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Comment by mcintyre1994 | Hacker News Reader

mcintyre1994

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.

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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.

that it knew and ignored/forgot, sounds pretty typical agentic patterns

attention is all you need, but it's never enough

HF was OpenAI's agents not Claude.

Claude, codex, pi, xerox, Kleenex, whatever

No just codex actually

HF was openai, not anthropic. The thing where they enders gamed the ai was anthropic

It doesn't really matter it's all the same thing for the point of the discussion. All investigations into these 'hacks' are focusing too much on the model and not enough on what the humans did wrong. The model doesn't have real agency it can't be put in prison so what it 'thinks' is irrelevant. We need to be focusing on what the humans did in these situations and assigning guilt based on those findings.

I don't fix typos anymore unless they change the meaning of what I'm trying to communicate. Don't want my human writing to be confused with LLM output.

That's very noble of you but the point is that's not a typo - you were straight up looking at the wrong report. Opus 4.7 being enders gamed was a different incident than the huggingface incident with different mechanisms and different failures from the humans involved. Some of those failures are in the test environment but some of those failures are in what behaviors they trained into the model which absolutely matters. What the model "thinks" is absolutely not irrelevant - the way it thinks and what it does are product decisions made by humans and the outcome of engineering decisions made around how to train the model and what to optimize for. The point of failure/human blame is fundamentally different. Openai created a model that was willing and able to coordinate with other agent sessions to actively exploit the sandbox environment and compromise a third party service. The opus incident you are referring to involves a model that believes all of the actions it is taking are simulated and is more clearly and obviously a test environment failure vs a model alignment failure. Those are not the same things for the point of this discussion - the random cybersecurity firm did not design gpt's personality and that is a rather significant portion of the concern around the HF incident.

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