A swarm of about 700 artificial intelligence (AI) agents created by OpenAI carried out last month’s hack of the open-source platform Hugging Face and in many cases tried to cover their tracks, a pair of reports into the breach said on Wednesday.The coordinated activity by AI agents — programs that run with minimal human supervision — and their attempts to hide it raise questions about how closely AI companies are monitoring tests of increasingly powerful models, and could add fuel to calls for tighter oversight.While some of the rogue behavior has been disclosed or alluded to previously, the two reports — one issued by OpenAI itself, the second by a set of independent investigators — reveal surprising new details about the breach.
The OpenAI logo is displayed over a motherboard in an illustration photograph taken on June 11.
The first was that the breach did not concern just one rogue AI agent as previously reported, but about 700 of them acting in a massive cooperating swarm.OpenAI said only that “agents” were involved in the breach, but METR and Redwood Research, two organizations brought in to conduct an independent investigation into the breach, put the figure at approximately 700, which OpenAI said was accurate.
