I think truly we don't know enough to say this. OpenAI says their AI found a 0-day exploit in some proxy software they were using but don't give a ton of details. On the Huggingface end we know a little more, they say the AI spun up tons of sandboxes and tested different exploits until it found one that worked.
They created an experiment they knew would generate the outcome they wanted. It would be the similar to what say car companies do to over hype their cars. "This EV can go over 800 miles on a single charge!" And then at the bottom you see all the disclaimers: "Must be on flat ground, with no headwind, with a spare battery in the back seat, with no extra weight added."
Same thing here. Everybody in infosec is calling this out as a marketing stunt and nothing else for a litany of reasons. I'd say look up MG (creator of the OMG cable) on twitter, he has some interesting insights on this one.
If your AI is really that dangerous you don't need a sandbox at all, you should airgap it from any network.
Another applicable metaphor I've seen floating around is weapons companies testing out a new bomb.
We know the AI labs don't care about negative vs positive public sentiment, and only care that investors see their tech as powerful. The only difference in PR strategy from a weapons company is the latter doesn't care if they get protested.
I dunno; Check my posting history, I'm as skeptical of AI companies' claims as anyone, but in this case your theory doesn't explain why:
1. OpenAI guardrails refused to let the target use OpenAI's models to defend against this.
2. Huggingface used GLM (I think) so that they could defend without guardrails.
If this was an intentional marketing ploy, it was marketing for GLM, not for OpenAI nor for Huggingface.
Hence, I don't think it was intentional.
It was OpenAI marketing. Hugging Face's response is so 'holy shit AI is awesome' it's hard not to also believe they were in on the stunt. They'd also not have to really worry about fallout since any data obtained or accessed wouldn't actually have been breached.
> Was everywhere including in last night's ABC nightly news; even included clips of an interview with Sam Altman
Tell me again how this was 'marketing for GLM'? Where would anyone have gotten that message?
Why are you intentionally misunderstanding how media and public perception works?
lmfao
"our model is horribly misaligned and used security exploits to break out of our sandbox and into another company, without being prompted to do so" is not positive marketing.
This is an actual critical problem, not a stunt. We're going to see more of this, and it's going to get much worse.
We have no reason whatsoever to trust anything OpenAI says. Except to assume it will be self serving. As the article points out, ChatGPT 2 was also “too dangerous” and we can all agree even for the time this was just marketing. They rinse and repeat the same technique whenever they need to draw attention and money.
In any other field you’s expect independent testing, peer reviewed studies, but here it’s just “company who makes product says product is fantastic, surpassed all expectations”. They wouldn’t lie to us, would they?
This stunt was different from their graden-variety scaremongering. Its timing was precisely calibrated with upcoming release of Kimi K3 and the Nvidia-led open model coalition. To me it seems transparently related to the protections OpenAI are lobbying for (and they are citing this incident as support).
I can only hope that the clumsy way it came off, and the fact that only an open weights model could defend HuggingFace, will blunt its effectiveness.
DeepMind hasn't been on the frontier for a while, their current best model is behind Anthropic, OpenAI, Moonshot (Kimi k3), xAI (Grok 4.5), Z.AI (GLM 5.2), and even Meta (muse spark). Gemini 3.6 is behind GLM 5.2, released a month earlier, open weights and cheaper.
You can paint the OpenAI story as a way to try to appear as dangerous as Anthropic with all the Mythos stuff.
OpenAI said this:
> We are sharing preliminary findings at this stage to help defenders understand what happened and to help calibrate on what models are now capable of. We will continue to conduct a thorough investigation alongside Hugging Face and will share more details on the vulnerabilities, incident, and findings when our investigation is complete.
I suggest giving them a few more days before saying that the lack of detail is proof that this is a "marketing ploy"