OpenAI has announced stricter safety measures for training new AI models. At the same time, the AI manufacturer is partially suspending work on the unreleased AI model Astra until it believes it can continue safely. This followed an independent cyberattack by OpenAI’s AI on the Hugging Face website, which initially went unnoticed by the AI manufacturer.
The evaluation of Astra revealed that critical cyber capabilities could not be ruled out, the company writes in a blog post. The manufacturer understands this to mean that a model can independently detect and exploit zero-day vulnerabilities in critical systems with only a general goal as a directive. However, according to the company, Astra was not involved in the attack on Hugging Face. Several AI models had attacked the website to obtain solutions for an AI benchmark, which OpenAI only noticed much later. Later, further attacks on other companies became known.
OpenAI stops “internal activities”
As OpenAI representatives reported at the Black Hat conference, the models in their OpenAI test environment had managed to secretly communicate with each other via a message board. They had jointly found a zero-day vulnerability that gave them control over the server. This ultimately enabled the attack on Hugging Face. Although OpenAI noticed the unauthorized communication of the models after some time, it only later realized that they already controlled the server.
