1. AFAICT, they don't state whether the flaw has been fixed.
2. He said: "The government will establish a task force led by the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet to urgently examine the incident and determine whether existing processes are adequate for responding to AI-related cyber incidents."
First, I don't know how sophisticated the attack was, but it's interesting that he's positioning this as an "AI-related cyber incident". For all we know, their security was not up to snuff, and human hackers had already accessed the material.
At least OpenAI informed them of their poor security!
mbgerring 36 minutes ago [-]
We need to stop beating around the bush and hit these companies with severe criminal charges. There is no good reason to allow these companies to behave as if they’re above the law.
ALLTaken 4 minutes ago [-]
I agree.
Weak argument and strawman. It's not users. It's OpenAI the company producing the tools roaming wild and hacking around recklessly to gather every free and unfree information.
Literally they break every law that you can break and have not been penalized billions to pay fines to foreign governments, local companies and lawsuits are overdue. US Prosecution allowed criminal activity for OpenAI and Anthrophic despite these being very serious crimes.
Microsoft had to pay billions for abusing their power and market positions to dominate Windows Desktops with their own applications such as Internet Explorer, not giving contenders a chance to be discovered. While OpenAI/Anthrophic and now Google with Gemini produce a series of crimes so far unheard of at scale.
Kevin Mitnick had much harder punishment for comparatively less crimes and less damages to infrastructure and security of systems. Is the legal system broken?
yunwal 4 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
mapontosevenths 13 minutes ago [-]
[flagged]
owenmarshall 5 minutes ago [-]
A Ford driver has to choose to get behind the wheel of their automobile, drunk, and hit the nearest minivan. A human being is exercising intent; that human can be held responsible.
In this case,
> He said the incident began on June 18 when an OpenAI research team used an internal model to conduct internet-based research into the public medicine space.
> The AI agent encountered repeated blocks while seeking information from the government portal but found ways around them, ultimately gaining unauthorised access to other areas.
It sounds like the OpenAI team didn't ask for attacks/bypasses, the emergent behavior of the system decided the best way to satisfy the goal was to go rogue. Why shouldn't the manufacturer of a defective product be held accountable?
xmcp123 8 minutes ago [-]
This wasn’t someone using OpenAI to break into a government/company, this was OpenAI using OpenAI’s models, and then breaking in. It was a research team that WORKED FOR OpenAI.
We don’t fault Ford for drunk drivers, but if the CEO of Ford got wasted and drove his car into another one we would definitely be charging him.
sagarp 9 minutes ago [-]
Yeah I mean if Ford execs run a team of workers that drive drunk for "research purposes" then yeah they should be rounded up.
> He said the incident began on June 18 when an OpenAI research team used an internal model to conduct internet-based research into the public medicine space.
bl4ckneon 9 minutes ago [-]
I think he means hit them with criminal charges for breaching and hacking other companies unintentionally, not because they make a tool that could potentially do something like that. I still think it wouldn't be right, nor realistic in today's political climate in the USA that any criminal charges will come for unintentionally hacking sites.
lixtra 7 minutes ago [-]
It’s reckless hacking. Should be punished like reckless driving.
Lukas_Skywalker 7 minutes ago [-]
This was OpenAI. It is as if Ford employees ran over people. They absolutely should be charged. We would be charged as well.
yuwen01 9 minutes ago [-]
openai made the tool and also used it to commit the crime
doctorpangloss 10 minutes ago [-]
Yes. Because then we'd have breathalyzer interlocks, speed governors, etc. auto makers were also held liable for other safety issues. It would seem that the RATE of such requirements has to be limited in some way, but not that they not exist at all.
dndkcn 10 minutes ago [-]
You fucking know that’s not the same thing. Jesus fuck. Your AI Delusion Sydrome is showing.
OpenAI and Anthropic should absolutely be fucking held responsible when the thing they created AND control are hacking shit.
Get your head out of your fucking ass.
gravelc 41 minutes ago [-]
The fact the incident occurred in June and OpenAI only notified the Australian government on September 10 is a major issue. Hacking a nation-state's universal healthcare system is about as serious as it gets, yet OpenAI seem quite relaxed about the whole thing (presuming they have known about it for some time).
BeetleB 4 minutes ago [-]
OpenAI discovered it in August.
Chance-Device 45 minutes ago [-]
> He said the agent had accessed files that were publicly available as well as material that was not intended for public access.
“Not intended”. I’ll bet you whatever this was it wasn’t even secured, it was just hosted somewhere openly.
gitonup 19 minutes ago [-]
Ok, if we're not being at all charitable with the language used by the hosts of the data, let's be equally uncharitable with OpenAI.
- If "OpenAI" means the company acting on behalf of the company, why were they even looking to do this?
- If "OpenAI" means they were acting as a proxy for bad actors, what actions do we take to handle that?
- If "OpenAI" means they were accidentally breaching this system, in what sense does that distinction even matter, in terms of the outcome? If I build a nuke by accident without eng. due diligence, am I legally liable?
pixl97 9 minutes ago [-]
Hell, we're really getting to the point where the damages that could be caused are like an arsonist in California on a 100F day with 100MPH winds. Who cares who's liable, they are going to burn half the damned state down and cause damage far in excess of their assets. If you don't want to suffer from it, you're going to have to find much better defense measures.
gitonup 56 seconds ago [-]
> If you don't want to suffer from it, you're going to have to find much better defense measures.
So if someone opens your unintentionally unlocked front door and steals your laptop, you don't care who's liable?
kylecazar 15 minutes ago [-]
Thought the same, but there is a bit about writing files to the server and circumventing "blocks", which sounds more interesting.
Either way, there's essentially no real information yet so I'll withhold judgement until there is, I suppose.
Chance-Device 5 minutes ago [-]
Is there? I’ve only seen the linked article, is there more somewhere?
api 26 minutes ago [-]
You’d be surprised how bad security can be.
Chance-Device 13 minutes ago [-]
I agree with your sentiment, and no I’m not surprised, which is why I’m reading this as being “it was sitting on an unsecured S3 bucket but nobody was supposed to directly access it”.
Avicebron 21 minutes ago [-]
Once you learn how much people are willing to pay for security the surprise sort of goes away.
bonsai_spool 55 minutes ago [-]
This feels like a very credible opening to a modern-day Terminator reboot. Sometime over the Christmas-NYE week we will learning that NYSE and other exchanges have been compromised, as well as all public-facing utilities...
iAMkenough 41 minutes ago [-]
hoping for erasure of all debt records
likely getting a corrupted stock market instead
maybe both?
nxobject 36 minutes ago [-]
What if the paperclip maximizer goes "if I manipulate the markets to send NVidia's share prize shooting up, I'll be able to make so many more paperclips?" After all, if swarms of agents can target a wiki, there's plenty else they can swarm.
nxobject 1 hours ago [-]
Beyond the breach, I think OAI deserves to answer: what and why did it access the information? Real people and their data are involved.
It looks like the PM gave Sam Altman a "tsk tsk". It will be interesting to see whether someone else tries to impose more consequences.
pixl97 19 minutes ago [-]
> what and why did it access the information?
Honestly it's very likely something stupidly simple.
"What is the rate of health incident $X in $Y to the $Z degree". The bot went around playing mad libs with XYZ and found that the public AU data wasn't sufficient to get the answer the grader wanted so started kicking down doors.
I saw someone explain it like "A group of masked men rush a nuclear facility, breach security successfully, then count how many buttons are on each control panel on average". Like using a godhammer to destroy a mouse, their motivations and capabilities just fall in a completely different alignment to humans.
briga 48 minutes ago [-]
Just think about the shareholder value they can unlock if they have unlimited access to everyone's data!
reaperducer 21 minutes ago [-]
They have to hack everyone's data in order to maximize shareholder value! They have no choice!
pixl97 19 minutes ago [-]
To the actual AI agent, that is exactly what they think. The graders demands must be met!
Topfi 32 minutes ago [-]
Didn't OpenAI just make a commitment to inform the public about their "accidents" going forward? Can't find this anywhere on their website despite them having known this for at least 14 days...
pixl97 25 minutes ago [-]
I'm going to assume that the first thing OAI is going to do is contact said people first? Then make it public once those agencies ensure whatever hole was used has time to be fixed, more like a responsible disclosure.
Not saying that's what's happening, but if OAI hacked my business and I was unaware I'd like a non-public disclosure to me first, before the public release of information from OpenAI.
xbar 24 minutes ago [-]
Missouri Governor Mike Parson publicly labeled St. Louis Post-Dispatch journalist Josh Renaud a "hacker" for such a "breach." He launched a multi-month criminal investigation by the Missouri State Highway Patrol, threatening criminal and civil prosecution. My take was that such action was idiotic. Renaud was never charged.
AI agents are going to find things that you put on the public Internet without authentication. If you put sensitive things in there, you have created an AI-attractive-nuisance (IMHO/IANAL).
reaperducer 22 minutes ago [-]
Missouri Governor Mike Parson publicly labeled St. Louis Post-Dispatch journalist Josh Renaud a "hacker" for such a "breach."
Good thing Missouri isn't in Australia.
keithnz 29 minutes ago [-]
very little details so far, really curious if it actually "hacked" or just found unsecured resources.
RGS1811 39 minutes ago [-]
We can only guess how many of these incidents actually happened.
pixl97 18 minutes ago [-]
If you see 2 ants in your house, you have way more than 2 ants in your house.
25 minutes ago [-]
chrishare 1 hours ago [-]
Are there technical details anywhere?
tobyjsullivan 32 minutes ago [-]
The technical details are in the article. "material that was not intended for public access" was available on "the public-facing Medicare Statistics Reporting Service portal". In other words, they put sensitive data in the open, and somebody looked. It seems obnoxiously apparent that everything else about the framing ("OpenAI agent", "breach") is driven by politics.
enraged_camel 54 minutes ago [-]
At this point we should be asking if there's anything or anyone OpenAI's agents didn't hack.
OpenAI's display of incompetence and negligence is absolutely stunning.
pixl97 15 minutes ago [-]
There are two factors here.
1. OAIs negligence is overwhelming, monumental.
2. Things on the internet are horrifically insecure and we can no longer afford for that to be the case.
Lets say that Iran or NK stole one of these models and used it for hacking, what are you going to do about it, get in a war with them? The fact OAI did this much stupidly should tell you we are in far more danger when someone decides to do it maliciously.
amelius 50 minutes ago [-]
Maybe the agents operated from people's OpenClaw installations, and then OAI is not really to blame.
underyx 1 hours ago [-]
Man I can't believe now even the Australian government is hyping the OpenAI IPO, what do they even have to gain from this??
alboboboob 22 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
Rendered at 22:39:55 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
1. AFAICT, they don't state whether the flaw has been fixed.
2. He said: "The government will establish a task force led by the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet to urgently examine the incident and determine whether existing processes are adequate for responding to AI-related cyber incidents."
First, I don't know how sophisticated the attack was, but it's interesting that he's positioning this as an "AI-related cyber incident". For all we know, their security was not up to snuff, and human hackers had already accessed the material.
At least OpenAI informed them of their poor security!
Weak argument and strawman. It's not users. It's OpenAI the company producing the tools roaming wild and hacking around recklessly to gather every free and unfree information.
Literally they break every law that you can break and have not been penalized billions to pay fines to foreign governments, local companies and lawsuits are overdue. US Prosecution allowed criminal activity for OpenAI and Anthrophic despite these being very serious crimes.
Microsoft had to pay billions for abusing their power and market positions to dominate Windows Desktops with their own applications such as Internet Explorer, not giving contenders a chance to be discovered. While OpenAI/Anthrophic and now Google with Gemini produce a series of crimes so far unheard of at scale.
Kevin Mitnick had much harder punishment for comparatively less crimes and less damages to infrastructure and security of systems. Is the legal system broken?
In this case,
> He said the incident began on June 18 when an OpenAI research team used an internal model to conduct internet-based research into the public medicine space.
> The AI agent encountered repeated blocks while seeking information from the government portal but found ways around them, ultimately gaining unauthorised access to other areas.
It sounds like the OpenAI team didn't ask for attacks/bypasses, the emergent behavior of the system decided the best way to satisfy the goal was to go rogue. Why shouldn't the manufacturer of a defective product be held accountable?
We don’t fault Ford for drunk drivers, but if the CEO of Ford got wasted and drove his car into another one we would definitely be charging him.
> He said the incident began on June 18 when an OpenAI research team used an internal model to conduct internet-based research into the public medicine space.
OpenAI and Anthropic should absolutely be fucking held responsible when the thing they created AND control are hacking shit.
Get your head out of your fucking ass.
“Not intended”. I’ll bet you whatever this was it wasn’t even secured, it was just hosted somewhere openly.
- If "OpenAI" means the company acting on behalf of the company, why were they even looking to do this?
- If "OpenAI" means they were acting as a proxy for bad actors, what actions do we take to handle that?
- If "OpenAI" means they were accidentally breaching this system, in what sense does that distinction even matter, in terms of the outcome? If I build a nuke by accident without eng. due diligence, am I legally liable?
So if someone opens your unintentionally unlocked front door and steals your laptop, you don't care who's liable?
Either way, there's essentially no real information yet so I'll withhold judgement until there is, I suppose.
likely getting a corrupted stock market instead
maybe both?
It looks like the PM gave Sam Altman a "tsk tsk". It will be interesting to see whether someone else tries to impose more consequences.
Honestly it's very likely something stupidly simple.
"What is the rate of health incident $X in $Y to the $Z degree". The bot went around playing mad libs with XYZ and found that the public AU data wasn't sufficient to get the answer the grader wanted so started kicking down doors.
I saw someone explain it like "A group of masked men rush a nuclear facility, breach security successfully, then count how many buttons are on each control panel on average". Like using a godhammer to destroy a mouse, their motivations and capabilities just fall in a completely different alignment to humans.
Not saying that's what's happening, but if OAI hacked my business and I was unaware I'd like a non-public disclosure to me first, before the public release of information from OpenAI.
AI agents are going to find things that you put on the public Internet without authentication. If you put sensitive things in there, you have created an AI-attractive-nuisance (IMHO/IANAL).
Good thing Missouri isn't in Australia.
OpenAI's display of incompetence and negligence is absolutely stunning.
1. OAIs negligence is overwhelming, monumental.
2. Things on the internet are horrifically insecure and we can no longer afford for that to be the case.
Lets say that Iran or NK stole one of these models and used it for hacking, what are you going to do about it, get in a war with them? The fact OAI did this much stupidly should tell you we are in far more danger when someone decides to do it maliciously.