Once you understand that these are chatbots that were designed to complete challenges like this, using tactics like this, you can understand that the chatbots didn’t “go rogue.” They did what they were designed to do, and because OpenAI ran them with inadequate supervision (without a “human in the loop” that checked each iteration through the Python loop to ensure it hadn’t gone off the rails), they trashed a competitor’s servers.
Designing autonomous, malicious software is generally considered irresponsible and dangerous. If you showed up at Defcon and gave a talk about how your autonomous malware did something unexpected and damaged someone else’s computers, the first question from the audience would be “Why are you so shit at making secure sandboxes?” It wouldn’t be “How are you so awesome at making hacking tools?”
The fact that OpenAI is making it much easier for unskilled people to break into and damage servers is indeed very bad news, but it’s not new bad news. Irresponsible parties have been doing this for years, most notably the NSA…
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Riley had a very good way of summarizing this: “LLMs are real, AI is fake.” LLMs – chatbots trained on things like CTF logs that can break into servers – are real. They’re on a continuum with other hacking tools that have been steadily demonstrating the fragility of the modern digital world, albeit without inspiring anyone in power to do anything about it.
“AI” – chatbots that wake up, “set their own goals,” and “spontaneously” start hacking servers – is fake. It doesn’t have “a 10% chance of ending the human race.” The Hugging Face hack isn’t a mysterious, supernatural occurrence. It’s a Python loop and a chatbot. The people responsible didn’t accidentally create god: they created autonomous malicious software and then failed to closely monitor it, resulting in it doing something both foreseeable and bad.
It’s fine to worry about this new suite of tools that give even stupider people the ability to trash even more computers. You should worry about that – and demand better security practices from firms and governments, including a blanket prohibition on NOBUS-style vulnerability hoarding. That’s a productive kind of worrying, with a chance of addressing your area of concern. It’s infinitely more reasonable than locking yourself in the toilet with a flashlight and saying “Ayyyyy Eyyyyyye” into the mirror until you wet yourself.
Except it wasn’t just “throwing everything and the kitchen sink at a server”. Modern LLMs have been trained well enough to not just create a list of potential attacks and execute them, but to:
of course this can be used for good too. I did this to pentest my own homelab stack. I used the very same flow to hack into a pair of smart glasses I own (not the creep glasses, mind you, but the “wearable monitor” kind of AR glasses - turns out the pair I own runs on a pretty decent base, a somewhat recent Linux kernel and minimal userspace, with some exploitable interfaces) within about a day.
What’s truly dangerous is that these tools have the ability to turn a relatively simple “hack into the NASA servers” instruction into a detailed, executable plan of actually breaching the servers in question. That a person with more than one and less than three brain cells to rub together - someone who’d think this scene is super cool and completely legit looking - can, with minimal guardrails-bypassing, increase their own chance of hacking into ANY server, from less than 0.000000000000000001% to 20-30%. Now that’s scary.
One specific you didn’t call out: LLM agents can do a more effective job of social engineering than your average Nigerian prince…
I didn’t even want to open that can of worms…
But that two-braincell person still needs to have a few million $ to burn. I wonder what they could have done to the huggingface servers if they had used the token spend on this incident to pay Ukrainian hackers instead?
No you wouldn’t need millions…
The two things I’ve listed above were done with self hosted LLMs and a $20 Claude subscription orchestrating them.
That’s the thing I’m talking about - these capabilities are literally given out for chump change. That’s what makes it dangerous.
If you’re talking about hiring people outside of Ukraine to hack on Ukraine’s behalf, that might move the needle - maybe not as much as sending in actual weapons, but both have considerations of repercussions and responses…
If you’re talking about giving the existing Ukranian hackers piles of cash, money itself doesn’t do anything, money only motivates people to do things. The Ukranian hackers are already pretty well motivated.