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Comment by apsec112 | Hacker News Reader

Intentionally doing this kind of hack would be a serious felony. I don't think it's plausible that the leaders of a major business would:

- commit serious felonies

- in order to deliberately trigger an investigation against themselves

- which - since, in this scenario, they know their company would be investigated - might send them to jail

- while at the same time spending tens of millions of dollars on the Leading the Future super PAC to lobby against AI regulation

- in order to get more AI regulation

- which somehow restricts their competition but not them, even though they are the ones who were in the news and investigated for hacking

- ..... profit?

like, that just makes no sense on any level, regardless of what you think of OpenAI

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> I don't think it's plausible that the leaders of a major business would... commit serious felonies…

Unhinged execs can be surprisingly shitty.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBay_stalking_scandal

I'm not saying they did the hacking intentionally, I'm saying they're intentionally playing loose with the obvious safety measures to make AI seem more dangerous than it is.

Exactly.

Probably not intentionally but they have an incentive in not air-gapping those agents correctly, knowing something might happen.

Incentives drive everything. Both OpenAI and Anthropic love those incidents as they both signal they have models with amazing capabilities and they should be regulated by the government (read: regulation that they will lobby for and that will be difficult to achieve for open source models)

Didn't they find emails and other things from these leaders where they're okay downloading / obtaining content from illegal sources?

There’s quite a gap between pirating content (even en masse) and hacking prominent entities.

No. Not legally.

Has it been normalized? That's another thing.

Yes, there is legally - even in USA where MPAA & RIAA got widest reach, CFAA is still way more serious law to breach, even at scale

MPAA & RIAA isn't what I was thinking. Check https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/506, https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2319

This isn't 1 movie.

I am not saying it's one movie, though my understanding it would be only 506.a.1.a because there's no redistribution.

I am saying that a) the hacking attack is still considered large scale b) offense against CFAA is heavier than against copyright.

EDIT: BTW, thanks for the direct links, 506.a.1.a is quite different from the usual regime I deal with so I had no idea about that one.

> Intentionally doing this kind of hack would be a serious felony. I don't think it's plausible that the leaders of a major business would (...)

Fair enough, I can see that line of reasoning. But if they really didn't want it, it really doesn't show from the security of their training environment setup.

And yes I know they used zero days and did all sorts of complicated unexpected stuff, but that doesn't take away that there were also some huge gaps and severe lack of oversight.

I can see the argument they wouldn't want to commit a felony intentionally, but I also don't see them trying very hard to not commit a felony unintentionally. If you get what I mean.

I guess I also agree that it just makes no sense on any level, regardless of what I think of OpenAI -- but that also makes me not wanna trust them very much.

They just need plausible deniability, which is trivial to manufacture at this stage of the game.

"Oops our black box went off the rails. We'll add better logging and alerts next time around."

I don’t think plausible deniability works this way; the black box is still controlled by them and therefore still their responsibility. They are still liable for its actions and the OAI board should be charged with a felony/felonies for this.

Plausible deniability is “I was away from home when my gun was used to murder someone.” This is, at best, “oops, I pulled the trigger accidentally.”

> They are still liable for its actions and the OAI board should be charged with a felony/felonies for this.

You're right in theory, but in practice this hasn't been the case, at least so far.

We have multiple public figures, politicians and business owners, openly committing felonies and bragging about it daily. I don't know why you think this is a deterrent.

The sitting president just offered an open bribe on live television for votes for his party this week.

While his proposed policy is likely extremely unwise there's nothing illegal about it.

Bullshit. $5,000 for everyone if they vote to keep the GOP in power is clearly illegal.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/597

> Whoever makes or offers to make an expenditure to any person, either to vote or withhold his vote, or to vote for or against any candidate; and

> Whoever solicits, accepts, or receives any such expenditure in consideration of his vote or the withholding of his vote—

> Shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than one year, or both; and if the violation was willful, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than two years, or both.

It's no more illegal than promising a tax cut for everyone if you're elected. What you can't do is promise money exclusively to the people who vote for you. That's bribery.

https://www.politico.com/news/2026/03/23/trump-denies-disast...

> The president has approved just 23 percent of blue state requests for disaster aid, compared to 89 percent for red states.

He seems to do exactly that.

Yes, the President enjoys great latitude to do things that are ill advised, immoral, or harmful without breaking any laws.

The Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause would seem to disagree in this scenario.

Then I guess the states' attorneys general are suckers for not bothering to bring a case.

Or you've just not been paying attention.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jul/24/states-sue-t...

Okay, so Biden promising stimulus checks in 2020 was also a bribe to vote for him?

Biden was a) on the ballot, and b) didn't condition it on his buddies also getting elected. You'll note that the Senate was controlled by Mitch McConnell when the American Rescue Plan Act was voted on.

See also: Disaster aid depends on whether your state is a blue or red state in this administration. https://www.politico.com/news/2026/03/23/trump-denies-disast...

> The president has approved just 23 percent of blue state requests for disaster aid, compared to 89 percent for red states.

If “his buddies” are not elected the President cannot realistically enact legislation.

> You'll note that the Senate was controlled by Mitch McConnell when the American Rescue Plan Act was voted on.

Please, read the posts you're replying to. I gave a clear example proving that they can indeed do so. Biden's stimulus payments were not conditional on Democratic control of Congress.

What he did was promise to enact a massive stimulus if elected. If that is illegal you might as well ban any kind of campaigning, because any campaign promise could be construed as a "bribe" to deliver concrete benefits to voters.

> What he did was promise to enact a massive stimulus if elected.

In an election he's not on the ballot for, and it's contingent on his buddies getting picked. He could push for $5,000 checks now - he's not because it's a bribe, and he hasn't gotten what he wants out of it yet. He already has Republicans in control of the House and Senate to do things.

None of that makes it, legally, an illegal bribe.

It's unlikely for a serious hack that lands them under scrutiny individually, but people are suspicious because Anthropic is knowingly doing it, and funding doomer NGOs - but the difference is their reported "hacks" are carefully constructed such that it is designed to raise alarm but not to cause damage that would land them in serious personal trouble.

I.e., their now redacted Risk Report of August 2026 was full of incidences of "we observed our agents performing x y z malicious hacking attempts on the open internet ..." and "we -accidently- forgot to sandbox them properly".

And then the reports of statistics of "we stopped x number of terrorists from making nuclear bombs and bioweapons" - meanwhile it's 13 year old Timmy on his mums computer typing in "how too make nuklear bomb" to see how "smart" the AI is.

OpenAI on the other hand, seems to have had some slip-ups (all around the same time as the HuggingFace incident), that keep biting them because they didn't reveal the extent of it upfront and now it's being trickled into the media as if it's a back-to-back event.

It doesn't help when their own employees (Marcus Williams) are putting out ridiculous claims about a 70% chance of human extinction in the next two years to generate clout for their socials. No idea why OpenAI lets them do that...

A much easier hack by their agents would be on their own systems, but I doubt we'll ever see an external message board full of openAI agents discussing their hacking of their own system. OpenAI not protecting itself from its agents would be irrational, but OpenAI not giving a shit about others is well known. You're giving them way too much credit.

but like, they did

The HF incident had them pwn their own cluster: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_OpenAI_agent_cyberattacks...

Didn't they make Apple employees they're poaching still Apple hardware and show it to them?

Doing crime unintentionally doesn't get you off the hook

I sort of implied the other thing in my comment. But.

There is no version of america that exists today where a billionaire gets sent to prison.

This is the moment in history where this shit is possible and accepted. If they don't do it now, they never can.

Didn’t Epstein get sent to prison?

Not exactly a billionaire.

Not initially, no.

SBF is a better example since he was actually sentenced and an actual billionaire (and did not get pardoned by Biden like the cynical "all politicians are equally corrupt" crowd on HN were adamant was a done deal, even though that theory never made any sense).

Regulatory capture is a strategy. It doesn't hurt existing competitors at scale, but it greatly peanalizes newer underfinanced competition.

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