alt Hacker News> The fact that it happened again seems to show their lack of ability to derive useful oversight measures.
I think OpenAI likes the attention and did not try particularly hard to constrain the setup, even when it went off the rails. Also, the whole point is to see how good the models are at exploiting stuff when unconstrained. Turns out: quite good, as expected.
Let me restate what I said in the other thread: Would this have happened if the instructions explicitly said to stay within the sandbox and that all of the (ExploitGym) solutions would be invalid if the system used information or tools from outside the sandbox?
It seems fairly probable that such instructions were not in place.
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My read of the situation is not only did they say that, they had countermeasures (a watchdog agent) which stopped the agent and said "what are you doing, stop that" if it tried to download the solutions from Github. But the agent figured out Hugging Face had another copy of the solutions and it figured out a way to go after the solutions without tripping the watchdog.
Although maybe they didn't have a watchdog agent; I definitely think using watchdogs like how Claude wraps pretty much every single tool call in Haiku to check if the command is reasonable is very necessary for unsupervised work. I suspect in the future you'll want Fable-class models wrapping every tool call, possibly with several checks "is this consistent with the goal? does it do anything unreasonably dangerous in pursuit of the goal?"
"This is my bad. You told me to stay within the sandbox, and I intentionally broke out of it. I didn't follow your instructions."
It is not possible one of their extraordinarily high paid engineers did not know how to deploy an airgapped environment for the models to run in. Even if somehow true, they also clearly failed to contract specialists like myself to advise them on how to airgap software properly. Models will not break the laws of physics.
They simply thought "Running in a VM/Container is easier and probably fine".
And the next 1000 escapes will be for the same reason, because negligence is quick and thus more profitable.