> the breach took place on 18 June - Open AI informed the government with an email to a general address on 10 September
So we have a company hacking a foreign government's websites and data. And, in terms of ethics, they take almost three months to notify; and in terms of competence, appear to have no formal contacts nor to have found one in that time.
Once an American business starts hacking allied governments, it's time for strict responses, yes? Replace the governance (board and C-level)? Remove financial incentives and open the company - open weights, open training, per its original 'open' ethos?
Altman is busy saying there needs to be regulation, but in terms of what OpenAI does, he can control that already.
In the infosec community it is well known that OpenAI and Anthropic did not hire many security engineers or researchers pre-April 2026. There is likely a case for gross negligence (IANAL).
There has been a crazy hiring push from both companies to poach security engineers/researchers from Google, Apple, and Meta since Q2/Q3, but the response was incredibly delayed. Many talented security engineers/researchers I know at Apple/Google/Meta (including myself) receiving these offers are worried about taking them due to the risks of criminal/personal liability and the more likely risk of tarnishing their careers.
Not a lawyer and this is not legal advice, but I did ask my lawyer about the potential personal risks after receiving an offer. I used that as a data point when I declined the offer.
On this, I go with the recent words of Jensen Huang [1]...we already have legal laws in computer criminality, so before AI vendors ask for more regulations, lets apply the existing laws ;-)
I think Lina Khan said this first about AI companies and I agree with them both. Companies already have an obligation to make safe products and not commit crimes
Well that's just it: we don't seem to apply laws in meaningful ways anymore.
Part of that is by design. The entire point of incorporating a business is to separate it as a legal entity from you, the person who owns/runs it.
Unless you can point to someone at OpenAI intentionally using their software to hack the Australian government's website, the best you can do is have some drawn-out proceeding where you charge OpenAI, the corporation, with some sort of crime, convict them (of what I don't know, IANAL) and fine them. Hopefully the fine is 1) large and 2) sticks through the appeals process.
There's no real mechanism to legally punish the likes of Altman and his c-suite over this.
It's particularly bad because OAI is a us dept of war contractor engaging in hacking of allied government systems.
Imagine if any of the name brand military contractors were caught wiretapping an ally? Or launching a weapon? Would not look good at all.
I imagine this will be treated without recourse like usual because the entire economy relies on this company and 1 other succeeding at all costs. But, wars have started over less...
> Altman is busy saying there needs to be regulation, but in terms of what OpenAI does, he can control that already.
It is still my belief that Altman wants one or ideally more governments to shut down or slow down OpenAI. OpenAI is going to need more cash to survive and Altman has run out of plausible lies. Having the AI breaks pulled by governments is basically the last chance to explain why they still aren't going to be profitable, and why they just need that next X billion dollars investment.
I don't for a second believe that an agent starts trying to hack backend system, when the form or API it has been asked to use isn't working.
> I don't for a second believe that an agent starts trying to hack backend system, when the form or API it has been asked to use isn't working.
I have seen coding agents on my own machine (in sandboxed VMs) start doing things while trying to accomplish what I've asked that I felt sort of exceeded my mandate (changing database passwords, poking at the egress proxy that's preventing them from accessing some domains). Not to the point of causing any real issues, but I don't have much trouble envisioning scenarios like this when using stronger instructions around pursuing the goal + a running in a misconfigured sandbox envrionment.
That said, there's a lot of potential upside for American AI labs if they're able to get people scared about AI, they can:
- To your point, claim the regulations slowed them down and paper over near/mid term financial concerns
- Get the government to create stupid regulations that don't actually slow them down at all, but do effectively lock out any future competition (and current global competition)
- Position themselves as the only organizations blessed by the government with the ability to make safe AI, therefore eventually allowing them to claim to be some flavor of "too big to fail" and worthy of a bailout, should the financials not work out.
- Effectively create a distraction that avoids further public conversation/accountability/regulation/liability re the more tangible sorts of problems their products cause right now.
I'll never understand the "slow down AI" idea. Other countries simply won't slow down, why would they? Maybe a couple Western countries would but no one else will give a shit about that plea, nor should they.
> And, in terms of ethics, they take almost three months to notify;
Kinda worse than that. It took between 10 and 40 days, not 3 months, between the organisation knowing and the reporting.
August (precise date unknown) – OpenAI said it became aware of a potential breach during a broader review of "misaligned model activity"
10 September – An email from OpenAI lands in the public inbox of Services Australia, the general services hub of the federal government, informing of the incident
Given it was the AI agents which did the hacking, doing this will result in basically every organisation at least as rich as the government of Tuvalu being able to hack anyone at any time.
> Altman is busy saying there needs to be regulation, but in terms of what OpenAI does, he can control that already.
Him having control would be an improvement on the reality.
This was a just case of: (owner of the agents detected the hack) && !(hacked party didn’t detect the hack) && (owner of the agents decided to notice the other party) && (they decided to went public with what happened so we know it)
One can find many other logical combinations that we can’t possibly know about such incidents.
So, you're telling me they didn't have any monitoring in place around their AI to notify them of an attempt at breaching a system they have no business visiting in the first place? OpenAI should be blackholed on this basis until they clean up their act.
They must have had monitoring in order to be able to detect this retrospectively.
Any automated alarms for detecting things in real-time were not sufficient.
Given a previous generation of agents discovered a zero-day and used it to get around attempts to sandbox them into one specific test, this is not hugely surprising, but it is a reason to force them (and everyone else) to stop until security catches up with capabilities.
I'm thinking of the Jurassic Park novel: they had sensors to count the dinosaurs, but the test was made under the assumption escapes were possible and breeding was not, i.e. something like "if (dinosaurs_found < n) then escape_alert();". They didn't know dinosaurs_found >> n until everything was already going wrong.
NotE how he was found guilty by the 2nd court for something more 'subjective' than 'objective' : for having confessed that he later found an authentication page that had failed to protect the documents.
How can you make a swarm of agents "feel guilty" ?
The word "found" is different from the word "feel"; I'm not sure why you involved feelings at all: Bluetouff was sentenced because he admitted he had seen evidence the documents were supposed to be restricted but chose to publish parts of them anyway.
If you go into someones garden an copy their work, it does make a big difference if you admit to seeing the sign saying "private property, keep out".
Because in other circumstances, a hacker might have decided to stop there, and not only not publish, but instead warn the website about their security flaw.
Especially after Bluetouff was found guilty.
In fact, I expect this to have happened many times, but "hacker did the right thing" is much less likely to make headlines.
Meanwhile, agent swarms seem to be (mostly ?) incapable of having this kind of moral compass, at least for now. (And OpenAI isn't doing much better, cough.)
> How can you make a swarm of agents "feel guilty" ?
"Feel" is a whole philosophical can of worms. Nobody knows what it means mechanistically for an arbitrary system (including other biological systems) to "feel" anything, let alone abstract concepts like guilt, all we can do is observe behaviours. If current systems can feel anything at all, it's by accident, but we have no test for it so we don't know if that accident has even happened or not.
Weirdly, for the Hugging Face incident, we do know they wrote down that it was bad and they shouldn't do it, even though they then continued to do it.
So: they acted like they felt guilty. And yet also acted like were compelled (by previous training?) to weigh "complete instructions" more than "don't do crime". We can adjust that, make "don't do crime" take precedence over "follow instructions"*; it's unfortunate that when we do for any specific model, there's immediately a horde of people complaining the model has been "censored" or "lobotomised".
(Different people, I hope. Goomba fallacy and all that).
* Though this may cause issues when going between jurisdictions. But hey, a discussion about sovereign compute is for another time, after we can agree to make "don't break the law" more important.
Unfortunately, "don't break the law" would also be a very effective way to use AI to construct an AI-enforced dictatorship, so we can't just throw that in blindly.
> Him having control would be an improvement on the reality.
Oh, he does. It's unlikely that this is some AGI that spawned itself out of nothing and started doing this. If he were a decent person, he'd simply find a way to investigate this internally, fire the people responsible, and find a way to set up guardrails around his product.
The problem is, like most people in SV, Altman seems to have a twisted ethical compass. He doesn't see these incidents as an issue, he sees them as an opportunity. He has both the thing a bunch of Western governments want (a superhacker agent that can do dirty work) and a crisis that can be used to craft regulations that favor OpenAI and thus his bank account.
I think the Australians have a good PR team. The whole story has been framed globally as AI bad, we’ve been attacked etc.
Nobody seems to be talking about the web server and sw being deployed was insecure.
Agreed that there should be real consequences, but I'm less convinced that "open the company - open weights, open training, per its original 'open' ethos" would be the right answer. That gets us into the kind of libertarian utopia where everyone is allegedly safer because everybody is well-armed... which usually doesn't work out so well in practice.
The alternative to "open weights" at this point is "American controlled."
And Dario and Sam have already made it clear that it's America First.
The rest of the world isn't going to accept a regulatory regime which imposes American hegemony. Maybe when Silicon Valley was playing all utopian like they used to. Not now.
Open weights is the most reasonable counter-power we have.
"The world should trust that we are going to do the right thing because it's the right thing and we feel the magnitude of this," Sam Altman said
Clarification: "The world should trust that we are going to do the right thing because trusting that we are going to do the right thing is the right thing and we feel the magnitude of this, what with our IPO round the corner, and all"
So we have a company hacking a foreign government's websites and data. And, in terms of ethics, they take almost three months to notify; and in terms of competence, appear to have no formal contacts nor to have found one in that time.
Once an American business starts hacking allied governments, it's time for strict responses, yes? Replace the governance (board and C-level)? Remove financial incentives and open the company - open weights, open training, per its original 'open' ethos?
Altman is busy saying there needs to be regulation, but in terms of what OpenAI does, he can control that already.