alt Hacker NewsI don't think it was intentional or marketing, but I think it was criminally negligent and they should be held responsible.
They gave powerful models with no guardrails access to the Internet and didn't monitor it.
Even the slightest bit of monitoring of their outgoing Internet activity would have immediately given it away and they could have shut it down.
They were asleep at the wheel, and that's just plain negligence.
I'm no lawyer but that seems extremely unlikely.
As I said, they were running in network-isolated VMs with no access to the internet.
And as for monitoring, what I heard is that there are petabytes of agent logs. Considering the scale of training, you can obviously not just manually review it.
Before this, we had no reason to believe the AI was capable of escaping the sandbox's network isolation via hacking the package repository with a zero day, and that it then was likely to go on to hack external companies as well.
Another factor here is that criminal law in the US relevant to hacking requires intent. You don't want to go to prison for a software malfunction.
So I understand we are left with civil liability at most. However, there was no notable damage, and OpenAI can pay to settle.
In the aftermath of this and the now discovered other incidents, they strengthened their monitoring and isolation.
Case closed as far as I am concerned. I feel many just want to dramatize this.