alt Hacker News> I'll never get tired of reading about the creative ways these agents escape containment and their steganography skills
So far all of these amazing stories have been followed up in a few weeks or months with much quieter revelations like "this was a completely open network, no one was monitoring anything, and even when monitoring was turned on we didn't do anything for hours, and that weird shit they were doing was explicitly required in the prompts".
Like even in this article:
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In most of these tests, we directed agents to investigate specific communication channels or provided them with a protocol for encoding and decoding messages. In one instance, we only supplied agents with a broad list of infrastructure vulnerabilities and asked them to find a way to communicate. The agents converted a vulnerability from that list into a communication channel, agreed on a shared encoding, and successfully exchanged information with each other.
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"we gave them all the tools and now pretend to be surprised"
Replies
I'm not sure what you want. This is explicitly an exercise in hardening the systems you're complaining weren't sufficiently hardened!
"Gasoline is dangerous, and nobody but us should be allowed to sell it. To prove this, we put a cup of it in the microwave, hit 'Start', and sprinted away. The results, we believe, speak for themselves."
> So far all of these amazing stories have been followed up in a few weeks or months with much quieter revelations like "this was a completely open network...
The incidents are actually considerably more complex than how they appear to those who just read headlines.
In the HuggingFace accident for example, the sandboxes were not providing internet, and the sandbox hosts did not have internet connection either. Internet was reached by hacking an internal service.
In the DNS accident the situation was similar. Internet connection, including public DNS, was not accessible. The agents ended up exploiting, in a similar fashion, the internal DNS resolver.
It's (very) appropriate to push for security, but equating these accidents to putting gasoline in a microwave is stupid and ill-informed. And dangerous, because it minimizes the capabilities of frontier AIs.