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Comment by ben_w | Hacker News Reader

Have you done that to your own machines?

Seriously. If your reaction to the inability to know about previously unknown vulnerabilities is "unplug the Ethernet cable", why are you not doing that (and equivalent) right now to your phone, laptop, etc.?

Remember, the open weights models are only a few months behind the private ones, so these events being from a few months ago means the threat of such models is something you ought to take with the same degree of seriousness that various commenters here deride OpenAI for not having had.

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> Have you done that to your own machines?

Yes, I worked for a medtech where part of our assurance process was that the machine that was used to burn the device's drives was always unplugged from the internet, and that the devices themselves could not connect to the internet, and that even someone with a screwdriver and a serial cable would have a really hard time trying to connect to a deployed device.

Great.

And the machine you used to write this comment? "your phone, laptop, etc"?

Because otherwise you're not taking the threat these new models pose seriously. Catch 22, basically: anyone who thinks OpenAI should have known this outcome would happen in advance, shouldn't be in a position to spread this message, because if they have an internet connected device with which to reply, then they don't think there's any open weight models currently in training and perhaps a month from being made downloadable, which are just as capable of messing up every device they own.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49413320

They are not (knowingly) running a piece of software tasked to find cyber security exploits on their laptop.

Neither was Hugging Face.

https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2026/08/29/metr-and-redwood-off...

> Failure to Care or Respond. The biggest holy shit moment, to me, remains that OpenAI on multiple occasions had teams that found out about the message board, knew that agents were in communication, and they disregarded this. The first known warning was in late May. The warning on June 27 was unambiguous.

> “Responders investigated and linked the observed internal activity to an ExploitGym evaluation using Artifactory as an improvised message board and a network pivot. At this time, the on-call response staff advised that stopping the evaluation run was not required.”

> Failure to Monitor. The entire time, there was almost no monitoring of the situation, of what these AIs were up to. That’s how this was not caught.

> Failures of Infrastructure. OpenAI failed at delivering even basic software security, in numerous ways. One example is the models all having access to the same Artifactory instance. There were also other severe failures. Nor did OpenAI seem to be properly testing for such failures.

Am I running a new model with unknown capabilities without safeguards on my own machine and then prompt it to do determine cyber capabilities? You don’t need to be a genius to see how airgapping would be a simple and much safer measure than using a VM.

You're on the internet, your threat is everyone else running a new model with unknown capabilities without safeguards.

In particular, all my last paragraph.

I do offline backups, which get physically unplugged between sessions. Even that might not be enough.

This is such a goofy comment.

In your mind, there's no difference between the precautions a BSL-4 virology lab should take when working with an unknown pathogen and the precautions that literally everyone else in the world should be expected to adhere to?

Because, hey, after they deliberately unleash their new unknown virus on the world, we're all going to face that same threat, right?

You're in a world where, continuing this metaphor, 60 random Chinese companies are making and exporting home virology labs.

A world where previously exported home virology labs are actively getting "upgraded" by people eager to share their "jailbreaks" to "un-hobbble" systems designed to stop people doing DNA/RNA printing of human infections.

A world where people have spent the entire time since the invention of the tech (including the specific incident under discussion, on this site, under this link!), mocking any and all efforts to secure the systems as "PR" "hype" to boost sales or the IPO, as if "we're dangerous please regulate us" is good for sales.

A world where the tech is just now at a point where it's cost-effective to make a custom virus to attack specific individuals, rather than slowly, expensively, and approximately, assembling something mainly useful for lab research.

If you genuinely, sincerely, think this is like a BSL-4 virology lab, you should be prepping for a disaster. Remember: if it is that bad, no matter how much blame you'd be correct to put on OpenAI, it's not going to stop the next incident from another company, let alone the Cambrian explosion of them that will happen the moment equally capable open weights come out.

It must be very freeing for you to absolve everyone of all responsibility because someone, somewhere could be acting irresponsibly.

I'm not mocking efforts to secure the system, I'm insulted that they didn't bother taking what I consider bare-minimum precautions of airgapping their new experiment. They claim they are forging new frontiers of computer security but they can't be arsed with security 101.

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