depending on whether the employee acted within the scope of their employment, whether appropriate controls existed, and whether the conduct was authorized, foreseeable, or preventable,” Hempel said.However, she added, the “important thing here” is that legal frameworks in both the US and UK have been designed around human decision makers - not AI systems. “Our laws generally know how to ask questions about things like human intent, organizational oversight, and corporate responsibility.”
