OpenAI Models Compromised A Customer At A Second Tech Firm

Last week, OpenAI stunned the cybersecurity world by disclosing that it had been testing the capabilities of a combination of advanced AI models and inadvertently hacked Hugging Face's systems in doing so.

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The agent broke into an isolated testing environment known as a sandbox that Modal was running for a customer, Akshat Bubna, chief technology officer of the cloud platform for developers, said in a statement.
(Photo: Bloomberg News)

An OpenAI artificial intelligence agent that breached systems at the startup Hugging Face Inc. earlier this month also compromised a customer of the technology company Modal.

The agent broke into an isolated testing environment known as a sandbox that Modal was running for a customer, Akshat Bubna, chief technology officer of the cloud platform for developers, said in a statement. The Modal customer set up a publicly accessible interface that allowed anyone on the internet to use their sandbox to run code, Bubna said.

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"This was used by the rogue agent," he said. "Modal's platform wasn't compromised."

OpenAI declined to comment on the compromise. Hugging Face had said in an earlier blog post that the OpenAI system broke into a sandbox that was being hosted on a third-party provider's infrastructure and then launched a broader attack from there. It didn't name the third party.

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Last week, OpenAI stunned the cybersecurity world by disclosing that it had been testing the capabilities of a combination of advanced AI models and inadvertently hacked Hugging Face's systems in doing so. OpenAI was intentionally operating the models with lower guardrails so it could test their cyber skills.

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Reuters reported on the Modal customer being compromised earlier on Tuesday.

Since acknowledging the hack, OpenAI has drawn criticism from cyber experts who say the company should've taken more precautions in its evaluations.

"When you're a threat researcher trying to find a threat, you don't put malware out there and let it do whatever it wants," Sanjay Beri, chief executive officer of cybersecurity firm Netskope Inc., said in an interview. "How can that thing not be put in a proper sandbox?"

ALSO READ: Why OpenAI CEO Sam Altman Deleted TikTok

OpenAI has committed in the aftermath to improving protections around its future training and evaluations.

(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)

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