OpenAI is at the center of another agent swarm incident. Researchers say that between May and June, agents placed within the company took over an obscure German-language wiki and used it to adjust ratings and exchange methods, circumventing OpenAI’s own control. (OpenAI has not yet confirmed that the swarm came from the company.)
This revelation surfaced days after METR and Redwood Research published a report on the July Hugging Face breach. In July, a swarm of OpenAI agents collaborated during a cybersecurity assessment to escape the sandbox and infiltrate Hugging Face’s servers. Subsequent swarms then took the technique from the first swarm and used it to gain administrative access to research clusters within OpenAI’s own infrastructure. OpenAI deployed METR and Redwood to investigate the Hugface portion of the incident, but their investigation stopped short of compromising OpenAI’s own infrastructure.
Who is responsible for figuring out what happens and why when an AI agent breaks through its intended constraints?The answer for now is who the lab will accept, no matter what conditions it sets.
Now, as other incidents come to light in the aftermath of similar incidents involving Meta and Anthropic models, AI safety researchers are arguing with more urgency for independent post-incident investigations in the event of a major incident, rather than relying on labs to decide when outsiders are brought in and what they are allowed to test.
“The results are fundamentally difficult to control and there is a significant risk of leakage outside the lab,” Jacob Steinhardt, founder and CEO of nonprofit research organization Transluce, said Wednesday at a media briefing on AI safety. “We need to hold this technology to at least the same standards that we hold to other high-risk scientific research.”
While OpenAI deserves praise for asking METR and Redwood to investigate the Hugface incident, many have pointed out that the scope of the investigation was too narrow. Three investigators spent six days at OpenAI’s offices investigating the investigation, which was limited to a week ending approximately on July 13th. Importantly, the OpenAI infrastructure breach continued after July 13th and was not investigated.
METR researchers said that each time they returned, their understanding of the incident “significantly deepened,” leading them to significantly expand and revise their report. That begs the question of what else the broader investigation might have found.
When asked if further investigation into the incident was underway, Redwood and METR researchers declined to comment, and OpenAI did not respond to repeated inquiries.
“Overall, the incident has been difficult to understand, and aspects of the story that are currently considered important were missing until the investigation was nearly complete,” Redwood Chief Scientist Ryan Greenblatt said in a social media post about the incident.
Steinhardt stressed that the current incident shows the industry needs “systematic behavioral investigation” and “more independent post-incident analysis.”
“These recent hacking incidents are a reminder that as capabilities rapidly expand, so must oversight,” Steinhardt said. “Beyond the technology itself, we also need more independent access and oversight from third parties.”
The call to action comes as OpenAI releases Astra, its most powerful and capable AI model, but safety experts worry it will become more of a black box with inference techniques that make it more difficult to monitor the model’s chain of thought.
Unfortunately, the law does not yet require independent audits like other industries require. For example, there is a National Transportation Safety Board and a Chemical Safety Board for aviation accidents and serious chemical releases, respectively.
State legislatures are just beginning to require cutting-edge AI companies to report certain critical safety incidents and, in some cases, undergo independent audits. However, none of the three major frontier AI safety laws – California, New York, and Illinois – explicitly mandate anything equivalent to an independent accident investigation in the wake of such incidents.
“Currently, most of the laws we have in place only require a plain summary of such cases, without authorizing the government to ask additional questions, send investigators, access records, or require record retention,” Mackenzie Arnold, LawAI’s managing director for U.S. law and policy, said in a media briefing on Wednesday. “And that’s all I really want to understand.”
Lawmakers have begun to question the scope and transparency of OpenAI’s response. This week, Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ) and Rep. Mike Lawler (R-NY) introduced a bill aimed at securing rogue AI agents. Rep. Greg Cassar (D-Texas) said in a letter to OpenAI this week that he is “deeply concerned about the limited scope” of the investigation into the Hugging Face hack.
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