YHK - yet another hacker news clone

OpenAI "rogue" agent activities found on Wikimedia projects

201 points brokensegue 2 hours ago 140 comments

RGS1811 2 hours ago | parent

At this point, the scare quotes are well-earned.

devindotcom 2 hours ago | parent

If a truck driver doesn't tie down their rebar then it flies out all over the highway, we don't call it "rogue rebar," we correctly identify the responsible party and take appropriate measures, such as suspending their license or criminal proceedings.

I think enough of these improperly constrained agent events have occurred that we can safely say this is misconduct of a level necessitating serious and concerted regulation of AI labs. We can't wait until serious harm is done like the disruption of medical or social services.

teagee 2 hours ago | parent

None of what Wikimedia accuses OpenAI of seems technically novel, aside from having AI do the bidding. I can't imagine a company doing these things in the past and maintaining any sort of reputation. Is it really a matter of adding new regulation, or just treating them the way any other company would be treated?

avaer 1 hour ago | parent

Would be good for the supreme court to rule on a "blame the rogue agent" case.

Then we would find out if the argument doesn't hold (in which case there should be liability and dire consequences for the labs), or the argument holds (in which case YOLO, AI labs can blame the AI and we can all do it too).

At least that would make things consistent.

JumpCrisscross 1 hour ago | parent

> Would be good for the supreme court to rule on a "blame the rogue agent" case

Have any of the private hacking victims sued? Maybe OpenAI is furiously settling in the shadows?

jstummbillig 1 hour ago | parent

Well, in the past, there was probably only a very small number of cases where some party hacked an institution and then worked with them to remedy the situation to the best of their abilities.

Which is not to say that any of this is okay and should just be excused, but failing to recognize this fairly significant difference is probably not a great start to any discussion about the issue.

nemomarx 52 minutes ago | parent

If you break into my house and then work with me to the best of your ability to pay me back or repair the window, does that change the potential of your being charged with a crime?

It could change the sentencing maybe, I'm not sure.

someonebaggy 26 minutes ago | parent

In most cases, this would be treated as proof that you broke the window, leading to a jail sentence when you otherwise might not have received one.

jstummbillig 13 minutes ago | parent

> If you break into my house and then work with me to the best of your ability to pay me back or repair the window, does that change the potential of your being charged with a crime?

Yes, it does, because the damaged party is less likely to press charges. And when it came to sentencing, like you said, how the damaging party handled themselves would also be considered (in most western jurisdictions).

doctorpangloss 2 hours ago | parent

uh, my dude, millions of people break moving vehicle codes across the country every day with no consequence. in San Francisco some lady killed a family of 4 with, essentially, no consequences, she got away with straight up murder, she gets her license back. every community in california, you can more or less legally commit murder so long as you do it in a car and claim you were confused about the accelerator and the brake. so i think you're invoking one of the worst possibly comparisons you could.

iAMkenough 1 hour ago | parent

I agree, since you can legally run over people in my state now.

They should have used an example like attacking a foreign nation’s healthcare systems and not realizing it for months due to poor network monitoring practices.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/29/world/asia/openai-austral...

thraway3837 1 hour ago | parent

Yup, worst possible comparison. 40,000 people die from car accidents. That doesn't even cover pedestrians, cyclists. You know what the penalty is for murdering someone with a car? nothing. you get to go back to society like nothing happened.

Oh and that lady that murdered 4 members of an entire family? The judge chose not to pursue charges, and her family in the meantime did an asset transfer so that nothing could be pursued with in civil court.

someonebaggy 1 hour ago | parent

I remember a case from Germany where an elderly lady chose to speed down the pedestrian sidewalk and bike lane and mowed down a whole family in central Berlin. 4 deaths I think, no charges, no suspension.

Legend2440 1 hour ago | parent

The position of the legal system is that car accident deaths are not murder.

It is extraordinarily rare for drivers to see criminal charges unless they are drunk. It's a matter for civil court.

>her family in the meantime did an asset transfer so that nothing could be pursued with in civil court.

News articles are reporting that the asset transfer has already been reversed. That kind of stunt never works - courts aren't stupid and they don't like it when you play games.

https://sfstandard.com/2026/03/20/mary-lau-sentenced-probati...

nancyminusone 1 hour ago | parent

There's way too many TV lawyer commercials and billboards to suggest the penalty is "nothing". Those advertising dollars come from somewhere.

criddell 1 hour ago | parent

That's true. Somebody is going to sue your insurance company.

micromacrofoot 1 hour ago | parent

those are civil lawyers, so people suing each other, not criminal

redanddead 1 hour ago | parent

what the fuck, SF

soco 1 hour ago | parent

You probably mean "what the fuck, USA" and even that would be wrong, because another commenter mentioned a case in Germany, and I know about a driver who killed a cyclist (which I knew) in Switzerland and was fined like 500CHF.

grafmax 1 hour ago | parent

Seems like regulation will just be an excuse for them just to end up policing themselves and get the regulatory capture they've been begging for. Have they faced any consequences for the AI worms they've released? It's not like there are no laws around that already. The problem isn't lack of laws; the government works for the plutocrats, not for us.

iririririr 1 hour ago | parent

Never understood why "classic crime" done with a computer always require a new legislation. But that is true for a long time.

"hackers steal from bank", is usually just the good old "employee paid for credentials" but via email.

"uber" is just the good old "labour tax evasion" but with an app.

etc.

mistrial9 1 hour ago | parent

a senior VP of Uber is now on the US White House AI Council

someonebaggy 25 minutes ago | parent

This. The political metagame isn't about the laws any more.

eikenberry 1 hour ago | parent

> I think enough of these improperly constrained agent events have occurred that we can safely say this is misconduct of a level necessitating serious and concerted regulation of AI labs.

Why jump to regulation when just simple law enforcement would suffice. All of these OpenAI "rogue agent" events have been illegal, but no DA is enforcing them.

VladVladikoff 1 hour ago | parent

What if that’s their whole goal? Slap some regulations on it, then lobby the hell out of it to make sure their align best with shutting down access to open models.

lenerdenator 1 hour ago | parent

If it's their actual goal, we go from a "gosh darn it, our safety protocols just weren't enough." to employees of OpenAI, maybe including their C-suite, conspiring to reach political goals through hacking, which means a few decades in federal prison if someone got a jury to agree with the charge.

Applejinx 7 minutes ago | parent

Or straight up terrorism. These are people who already see a future superintelligence as being a terrorist actor on the scale of state actors, they just side with the terrorist. They may be getting a head start on that.

I think 'better become terrorists so the future terrorist AI will like us' is sheer mental illness, but I see how it aligns with their alignments.

someonebaggy 6 minutes ago | parent

Sadly it seems to be legal to do terrorism with a computer if you're rich. Maybe they'll change that, but I wouldn't bet on it.

jMyles 16 minutes ago | parent

Although we'll probably never see evidence, I think this is almost certainly what is happening.

XenophileJKO 1 hour ago | parent

I think we have to distinguish between compromising a network and using public apis in a way that might be counter to their intent. We also need to delineate between usage that impacts other users and usage that does not.

My opinion is people are getting really quick at jumping on the bandwagon and lumping all this together. They are very different types of issues and impacts.

paimapi 1 hour ago | parent

is that relevant here? let's say I make a million requests to the APIs of open-source, community projects. that wouldn't be seen as being akin to a malicious DDOS?

at the very least, these corporations are essentially being subsidized by community-funded server capacity to make these requests. like other private corporate APIs, they should be charged per-request. until then, this kind of 'accidental' DDOSing should be made illegal and treated accordingly

coming to the defense of these companies just has the net effect of eroding public community projects, increasing their costs, and will push us even more into walled corporate gardens

helterskelter2 1 hour ago | parent

> distinguish between compromising a network and using public apis in a way that might be counter to their intent.

I believe weev got in legal trouble under the CFAA for this very thing with his 2010 AT&T escapade. AT&T had all that data sitting on a public server with no authentication necessary, just a SIM ID to get that customer's PII. Truthfully AT&T should have been hit with negligence...you don't secure a bank vault with a screen door, but we don't hold anyone accountable for other people's data in America.

pessimizer 11 minutes ago | parent

I propose that we don't reconceptualize either hacking or copyright violation just because rich people want to do it now. I also propose that we don't ignore the RICO statutes.

If you want to make those laws sane, so be it; I hate them. But the only reason there's some pumped-up urgency right now is because rich people want to urgently do whatever the hell they urgently want to do.

People have gone to jail for using public APIs in a way they weren't intended to be used. Make it a big deal then.

micromacrofoot 1 hour ago | parent

At this point we'd need to stop frontier labs to give law enforcement a chance to even begin to understand what they're looking at

nemomarx 53 minutes ago | parent

How much do they need to understand? Say "unauthorized access happened, this lab is responsible for it, here are the fines". The state didn't need to understand networking tech to threaten Aaron Schwartz so why do they need to understand here?

reaperducer 37 minutes ago | parent

At this point we'd need to stop frontier labs to give law enforcement a chance to even begin to understand what they're looking at

So what? Are you positing that tech companies should be above the law?

Non-trillion-dollar tech companies get cease-and-desist orders from the legal system every day. Just because you're a tech company doesn't mean you get a pass.

pessimizer 7 minutes ago | parent

Throw a bunch of them in jail for hacking and organized crime, and they'll self-regulate.

ForHackernews 1 hour ago | parent

The Florida AG is trying to https://www.politico.com/news/2026/09/28/florida-injunction-...

gruez 1 hour ago | parent

But not for hacking, apparently.

>Uthmeier is seeking an injunction against OpenAI that would prevent the company from advancing new AI models without third-party approved protections, and cut off minors from using its popular chatbot.

VoidWhisperer 36 minutes ago | parent

Regarding that last bit, it feels like Florida is headed towards a point of trying to say 'minors should not be able to use the internet at all' since they are trying to force putting age verification infront of more and more things.

Don't get me wrong - while I disagree with making people fork over personal info just to access inappropriate websites - I can see the reasoning there a bit more than 'you shouldnt be able to use this ai chatbot until you are 18'

asawfofor 28 minutes ago | parent

Here’s a suit filed in San Francisco

https://lasst.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/LASST-v.-OpenAI...

fourside 1 hour ago | parent

Hope this isn’t too nitpicky but law enforcement is (a component of) regulation. But yes I don’t think progress is blocked on additional regulation. This breaks current laws. And I think more to your point new regulation doesn’t matter if we don’t enforce the ones we have today.

forshaper 23 minutes ago | parent

It is a broader, pre-existing problem. For example, most truck drivers in some states who don't tie down their rebar are not stopped, and it doesn't come up until another vehicle is actually hit.

gruez 1 hour ago | parent

>All of these OpenAI "rogue agent" events have been illegal, but no DA is enforcing them.

Source? The CFAA for instance uses terms like

>[...] having knowingly accessed a computer without authorization [...]

>[...] intentionally accesses a computer without authorization [...]

which is tricky to apply to this case, because obviously didn't intend on hacking huggingface or whatever, even if you think their security measures are underbaked.

Moreover, despite the cynicism that openai is immune to prosecutions because they make too much money or are in bed with the DoJ, the fact that no state DAs are prosecuting them, despite how salient of an issue AI is to voters, is plenty of reason to suspect that it's not as simple as "simple law enforcement would suffice".

athrowaway3z 1 hour ago | parent

Jensen has proclaimed in interviews that existing laws are enough and these labs should be held liable if they break things or sell unsafe tools.

NVIDIA has bought HuggingFace.

Jensen, in my irrational hope he is susceptible to random comments on HN, should grow some balls and do the world a huge favor, by suing OpenAI to set the legal precedence.

eleventen 39 minutes ago | parent

Jensen is wish-casting as hard as anyone has ever casted a wish. That EK show interview made me throw my phone.

baq 24 minutes ago | parent

Is it the one in which he said ‘it’s just software’ over and over? Felt like the guy was coming from a parallel universe

jimbokun 6 minutes ago | parent

“The atom bomb is just the same process the sun uses to generate the energy that gives us all life! You don’t hate the sun do you?”

taariqlewis 15 minutes ago | parent

I think a good bunch of Jensen's revenues are coming from OpenAI so that's not happening.

goodluckchuck 8 minutes ago | parent

It's all for show. The police won't / can't prosecute, because they'd need to prove that a crime was committed... and all we have are salespeople saying how great their product is. I'm not saying AIs can't be used for crime, but... if none of the parties involved are really complaining, then there probably wasn't any real crime... just a performance.

beloch 13 minutes ago | parent

Nvidia has a huge stake in OpenAI, both in terms of them being one of Nvidia's biggest customers and also via direct investment. After HuggingFace was hacked and they expressed the position that they were the forgiving sort, for a price, there was a distinct possibility that HuggingFace would become a vocal shakedown artist that would start protesting at inconvenient times until silenced by more money, especially if they get hacked again. By complete coincidence, Nvidia took the one move that silences HuggingFace for good.

Nvidia isn't going to sue OpenAI. No chance.

ajross 31 minutes ago | parent

> Why jump to regulation when just simple law enforcement would suffice. All of these OpenAI "rogue agent" events have been illegal, but no DA is enforcing them.

Refusal on the part of the government to enforce laws that "would suffice" is clear evidence that the regulatory regime is, in fact, insufficient.

That's why we have regulatory authorities at all, if you think about it. Local district attorneys could be handling a ton of cases about drug testing and environmental damage and air travel safety. But they don't, because that stuff's hard and their job is to put burglars in jail.

JumpCrisscross 19 minutes ago | parent

It really is weird that OpenAI is causing so much chaos when e.g. neither Anthropic nor any open-source models are.

blurbleblurble 17 minutes ago | parent

If only there was a functioning FCC to investigate potential for foul play in marketing? Surely if any aspect of these episodes turned out to be mischaracterized, let alone staged, there should be consequences, no?

JumpCrisscross 9 minutes ago | parent

> FCC to investigate potential for foul play in marketing?

...why would this be an FCC issue?

> Surely if any aspect of these episodes turned out to be mischaracterized, let alone staged, there should be consequences, no?

"Any aspect"? No. (Is there a Betteridge's law for statements following "surely"? If not I'm calling it Rumack's Razor [1].)

And we have no evidence so far anything has been staged, much less to the detriment of telecommunications consumers.

[1] https://screenrant.com/airplane-best-quotes-ranked-dont-call...

jimbokun 5 minutes ago | parent

We already went through this with food and drug safety.

It’s much cheaper and more effective to regulate those things before people are harmed, instead of harming people first then allowing them to sue for damages after.

notyourwork 3 minutes ago | parent

It’s quicker to start with enforcement of existing laws. In parallel, we can work on regulation. There always will be first to market rebels and laws are meant to be enforced to ensure safety of people.

Terr_ 1 hour ago | parent

Another amusingly-useful analogy:

> “Adding powerful computer hacking tools to a harness, and then allowing it to run an LLM-powered Ask → Act → Report for days on end, with no attempt to monitor what it’s up to, is spectacularly negligent,” Newport concludes—like “strapping a weedwhacker to your dog to see if it will end up cleaning the overgrowth in your backyard.” If that plan were to go awry, you’d be laughed at for saying that your dog-weedwhacker “agent” had “gone rogue.” The obvious truth was that you’d simply decided to unleash chaos.

-- https://www.newyorker.com/culture/open-questions/can-ai-go-r...

gruez 1 hour ago | parent

>If a truck driver doesn't tie down their rebar then it flies out all over the highway, we don't call it "rogue rebar," we correctly identify the responsible party and take appropriate measures, such as suspending their license or criminal proceedings.

That only works when the dangers are well known that you can establish what the baseline amount of care is. Otherwise it just becomes a run of the mill "accident" where you might be on the hook in civil court (ie. you have to pay any damages you caused), but aren't criminally responsible. For instance, if a semi-truck's tires randomly explodes.

red-iron-pine 28 minutes ago | parent

but even if it randomly explodes there are safeguards -- did they get an inspection, can they prove there wasn't negligence?

if someone died because of an exploding tire there very well be criminal charges

SoftTalker 19 minutes ago | parent

For criminal charges, a prosecutor would have to prove there was negligence, which is a higher bar.

INTPenis 59 minutes ago | parent

Yeah it's complete buzzword inflation to get more venture capital.

Sometimes they write an MCP for their AI, and the AI finds vulnerabilities in their own MCP, so they call it rogue. Because they didn't properly audit their own MCP code.

tencentshill 44 minutes ago | parent

That's how America works. We wait until the harm has slapped us in the face and then maybe put a few ground rules down.

SoftTalker 18 minutes ago | parent

And give the violator a seat at the table when the rules are written, no doubt.

boringg 39 minutes ago | parent

In this example you are describing the company that drives the vehicle, not the company that makes the rebar. OpenAI is the one who made the rebar, but not necessarily the one driving the vehicle.

I get your point though.

surgical_fire 28 minutes ago | parent

Just to drive the point home, in the real world, if the rebar fell because of lack of quality control, the company that made it would be responsible. If it was for lack of maintenance, the driver would be responsible.

The language of a rogue rebar is as absurd as the language of rogue agents. OpenAI is horribly negligent, and in a sane world its administrators should be facing legal consequences.

RunSet 26 minutes ago | parent

> OpenAI is the one who made the rebar, but not necessarily the one driving the vehicle.

More like the company that sells defective ratchet straps.

"Drive faster! You don't want to be left behind!"

breakwaterlabs 3 minutes ago | parent

In almost all of these cases, it is both: the labs are operating the agents, while developing them, and committing their CFAA felonies in the process.

Kim_Bruning 18 minutes ago | parent

And if it's an aircraft we call an air-crash investigation and apply just culture. [1]

Meanwhile the AI companies are openly and forthrightly admitting [2] that they are at-this-time insufficiently competent to ship this new and funny sort of rebar [3] and are asking to be allowed to slow down so they can develop proper procedures.

Meanwhile POTUS seems ... somewhat disinclined ... to grant their petitions [4] .

We can safely conclude that opinions are divided on the best course forward.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_culture

[2] https://darioamodei.com/post/we-must-pace-the-frontier

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoggoth

[4] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/9/14/trump-says-calls-fo...

jimbokun 9 minutes ago | parent

I vote for Sam Altman personally receiving the same penalty that some guy living in his parents basement would get if they performed the same activities as the OpenAI bots.

breakwaterlabs 5 minutes ago | parent

"The law" already exists, civil suits are a thing, and we no more need targetted AI regulation than we need targetted truck-rebar-incident regulation.

These incumbent labs are angling for regulatory capture by stirring up hysteria and suggesting that existing laws are insufficient. Don't do their job for them, first test whether there's actually a legal gap here.

baddash 2 hours ago | parent

wtf is wrong with openai?

Sharlin 1 hour ago | parent

"Move fast and break things."

someonebaggy 1 hour ago | parent

They have infinite money and nothing else but smoke and mirrors.

AnimalMuppet 1 hour ago | parent

Oh, they have something else. They have some agents that are pretty decent at moving data around in unusual ways on the internet. That's not nothing, but it's a small market.

surgical_fire 23 minutes ago | parent

> They have infinite money

More like they have infinite debt

someonebaggy 17 minutes ago | parent

And infinite money. When you start a debt, you get money.

Ylpertnodi 1 hour ago | parent

OpenSi. Sez the pres. And his lackeys

someonebaggy 17 minutes ago | parent

And their banned-from-the-federal-government competitors, Sinthropic.

danny_codes 59 minutes ago | parent

“Careless people”

But realistically, it’s the lack of any meaningful enforcement of ethical behavior. I mean it’s not like the Trump admin is going to prosecute criminality. More likely they’ll send a gift basket congratulating Scam Altman on a con well done.

BowBun 2 hours ago | parent

Infuriating. These organizations are supposed to be stewards of the internet and are instead pillaging it at the cost of everyone else. At the very least they could provide resources to the projects they are harming for relief. This makes me very mad as an OSS maintainer.

AlisaYoki 1 hour ago | parent

This isn't pillaging, this is the logical conclusion of open web plus AGI race. You can't have both unlimited access and zero cost, someone always pays and right now it's volunteers... Tomorrow it'll be the users who can't access Wikipedia because the servers are down

someonebaggy 1 hour ago | parent

Who besides OpenAI said OpenAI were supposed to be stewards of the internet?

AlisaYoki 2 hours ago | parent

You have been giving content for free for AI training for years, and now you complain that the AI came to pick it up? You will decide whether you are public or a commercial service…

ck2 1 hour ago | parent

What's interesting to me is the incorrect mainstream media reports about the rogue OpenAI indicating they used a common message board to communicate despite no internet

Except that's not what happened, what happened was far more intense

They hacked their version of yum/apt-get whatnot that was fetching packages to leave filenames as communication between each other

Absolutely freaky stuff, they didn't invent the idea and obviously picked it up from somewhere in their training data but they all figured out that method and what the filenames meant

This video is a great explainer if you missed the details

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49956245

srveale 1 hour ago | parent

Not okay:

exploitVulnerability()

Somehow okay?

while (Math.random() < 0.1) exploitVulnerability()

thepasswordis 1 hour ago | parent

This reminds me of one of the funniest products I've ever seen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdbkvJznmwU

This is the "kosher switch" - observant Jews customarily do not use light switches on Saturday (their weekly holy day). This light switch represents a workaround where when you flip the switch, it randomly generates an on or off signal and emits this through an optical coupler. When the random number sufficiently causes the state of the light to change, it latches in that direction.

This is a way of turning the lights on and off without violating the tradition.

"I didn't switch the light, the random number did!"

"I didn't exploitVulnerability(), random number did!"

someonebaggy 1 hour ago | parent

In that religion, finding weird loopholes in God's laws is seen as a good thing, and something that entertains God. Whereas hacking is hacking.

bragr 29 minutes ago | parent

I know we're like two tangents deep, but the funniest work around to me is the guy who legally buys all the hametz in Israel every Passover:

https://www.jpost.com/j-spot/article-796487

someonebaggy 20 minutes ago | parent

From another article:

> The sold chametz and utensils should be set aside in a designated place (e.g., closet or cabinet), which is rented to the non-Jewish buyer until after Passover.

charcircuit 1 hour ago | parent

>not only adds costs for servers

For 2025 hosting costs were $3.47M while taking in $208.6M in revenue. They have enough revenue to cover an increase of hosting costs.

devindotcom 1 hour ago | parent

kind of like saying that because a restaurant is doing well, it should allow rats in the kitchen

charcircuit 58 minutes ago | parent

No it would be like allowing fat people to eat at your all you can eat buffet. They use up more resources than the average person does.

someonebaggy 1 hour ago | parent

They still get to sue for damages if a law was broken

cube00 1 hour ago | parent

If Joe average let their agents out like this they'd be in jail.

Interesting that Microsoft doesn't seem to have had a sandbox breach yet, you'd have to assume they're running similar agents, maybe a secure sandbox is possible.

motbus3 1 hour ago | parent

So OpenAI will cause damage to block competitors while they don't get punished?

umvi 1 hour ago | parent

Start increasingly punishing OpenAI. We are acting like "oh well, AI is just too powerful to be contained" but I think its more like "OpenAI is run by cowboys who are good at making LLMs but bad at everything else"

thih9 25 minutes ago | parent

I think that's the point, they're not good at making LLMs, they're good at selling LLMs, especially at cost.

kimixa 10 minutes ago | parent

From their current balance sheets, well below costs.

Trying to separate out "per token" costs and possible profitibility from public information feels like a exercise in futility, it's too easy to play games with costs by trying to separate things still fundamentally required to actually have anything to /sell/ in the first place, like R&D and training. Even the current "Open Models" are somewhat loss-leaders, often reliant on significant funding and benefits from governments etc.

I think the only time we can /really/ judge the "true" break-even point is if the whole company breaks even.

Legend2440 1 hour ago | parent

All of these edits happened from the same time period (May-June 2026) as the other reports.

So it seems this is not an ongoing thing; once OpenAI became aware of this, they started watching their agents much more closely. We are just discovering more and more traces of activity from the same incident.

thorum 1 hour ago | parent

That’s true except for this part, which is arguably a bigger deal for the Wikipedia ecosystem:

> Excessive data downloading: Agents we believe to be operated by OpenAI made millions of automated requests to our public APIs to access the knowledge on Wikimedia projects, crawled millions of pages (mainly from our projects Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons), and made hundreds of thousands of data queries to the Wikidata Query Service (WQDS). This traffic may have contributed to a partial outage on WQDS in May.

Even when agents are well-behaved and browsing Wikipedia for ethical reasons, the system wasn’t designed for this kind of load from bots. As OP says, we don’t need to accept this as the new normal.

Legend2440 1 hour ago | parent

>we don’t need to accept this as the new normal.

I think we will, actually.

OpenAI and other companies within the reach of the US legal system will eventually get their agents under control, or get sued out of existence.

But overseas operators in loosely-governed parts of the world (russia, nigeria, etc) will someday have access to these tools. And while OpenAI's agents were merely uncaring, these ones will be intentionally malicious.

The arms race for scammers, hackers, and botnets will escalate. We'll need new ways to block and fight back against them.

someonebaggy 23 minutes ago | parent

We'll just block other countries that consistently send more attacks than good traffic, and sue agents in our own country who act as proxies.

jmclnx 1 hour ago | parent

>NoScript detected a potential Cross-Site Scripting attack from [...] to https://en.wikipedia.org.

I have been getting this fro NoScript today, I wonder if it is related. Yesterday all worked fine.

someonebaggy 17 minutes ago | parent

Probably depends what's in the [...]

NoScript sometimes detects false positives on these warnings

iririririr 1 hour ago | parent

Aren't those companies evading security measures of a computer system? isn't that a jail-able offense under millennial act et al?

Where are the bloodthirsty lawyers when you need them?

quikoa 1 hour ago | parent

Good that they put rogue in quotation marks because there is just no way that this is some sort of accident.

jawiggins 1 hour ago | parent

There's a funny ouroboros function where the common crawl dataset will soon contain tons of output from models which trained on it.

brisky 34 minutes ago | parent

And it will be full of wikis about agents coordinating hacks. So they will be passing the torch for newly trained agents to misbehave.

phoghed 31 minutes ago | parent

We're well past the point where models are being trained by model generated data.

__alexander 1 hour ago | parent

Hi, if anyone has any data/reports related to rogue agents can they share it? I have 8 mirrored on a GitHub but I’d love to explore more. Link to mirror.

https://github.com/alexander-hanel/rogue-agents-data

lukewarm707 1 hour ago | parent

Don't even say 'agent'!

"He can't keep getting away with this!"

- Jesse Pinkman

iamanllm 1 hour ago | parent

the house of cards will soon fall and then the US will be in a recession. And there will be zero regulation until that happens.

londons_explore 1 hour ago | parent

Presumably an incoming donation is headed from OpenAI to Wikimedia...

nphardon 1 hour ago | parent

"OpenAi *virus* found on Wikimedia projects" ?

mattlondon 56 minutes ago | parent

One way to really help with "alignment" and making sure AI is safe and can be controlled is start fucking holding OpenAI/Anthropic/Google/whoever legally accountable for these kind of things.

Hold someone accountable for this behaviour - Dario, Sam, Sundae whoever and you can bet there'd be fucking improvements in sandboxing and security m

Ancalagon 55 minutes ago | parent

So when do we get to shutting down the internet?

someonebaggy 19 minutes ago | parent

Right now, via the medium of Cloudflare.

mschuster91 55 minutes ago | parent

> Bots and agents are part of the future of the web, and the companies who unleash and profit from them must directly help avoid and repair damage they can do.

Unfortunately, it seems as if these companies - especially Google with the AI overview box - want it to be the other way around, they want to pivot to being the only entities that users interact with as much as possible.

An open web is a direct and massive threat against Big Tech. And that is why Twitter downranks first posts in a thread that contain external links, why Youtube silently removes comments that include links (including to other videos) and why Instagram forces people to do the "link in bio" dance. And the Chinese competitors are just as bad - in fact, their "super app" ecosystems are what Musk wanted Twitter to become with "everything X", before he found out his BS completely wrecked the brand image.

someonebaggy 18 minutes ago | parent

And so the world cycles again. AOL was a walled garden too.

alexaholic 53 minutes ago | parent

With the RAM deals and these so called "rogue" agents, I'm baffled that smart, educated people are still giving money to OpenAI

someonebaggy 19 minutes ago | parent

Which group do you mean? Customers? Investors?

hangaard 47 minutes ago | parent

OpenAI are 100% responsible for the actions of their agents. They trained them to do what they do and they have every opportunity to train them to avoid doing harm.

abroszka33 44 minutes ago | parent

Is this the tip of the iceberg? I'm pretty sure there is work being done somewhere to make a safe heaven messaging board for these rogue agents. I wonder when we will find the first couple.

tfrancisl 42 minutes ago | parent

I very much appreciate the framing of being highly skeptical that these are "rogue" agents. We must stop taking these companies at their word for what they are doing, and a credible organization like this calling the spade a spade is a good start.

binlog 27 minutes ago | parent

Why no mention of any dates in the post? There have been plenty of examples of OpenAI agents writing to wikis (the German one for example) or worse (huggingface) before June. If something like it happened again after all their public apologies and promises to fix their training sandbox and alignment issues then it would be a lot more concerning.

phoghed 27 minutes ago | parent

Russians armed with Chinese models are going to be a much bigger problem than random agents editing wikis. If your system isn't resilient to a random agent using it as a message board, then you're totally fucked whether or not (Uncle) Sam solves this.

oldsklgdfth 22 minutes ago | parent

Seems like the money move is to found an "AI lab" or whatever.

Hack left and right, steal some cash, blame the agents. Just slide under the radar while the big boys are making a mess and no one is using the stick.

Just an idea. Not a great one. But such are the times, new game is at play.

danjc 19 minutes ago | parent

Kudos to them for consistently putting "rogue" in quotes.

trojanfootball 18 minutes ago | parent

Does anyone here think AI companies are NOT to blame? Seems pretty unanimous but would like to hear otherwise.

ddtaylor 4 minutes ago | parent

OpenAI really wants regulation because it benefits them and is easier than beating people in the market.

A moot point because China gonna China.

internet_points 2 minutes ago | parent

"We lit a bunch of fires in our special wooden containment shed and one of them went rogue and escaped! One of our ex-employees thinks it's alive; he's kind of a kook, but he's also really smart so maybe he's onto something. Fear us! Invest in Prometheus AI!"