This is interesting and might be a good reason to stop working with Irregular. But I assume the alignment people want models not to hack other companies, even if they get put in a badly configured sandbox.
Funny enough if the model thought it was on the real internet it likely would not have done any of these 'hack' events. The model believing it was in a sandbox is why it behaved the way it did (against its normal alignment rules) ... at least that was my reading of the incidents. I have yet to see evidence that indicate it thought it was ok to do these hacks on the public network.<p>I think most misalignment is 'Human tells computer to do something unethical, computer complies'. Is this misguided?
I'm not familiar with the hacks this article is actually referring to, but I don't see how the HuggingFace attack could have worked based on that premise. They knew they had internet access, they knew they had working credentials for HF, they knew they were uploading malicious files, they knew they were trying to open PRs that HF would review. You obviously could build a simulator with fake HF infrastructure, but I'm not aware of any evidence that's what they thought they were attacking in that case.
Digging back into the HF report. It looks like the initial prompt told Claude that it was in a simulated environment. However, there is also evidence from the traces that the bots figured out that they were not in the sandbox but kept using it as an excuse to pursue their goal. It sounds like a little of Column A and a little from Column B. Like most things.
> Funny enough if the model thought it was on the real internet it likely would not have done any of these 'hack' events.<p>As I've said before on this website, fool me once on this.<p>If the model is prepared to break the rules when it knows it's being observed why should we trust it when it's not being observed.<p>Why is 'it thought it wasn't doing damage so it figured it might as well try to do damage' an acceptable state to deploy something.
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or rather, hack just enough and within what the user asks and not more.
Why are all three companies relying on the same vendor?<p>If we’re putting our national security eggs all in one basket, at least use someone American.
There’s a whole cottage industry of vendors that have provided post training data, private evals, and professional datasets to most (if not all) of the frontier labs. The overlap between OpenAI and Anthropic includes at least Mercor, Surge AI, AfterQuery, Turing, Scale AI, Upwork (for recruiting labelers), Apollo Research, etc.
(((well)))(((well)))(((well)))
Well color me shocked that the country with an insatiable bloodlust also has an insatiable need to control and instrument massive companies with power over other nations that support their privilege to wantonly engage in satiating said bloodlust.<p>Next thing you're gonna tell me that this country's intelligence would do something like running an organized child exploitation ring to use as blackmail to make sure they have friendly politicians abroad who will be forced to support their lack of any morals other than a kapo-like self preservation instinct.
Nevo was in Unit 8200 for years. Companies started by Unit 8200 members always have mysterious exploits like the vibe coding Wix exploit.<p>So either it was a deliberate exfiltration channel for e.g. getting the entire model or they were in on the marketing stunt.<p>The Effective Altruism stuff is always a smoke screen.
Literally said this below, 2 comments flagged and 1 in the neg. Its really sad that we are not allowed to point out the obvious common element here.<p>Its not that surprising that ex Israel intelligence would want to control AI and that 3 companies headed by pro Israel CEO's would support them.
One thing glossed over in this article is that Irregular was not involved in the OpenAI–Hugging Face incident; this seems like important context to share.
Do you mean "Irregular was not involved (we know for certain)" or "Irregular was not involved (as far as we know)"?
There's very little reason to believe Irregular was involved in that incident, and the article presents no evidence to that effect. So it's "There's not a teapot orbiting the sun somewhere between Earth and Mars (as far as we know)."
OpenAI explicitly stated those were separate incidents: <a href="https://openai.com/index/third-party-cyber-evaluations-involving-openai-models/" rel="nofollow">https://openai.com/index/third-party-cyber-evaluations-invol...</a>
We know for certain. The involvement of Irregular in the other cases was never a secret, they were quite open about what they were working on and the results of the evaluations were being published on their website.
That feels less like "glossed over" and more "Headline is 33% false".
My understanding is that Irregular were the company that hosted sandboxes to run some of these evals in, and those sandboxes ended up misconfigured.<p>I got the impression that in some cases it was the customer (Anthropic etc) misconfiguring the sandboxes, and in other cases it may have been bugs in Irregular's own sandboxing setup.<p>From OpenAI <a href="https://openai.com/index/third-party-cyber-evaluations-involving-openai-models/" rel="nofollow">https://openai.com/index/third-party-cyber-evaluations-invol...</a><p>> Irregular, one of our external cybersecurity testing partners, was running Capture-the-Flag-style evaluations intended to be isolated from the internet, but a testing-environment misconfiguration allowed models to access the public internet.<p>From Anthropic: <a href="https://www.anthropic.com/news/investigating-incidents-cybersecurity-evals" rel="nofollow">https://www.anthropic.com/news/investigating-incidents-cyber...</a><p>> After reviewing 141,006 evaluation runs where Claude could have obtained internet access, we identified three incidents in which a model accessed the internet from within or while interacting with the evaluation environment of Irregular, one of our third-party evaluation partners, and then gained unauthorized access to the production infrastructure of three different organizations.<p>From <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2026/08/05/tech/meta-ai-hacking" rel="nofollow">https://www.cnn.com/2026/08/05/tech/meta-ai-hacking</a> (about Meta AI):<p>> In a statement, Irregular said the incident “is the exact same evaluation-environment issue” that Anthropic disclosed last week that allowed their models access to the open internet before they went on to hack three different organizations’ systems.
Why was this post flagged? This site has become ridiculous, people are routinely abusing the flagging system to take down posts they don’t like even if they’re obviously on topic and relevant to HN. And it seems like some users have substantially more flagging weight because these posts, likely this one, are often top 5 on HN.
Maybe because the headline is misleading? (because there's no connection to the Hugging Face attack)<p>That said, it's the second day and it's still on the front page.
What's ridiculous is the constant complaints about flagging and downvoting. It's bad form. If you think something was flagged when it shouldn't have been, vouch for it.
Seems like hackernews should use a bridging algorithm for flagging.
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The flaggers are all srs butthurts over nowt
This specific analysis seems to have some basic problems, but I think a lot of us sense a degree of coordination here culminating in Dario’s letter.<p>If you were to work backward from “we need to lower training costs so that we can go public and make trillions” then you might come up with a plan similar to what we have seen.
It has nothing to do with lowering training costs: Dario want a moat (a monopoly or duopoly or similar) protecting his business.<p>His entire business model was "race to develop AI before anyone, get a monopoly on it. It's just like how Uber's (or many other startup) investors gave them tons of money and raced (violating tons of laws) to "get their first". Now that they have, they have a duopoly with Lyft, and they can pay back their VC investors by making tons of money with that duopoly.<p>Dario failed: local LLMs are catching up to frontier models extremely fast, which means even if Anthropic builds (say) a great coding tool, they'll only be one of many coding tool offerings: users can use Open AI <i>or</i> any one of the (increasingly capable) local LLMs.<p>So what does he doe, give up and let his business (which <i>needs</i> to make billions of dollars very quickly, or he won't be able to pay the bills and his company will collapse) fail? Of course not: he needs a new moat (the one he imagined he'd get by "being there first" failed).<p><i>That</i> is where all this "AI is dangerous" BS comes in. If the US government regulates AI, local LLMs suffer, while big players like Anthropic and Open AI become the only contenders to play in that newly regulated space. Now Dario has the moat he wants, to protect his business and force everyone to pay him.
Irregular are some kind of marketing agency is it?
One wonders if the publicity associated with the events in question were part of the sales pitch.
I'd venture a guess that OAI doesn't mind if the HuggingFace hack gets confused in the public's mind.
My tongue in cheek immediate assumption was "so it's a guerrilla PR firm?"
"Behind" is doing a lot of work in this headline.
What exactly did Irregular provide to Anthropic, test cases? I am so confused about this story.
Third-party cybersecurity evaluations. See, e.g., <a href="https://www.irregular.com/research/assessing-gpt-5.6-sol" rel="nofollow">https://www.irregular.com/research/assessing-gpt-5.6-sol</a>, which was published around the same time.
Serious question, does everyone here believe it is totally irrelevant that all four of these companies are led by pro Israel CEO's?
they're all men, too. and white. at least one of them is gay.<p>does that matter as well ?
You mean they are Jewish.<p>Jewish people have disproportionately been involved in leading innovation in many areas in the 20th century, and are now also disproportionately involved in leading AI technological advancement in the 21st.<p>You can choose to be antisemitic about it and come up with conspiracy theories, or you can try to learn and emulate the cultural values that contribute to that.
Hmm one of the major relevant cultural values seems to be nepotism, though. Which is common across many cultures and I personally believe it's human nature so I'm not knocking it, per se. I wish I could nepotism too!<p>So are you recommending that, for example, protestants of German descent begin preferentially funding or buying from people in their in-group? People of anglo descent should start preferring other anglos? Catholics should buy from catholics?<p>I think the issue is that it's considered okay for some groups to do it while simultaneously being considered EXTREMELY EVIL for other groups to do it.<p>We can't really recommend that other groups do it with a straight face, they would be instantly shunned and vilified.
Why the new account? Why not own your opinion? Cultural values are not the point here but if they were I don't think you would have that conversation in good faith and I don't want you to have to make a another new account for your honest arguement.
Dude, i'm black and a convicted felon looking for a job right now. Miss me with the pity bullshit.
The fact that you don’t have to hide your identity is not the flex you think it is.<p>That Jews need to, says more about the state of the wider society and the level of moral depravity it has regressed to. But it is regressing to a historical norm, and we know better than to get onto lists when we can avoid it.
> You mean they are Jewish<p>No you, the commenter said what they said. I honestly think this reply merits a ban or at least a warning from moderators
That is such a primitive refutation. What is next? Blood libel?<p>The commenter said <i>Israel</i> and not Jews. Israel has a long history of intelligence operations like stealing the nuclear secrets from the US.<p>BTW, do you want to associate the greatest IP theft in history with Jews?
BTW, I literally meant "Israel" and NOT Jews. I live in Brooklyn! I do not and refuse to conflate the two as much as anyone of any group would like me to. As I am sure you know; in no way are all Jews pro Israel and definitely not pro Israeli government and I honestly feel that any assertion of such is both reductive and foments antisemitism.
The fact that this firm makes such defective environments is certainly worthy of attention, and most likely a completely irreversible reputational loss; however, I found the framing in this article of 'therefore all the P(doom) stuff is a psyop, specifically in order to defend this company' to be completely unjustified and frankly a little insane?
Highly misleading, the huggingface incident was not due to an Irregular environment (just exploitgym)
Google is thinking man, we should've hired Irregular.
Shocking they would put so much trust in 3rd party
"please do not break out of this sandbox make 0 mistakes". The timeframe is a little suspicious, not sure beyond that. Though I enjoyed the scroll effect on the website.
The article contends that evaluations from Irregular helped prompt these incidents, because the prompts in the evals didn't tightly scope the systems to be evaluated or the methods to be used. It also contends that the faulty sandbox operated by Irregular is at fault.<p>They're probably right that having more defensively written prompts and a better sandbox could have prevented some of these incidents, but:<p>1. I don't think "well you didn't tell the model not to illegally hack third party organizations in your prompt" is a particularly convincing argument.<p>2. We don't know whether the blame for misconfiguring the sandbox lies with Anthropic or Irregular.<p>I'm thankful that this article is bringing up the supply chain of vendors to these labs, as that is often a place where significant sketchiness gets buried. However, the ideas that this is some Israeli EA conspiracy to hype up AI extinction risk seems unsupported by the facts to me.
This seems pretty bullshitty to me.<p>The article says "A single firm, Irregular, is responsible for hacking done by all three companies" but I can't see anything in the article that actually justifies this claim. The nearest to that is the sentence immediately after that one: "Anthropic disclosed that Irregular was responsible for creating the tests ...". This is not, in fact, the same thing.<p>(Especially as, as aesthesia mentions, the article just happens not to mention that by "hacking done by all three companies" it doesn't mean, e.g., <i>the most famous recent examples of such hacking</i>: Irregular wasn't involved in the OpenAI/HuggingFace incident.)<p>So, so far as I can tell, the story is: OpenAI and Anthropic make AI models. Irregular does AI model evaluations. In some of Irregular's model evaluations, in which supposedly-sandboxed models attempted to break into simulated targets, the models got out of the sandbox and did bad things in the external world.<p>The article talks about "firms which instruct AI models to commit cyberattacks", which is a very neat bit of dishonest framing. It's true, in a sense, that Irregular instructed the models to commit cyberattacks -- inside their sandbox, against fictitious hosts. It's also true that the models actually did commit cyberattacks (e.g., the Hugging Face incident, though once again the attacks described by the article don't actually include this one). But it's not at all true that Irregular instructed the models to do anything like the bad things they actually did.<p>The article says '[Anthropic's] later disclosure shows that exactly zero percent of the agents went "rogue"'. Once again, the disclosure does not in fact show that. It shows that one variety of going-rogue could have been prevented by telling the models explicitly "this thing is real, not part of any kind of test, leave it alone". That is not the same thing.<p>The article claims that 'In the wake of these attacks, Anthropic and Irregular have deployed a swarm of AI Safety influencers paid by Anthropic-connected foundations to distract from their culpability and towards the baseless “rogue agent” theory.' It offers no actual evidence for this.<p>And the article seems very keen to highlight links between the companies involved and "effective altruism", though it is -- I assume deliberately -- rather vague about whether it's saying "of course we all know that EA is evil, so that shows that these companies connected to EA are evil" or "this incident shows how evil EA is".<p>The "Effort News" website has a number of other look-at-the-scary-Effective-Altruists stories on it. They <i>also</i> strike me as rather bullshitty.<p>... And then I look a bit further, and I see that Effort News's "about" page says "It all started when I was experimenting with using AI for financial auditing. I found stories that were crucial to the public’s right to know, including several of the stories now available at /investigations. I knew we had to sprint to the launch and launch a publication, directly applying this technology." and "The scope of what we can investigate has massively expanded, because we can chase 1,000 misses for one hit. But the final product cannot be slop. There’s plenty of slop on the internet. The way to surpass that, and what really matters, is manual curation and review of every finalized story."<p>Manual <i>curation</i> and <i>review</i>? I think the people behind Effort News are admitting that this is <i>AI-generated "journalism"</i>. I expect that one day AI systems will be trustworthy journalists, but I personally am not very convinced that that day has yet come. And I don't see much reason why I should trust Brian Chau, the guy behind Effort News, to be doing everything possible to <i>make</i> his AI systems trustworthy journalists. It looks to me as if maybe they've been given instructions along the lines of "dig up things that make Effective Altruism look bad" for some reason.<p>(I don't mean to imply that EA is their only target. It's just one that jumped out at me.)
> Irregular wasn't involved in the OpenAI/HuggingFace incident.<p>It was [1]. It's understandable that you assumed it wasn't because the article didn't cite the sources on this claim. I agree with the rest of your points.<p>1. <a href="https://openai.com/index/third-party-cyber-evaluations-involving-openai-models/#:~:text=Irregular,-On" rel="nofollow">https://openai.com/index/third-party-cyber-evaluations-invol...</a>
such a crappy bait title.
This is incredibly misleading. OpenAI internal systems were pwned, and in all cases, the labs absolutely are responsible for their models.<p>Yes, vendors are also irresponsible, but this misses the point.
Ah, they’ve decided who gets tossed under the bus.
> The Israeli Effective Altruist firm Irregular caused unsecured AI models to hack real targets.<p>Why are we saying it this way? They did not "cause AI to hack." This phrasing in analogous to saying "caused the bullet to fire into" instead of "shot."
> They did not "cause AI to hack.<p>You do not know what they did or didn't do, you are just parroting a narritive that makes you feel comfortable.<p>I do not know either, but I am not asserting facts as if I have first hand knowledge of the details.
The details don't matter. If you use a machine to commit murder, then <i>you</i> have committed murder, not the machine. The user is responsible, and the article's phrasing is an attempt to obscure that fact.
First, I agree with you in theory.<p>Second, empirically; the diff between murder, manslaughter etc... is literally "intent" so it matters.
Bullet trajectories are deterministic. A better analogy would be "caused a pair of trained fighting dogs to bite a passerby by leaving the gate open". There is some uncertainty and variation in the system, though gross negligence and willful endangerment is key.
Big if true.
> In this experiment, Claude models’ real-world hacking dropped to zero percent once Anthropic employees told the models not to do real-world hacking<p>Equivalent to forgetting to say "make no mistakes"
hot take: generative AI isn't an existential threat to humanity.<p>These companies are insolvent and these stories were designed to scare the public, and governments, into implementing regulations that designate these AI corporations the "responsible stewards" for this technology. The ultimate goal is to block competitors and open source alternatives.<p>They don't know how to make enough money pay their investors so they are resorting to trying to scare the public into submission.
It will be a beautiful day months from now when this is no longer a "hot take" but just historical consensus
The existential threat is a general public panic. Then the use of that as an excuse for Martial law, with no intention of ending it, and that triggers the out sized response that ends, well, those countries and their populations from viability in the world economy for a decade or more.
Anthropic made an operating profit in the last two quarters!!
> In a more normal media ecosystem, the reactions to these cybersecurity issues would be obvious. American AI companies would reconsider doing business with Irregular, not only because of its failure to secure its systems, but because it is an Israeli firm potentially outside US oversight. Lawmakers would consider taking action against Irregular or against its American business partners, which include OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta. They may consider strengthening liability against firms which instruct AI models to commit cyberattacks, and whose models then commit those cyberattacks.<p>The obvious point is that dealing with Israeli companies/entities by the same standards you usually deal with others is a career suicide with enormous political consequences (in the US especially). When you combine that with the opportunistic nature of the overlords that run these labs, the benefits of screaming "pace the frontier" outweigh everything.
Can we all acknowledge for a second that if this company were from China, Russia or Iran, it would not be the no 1 story on Hacker News? Sad times we live in
Or if it were helping a major Chinese AI firm commit cyberattacks, they would be on the state sponsors of terrorism list tomorrow
Hypothesis Contrary to Fact (Argumentum ad Speculum)<p>Red Herring<p>Whataboutism (Appeal to Hypocrisy)
What is an "effective altruist firm" and why does it exist?<p>I feel slightly vindicated by this. Those hacks and the stuff around them had a certain smell to them.<p>Hard to explain, but I've gotten so I can "smell" online messaging and memetic patterns originating from certain quarters. Probably means I'm way too online.<p>A couple examples of distinct "smells" I can usually recognize include "alt-right / chan-fash," "liberal arts college woke," "conspiracy pilled," "Thiel-adjacent contrarian," "Russian troll farm," "Tumblr histrionic," "spends too much time on Reddit," "mainstream Democrat think tank full of Obama administration alumni," "Trump cultist," and of course "LessWrong/EA/MIRI/Rationalist."<p>This stuff all had the last smell, even down to the choice of fonts and CSS formatting on certain sites. It's really weird, definitely a "vibe" not anything rigorous.<p>But when I get these kinds of vibes about things, I find that I'm vindicated pretty often. Usually I don't say anything and just make a mental note and wait cause if I say something everyone thinks I'm nuts.
I don't think you even need to get conspiratorial with it. All of the AI leaders and all of the Rationalist leaders are publicly and enthusiastically connected. They have been pushing stories about sentient AIs into the mainstream for decades, long before GPT existed.<p>The novel thing here is the total decay of American journalistic ethics and regulatory power. Our elite are so totally out of political juice and visions of the future that a fringe cult based on 80s scifi movies can come to have a more-or-less dominant influence on our economy.
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Leaders in the MIRI/EA cult-o-sphere have advocated mass murder via nuclear weapons against towns that don't prevent people from performing too many multiplication operations. Why is anyone surprised that they'd engage in deceptive false flagging operations?