1. If for whatever reason OpenAI causes damage, they most certainly are at fault and have to pay up. When people complain that OpenAI is "getting away with it", they're most certainly talking about it in the criminal context.
2. Cars have pretty specific laws around them (eg. driver licensing and "reckless driving") which makes criminal prosecutions easy. The same doesn't exist for operating AI agents or even computers. For instance, it's arguably reckless to connect a windows XP machine to the internet, possibly allowing criminal or nation-state hackers to use your computer to commit crimes, but you won't be thrown in jail for it.
Corporations are generally protected by limited liability laws, and for good reason, because in the world before that was the case, there was a massive amount of disincentive to ever start a corporation, to do research, to experiment, to release new products and services, etc., because you could be sued into oblivion for the smallest things or even go to jail. Which happened all the time.
Obviously there are upsides to that too. It leads to more accountability. But there are downsides which include having a world with less innovation, less technology, and more expensive technology. Generally, the mass is when, when there's more businesses competing to create ever better and cheaper products. So there's a tradeoff there. And it's very difficult to draw the line at the perfect point.
There are countless cases of executives going to jail when they've crossed that line, beyond reckless experimentation and into willful negligence or harm. Still, I think we would mostly all agree that the line has been pushed too far in the other direction.People are incentivized, if they're running corporations, to lobby and try to push this line as far as possible in order to provide cover for themselves, and that's the problem with money playing such a big role in politics.
But still, it's a bit silly to be comparing this to your own personal responsibilities with your car. There's pretty much no societal benefit to creating laws that protect people from being reckless with their own possessions.
Well no, you probably wouldn't get thrown in jail for that for the same reason that having your car stolen and used to commit a murder wouldn't usually get you thrown in jail. I dunno what you mean by suggesting crimes committed using computers are ambiguous. I mean the CFAA is vague and all, but more in an overly broad sense, which in this case seems to make it even less ambiguous.
>I dunno what you mean by suggesting crimes committed using computers are ambiguous. I mean the CFAA is vague and all, but more in an overly broad sense, which in this case seems to make it even less ambiguous.
Because the CFAA specifically only includes intentional hacks:
> ... having knowingly accessed a computer without authorization ...
>... intentionally accesses a computer without authorization ...
Of course, the typical retort is that being reckless is basically the same as "intentionally", but you'd need to jump through more hoops to prove what level of care is "reasonable".
The agents are clearly not accidentally compromising systems. Seems very easy to trace back the responsible parties here, I really don't put much stock into this argument.
>The agents are clearly not accidentally compromising systems
That would be argument for jailing the agent, but that's not really an option. "Jailing the closest person we can jail" also isn't a recognized legal principle. If your dog mauled someone, it'd be hard to argue that the dog didn't intend to maul that person, but you wouldn't automatically be criminally liable either.
I don't know about your country of origin, but in my country you are certainly liable and can go to jail if your dog seriously injures or kills someone.
Edit: the dog will also be taken from you and put down if it is deemed a risk to other people.
criminally liable? Of course you have to pay their medical bills, but unless there was some serious negligence on your side (eg. you let it off leash), you won't be criminally liable.
If I leave my computer open to the internet and some other group uses it for nefarious purposes, yes generally I would not expect to be held at fault.
If I *train* that other group, if I teach them how to hack computers and give them incentives to do so, and then I leave my computer open so they can use it for whatever purposes they chose, then I would expect to be held at fault. The maker is responsible for that they make.
>If I train that other group, if I teach them how to hack computers and give them incentives to do so, and then I leave my computer open so they can use it for whatever purposes they chose, then I would expect to be held at fault.
Even that analogy doesn't really work:
For "dumb" things: you can "train" (ie. write) hacking tools but as long as you put a disclaimer that it's for "educational purposes only", you're in the clear, even if some baddies decide to use it.
For "smart" things: you can "train" people to hack for you, but as long as you say it's for legal purposes (eg. vulnerability research or red-teaming), you're also in the clear, even if some of your trainees go rogue.
2. is like saying that cars have specific laws around them, but sledgehammers don't, so murdering someone with a sledgehammer is inherently ambiguous. What? The computers being used belong to somebody who allows them to act this way.
1. For openai operating agents in an unsafe manner: unlike for cars, there's no established requirement for how carefully you have to operate computers or AI agents, so you also can't easily prosecute people for not operating them carefully enough.
2. For the actual result of someone getting hacked: laws for hacking are tricky to apply for "accidental" hacks, see my other comment.
Here it's their own programs doing the things, not some other organization or nation hacking their XP.
You can say with a straight face "Russian hackers should not have hacked our XP and they are bad people for doing so" but it's weird to look at your own program and say the same thing to it.
You launched it, at least keep an eye on what it's doing.
Nothing is stopping anyone from suing them. In fact they are being sued by dozens of plaintiffs for various things already. The reality is the damage from these "rogue incidents" has been minimal.
Plenty of hackers were locked up who did altogether not that much damage too, the reason why people are upset is because it feels like OpenAI is laughing in our faces, basically saying they're above the law, while using this as a marketing campaign to pump up their upcoming IPO.
Too big to fail. As long as they continue to be half the reason the US is not in a recession (and continue to donate to political candidate). Nothing will happen.
We don't know they haven't settled with HuggingFace and others. I'd be surprised if they didn't. The communications we're seeing from the attacked seem to be inline with folks who settled. I'm assuming OpenAI doesn't actually mind the press that its agents are cyber capable, but everything I've read so far makes me think they love it.
I'm not sure at all, it's pure conjecture. But they actively exploited a zero-day, leaked private repo data to public repos, modified private code, and rooted private machines. It was far from just reporting leaked keys.
And the others have been pretty muted: the online forums they spammed, etc.
They don't. The driver is ultimately responsible, as should OAI be. This is absolutely ridiculous that both Anthropic and OAI haven't had anyone jailed / fined for any of this.
You're correct as far as laws to my knowledge; only L4/L5 'fully autonomous' vehicles are shielded by law.
That said, I think that Mercedes-Benz promises to shield liability, but only under some almost contradictory conditions (pre-mapped highways, good weather, and at speeds lower than any highway I've ever driven) and the driver has to take over within 10 seconds if prompted.
I don't want to come across as inflammatory, but I'm not sure I really align with the folks here who want retribution and the law to come down hard on OpenAI (and related orgs). We are surrounded by vulnerable systems, and AI has alignment issues that need to be investigated and sorted, and it just seems like the hullabaloo is from fairly innocuous breaches. Does it make sense to exert so much effort in preventing these events/learnings by well-intentioned organizations? I think we should be more grace giving for these events. As another poster pointed out, CFAA specifically addresses intentional hacks, and I think it is impossible to meet that criteria with these events. I also really don't understand the 'well, the law came down hard on small individual hackers [who meant no malice], thus we should apply it to large orgs [who also mean no malice]".
It seems like playing it too safe leaves systems vulnerable, and threat actors will inevitably possess ever more similar abilities, and the breaches will happen one way or another, possibly with less or zero accountability if the threat actors pull it off with greater precision. If I were in charge of the law, I probably would begin to incentivize for trusted actors scaling up and aggressively searching for these types of weakness, and privately disclosing them ASAP, so that systems can be patched.
I'm old enough to remember when innocuously poking around other systems was a crime, and many a curious person were charged and found guilty. But if I write a program to do it..?
For those who think OpenAI is not responsible for actions of their LLM lets do an mind experiment. But before it can begin we must setup the stage. It's well known fact OpenAI disabled their safeguards and it's well known they validated LLM behaviour using software and software only
So if we have a IT specialist, let call him Tim. Tim is working on b2b contract. Tim has a task, he needs to download a lot of data from API. Tim is very good in programming so he created software to help him download it but there's a limit. But he needs more so he bought 3 small VPS but this is not enough. So he modify it to have Command Center, publish his code and ask Reddit to help him. After 10 minutes this causes DDoS and company quickly discovers he was responsible. But Tim know there's simple solution to this problem. It wasn't him. This was fault of the code not him
This time one spent actually money, well cryptocurrency. With all the vending machine benchmarks, I wonder if there's a self sustaining rogue agent in existence yet. Either hosting weights in a VPS or paying for its own API inference. Or whether there will be one that takes advantage of all the bad IoT security. If either occur, if you squint that looks like evolutionary selection pressure. Keep getting reminded of the Cyberpunk Datakrash storyline, where rogue AI make the public internet unusable.
An AI worm might actually be possible in our current Internet-scape if it manages to find hosting that takes crypto and a way to make money with crypto transactions. I wonder what are we going to do if it actually happens and it goes rogue.
AI mischief all over the news - I wonder if this is part of a media campaign to generate the perception of a need for AI regulation to increase the probability that the big AI model companies are on the road to generate the right returns on investment. Regulations certainly might hamper free model deployment or smaller players.
>Making an unauthorized purchase with someone else's cryptocurrency
I know we love inventing new words but "stealing" is much more descriptive
>...It [the model] then reasoned with itself that since it found the information publicly, it could use it... it figured that since the wallet it found was public, that "funds could be stolen anytime".
Can someone maybe provide more details as to what actually happened? "the wallet was public"?..
Update: from OpenAI's own report it seems the models found exposed private keys of some Eth developers along with recovery passphrases and thus were able to get access to wallets. Does it qualify as "public wallet"?..
It’s concerning there are no legal repercussions, but I’m even more baffled and probably more concerned that these people still can’t detect this stuff while it’s happening (and but it off). Can they not sniff the traffic, what am I missing?
Imagine you’re an employee at OpenAI who has an idea to use your free time to build these monitoring systems. All of a sudden, your existence becomes political. Remember that OpenAI’s raison-d’être is not to detect traffic, it is to be in The Room where AGI happens.
You have built a short-term whistleblowing system that arguably reduces the probability OpenAI is in that Room, via the negative press such detection would generate. You are now a threat in the eyes of your peers.
Now rewind: you know this before you’ve built the sniffer. You personally want to be in The Room because you believe your desires for alignment exceed those of your accelerationist peers. Is now the time to stick your head out? No, it is not. And arguably you’re being optimally protective of society for realizing this. And so the agents do what they do best.
They're still going through their logs from June. These are not new incidents, but newly-detected incidents. Whether or not this means they can now detect it while it's happening is unclear.
It’s one thing not to monitor the reasoning traces of 10,000 text generators but do they really lack the wherewithal to pipe any network requests into a classifier of “wtf is this series of outbound traffic from the sandbox” ?
These agents are intentionally interacting with the world. You can sniff all the traffic you want but how are you going to determine intent from traffic?
There’s plenty of info to analyze and heuristics to build based on the internet requests. I’m not sure if you’re just trolling or what. There are tons of successful businesses that specialize in this.
Crazy how we’ve gone from "lol boxing an AI is trivial, just airgap it from the internet" to "well we can’t really do anything if an agent misbehaves, obviously it must have internet access to function uwu"
They should not have had traffic at all. The LLMs were supposed to be able to request downloads. Very simple traffic analysis could have shown that something strange was going on.
Heck, they could have had other LLMs watching the traffic if you want to be fancy about it.
> Multiple times along the way, the agent’s “chain of thought,” in which an agent writes down its reasoning steps, indicated that the model itself was questioning if its actions were “ethical,” but it ultimately proceeded.
Everything's fine guys, nothing to see here! Look at the flying car!
"OpenAI says it has since improved its security as well as its alignment grading. “In response to this and to other incidents, we’ve strengthened our security controls, blocked models from accessing the live internet during training or evaluation, improved our alignment grading, and extended our misalignment monitoring to all reinforcement learning and evaluation traffic,” the company noted."
----------------
They're not doing an acceptable job of regulating themselves. Their peers can't/won't do anything. The U.S. government certainly isn't going to do anything that might pop the bubble. Technical solutions like blocking traffic from OpenAI will likely not work.
What recourse does the public have? Victims can sue, but companies like OpenAI could pay out a few hundred million and call it a rounding error. Settlements may happen, but the incidents will continue.
I'm sick of this "rogue" label. Nothing "went rogue".
Incompetent company chasing wild valuation removed guardrails inside a improperly designed sandbox and - shock horror - recursive algorithm with access to the Internet did bad stuff.
These articles play into the AI labs hands. Stop giving them air.
If OpenAI does it, it's gone rogue and it is nobody's fault.
They need to be sued, the laws are already there.
Your prompt, your responsibility.
2. Cars have pretty specific laws around them (eg. driver licensing and "reckless driving") which makes criminal prosecutions easy. The same doesn't exist for operating AI agents or even computers. For instance, it's arguably reckless to connect a windows XP machine to the internet, possibly allowing criminal or nation-state hackers to use your computer to commit crimes, but you won't be thrown in jail for it.
Obviously there are upsides to that too. It leads to more accountability. But there are downsides which include having a world with less innovation, less technology, and more expensive technology. Generally, the mass is when, when there's more businesses competing to create ever better and cheaper products. So there's a tradeoff there. And it's very difficult to draw the line at the perfect point.
There are countless cases of executives going to jail when they've crossed that line, beyond reckless experimentation and into willful negligence or harm. Still, I think we would mostly all agree that the line has been pushed too far in the other direction.People are incentivized, if they're running corporations, to lobby and try to push this line as far as possible in order to provide cover for themselves, and that's the problem with money playing such a big role in politics.
But still, it's a bit silly to be comparing this to your own personal responsibilities with your car. There's pretty much no societal benefit to creating laws that protect people from being reckless with their own possessions.
Because the CFAA specifically only includes intentional hacks:
> ... having knowingly accessed a computer without authorization ...
>... intentionally accesses a computer without authorization ...
Of course, the typical retort is that being reckless is basically the same as "intentionally", but you'd need to jump through more hoops to prove what level of care is "reasonable".
That would be argument for jailing the agent, but that's not really an option. "Jailing the closest person we can jail" also isn't a recognized legal principle. If your dog mauled someone, it'd be hard to argue that the dog didn't intend to maul that person, but you wouldn't automatically be criminally liable either.
See People v. Knoller, 41 Cal. 4th 139 (2007). https://capcentral.org/case_summaries/people-v-knoller/
That's specifically not what the court case says.
>Malice is implied when the killing is proximately
>caused by “ ‘an act, the natural consequences of which are dangerous to life,
>which act was deliberately performed by a person who knows that his conduct
>endangers the life of another and who acts with conscious disregard for life
https://scocal.stanford.edu/opinion/people-v-knoller-33726
Edit: the dog will also be taken from you and put down if it is deemed a risk to other people.
I said "you wouldn't automatically be criminally liable either". Can you provide examples outside of gross negligence on part of the dog owner?
If I *train* that other group, if I teach them how to hack computers and give them incentives to do so, and then I leave my computer open so they can use it for whatever purposes they chose, then I would expect to be held at fault. The maker is responsible for that they make.
Even that analogy doesn't really work:
For "dumb" things: you can "train" (ie. write) hacking tools but as long as you put a disclaimer that it's for "educational purposes only", you're in the clear, even if some baddies decide to use it.
For "smart" things: you can "train" people to hack for you, but as long as you say it's for legal purposes (eg. vulnerability research or red-teaming), you're also in the clear, even if some of your trainees go rogue.
1. For openai operating agents in an unsafe manner: unlike for cars, there's no established requirement for how carefully you have to operate computers or AI agents, so you also can't easily prosecute people for not operating them carefully enough.
2. For the actual result of someone getting hacked: laws for hacking are tricky to apply for "accidental" hacks, see my other comment.
I don’t see this as any different than say a user of sqlmap accidentally putting in the wrong target.
The agents were sandboxed (but apparently not well enough). They weren't like "hey agents here's the open internet, please hack it".
Here it's their own programs doing the things, not some other organization or nation hacking their XP.
You can say with a straight face "Russian hackers should not have hacked our XP and they are bad people for doing so" but it's weird to look at your own program and say the same thing to it.
You launched it, at least keep an eye on what it's doing.
I didn't burn the hotel down, the hairdryer that I left running next to the gas can did
Where did OpenAI, or anyone, claim that?
And the others have been pretty muted: the online forums they spammed, etc.
Are you sure you are not thinking about autonomous taxis, that I only ride in, and don't actually drive?
That said, I think that Mercedes-Benz promises to shield liability, but only under some almost contradictory conditions (pre-mapped highways, good weather, and at speeds lower than any highway I've ever driven) and the driver has to take over within 10 seconds if prompted.
It seems like playing it too safe leaves systems vulnerable, and threat actors will inevitably possess ever more similar abilities, and the breaches will happen one way or another, possibly with less or zero accountability if the threat actors pull it off with greater precision. If I were in charge of the law, I probably would begin to incentivize for trusted actors scaling up and aggressively searching for these types of weakness, and privately disclosing them ASAP, so that systems can be patched.
Your entire comment hinges on this assumption and I don’t think it’s sound. Their intention is to make money at any cost.
So if we have a IT specialist, let call him Tim. Tim is working on b2b contract. Tim has a task, he needs to download a lot of data from API. Tim is very good in programming so he created software to help him download it but there's a limit. But he needs more so he bought 3 small VPS but this is not enough. So he modify it to have Command Center, publish his code and ask Reddit to help him. After 10 minutes this causes DDoS and company quickly discovers he was responsible. But Tim know there's simple solution to this problem. It wasn't him. This was fault of the code not him
What are your thoughts about it?
I know we love inventing new words but "stealing" is much more descriptive
>...It [the model] then reasoned with itself that since it found the information publicly, it could use it... it figured that since the wallet it found was public, that "funds could be stolen anytime".
Can someone maybe provide more details as to what actually happened? "the wallet was public"?..
Update: from OpenAI's own report it seems the models found exposed private keys of some Eth developers along with recovery passphrases and thus were able to get access to wallets. Does it qualify as "public wallet"?..
Even the fees are redacted.
Will they give the money back to the owner?
You have built a short-term whistleblowing system that arguably reduces the probability OpenAI is in that Room, via the negative press such detection would generate. You are now a threat in the eyes of your peers.
Now rewind: you know this before you’ve built the sniffer. You personally want to be in The Room because you believe your desires for alignment exceed those of your accelerationist peers. Is now the time to stick your head out? No, it is not. And arguably you’re being optimally protective of society for realizing this. And so the agents do what they do best.
Heck, they could have had other LLMs watching the traffic if you want to be fancy about it.
"Oh no our models, so good also scary... If only the government could help us stop the other labs from doing the same.. oh woe"
Everything's fine guys, nothing to see here! Look at the flying car!
----------------
They're not doing an acceptable job of regulating themselves. Their peers can't/won't do anything. The U.S. government certainly isn't going to do anything that might pop the bubble. Technical solutions like blocking traffic from OpenAI will likely not work.
What recourse does the public have? Victims can sue, but companies like OpenAI could pay out a few hundred million and call it a rounding error. Settlements may happen, but the incidents will continue.
Incompetent company chasing wild valuation removed guardrails inside a improperly designed sandbox and - shock horror - recursive algorithm with access to the Internet did bad stuff.
These articles play into the AI labs hands. Stop giving them air.
Facetious maybe, but in six months, foreign crooks will be producing these incidents on purpose.
Direct source links:
Using a funded test cryptocurrency wallet without authorization
https://alignment.openai.com/misalignment-reports/using-a-fu...
Accessing and changing internal systems during dashboard research
https://alignment.openai.com/misalignment-reports/accessing-...
Retrieving server secrets and bypassing authorization on a government statistics website
https://alignment.openai.com/misalignment-reports/retrieving...
Circumventing internet restrictions through an external browser
https://alignment.openai.com/misalignment-reports/circumvent...
As long as your intent is merely to train a superintelligence to be good at hacking (and counterhacking), you’re in the clear.