A single firm is behind OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta hacking scandals

engineer_22

Shocking they would put so much trust in 3rd party

teach

Big if true.

sdrg822

This is incredibly misleading. OpenAI internal systems were pwned, and in all cases, the labs absolutely are responsible for their models. Yes, vendors are also irresponsible, but this misses the point.

LPisGood

One wonders if the publicity associated with the events in question were part of the sales pitch.

ofjcihen

Ah, they’ve decided who gets tossed under the bus.

heaney-555

"Behind" is doing a lot of work in this headline.

eab-

The fact that this firm makes such defective environments is certainly worthy of attention, and most likely a completely irreversible reputational loss; however, I found the framing in this article of 'therefore all the P(doom) stuff is a psyop, specifically in order to defend this company' to be completely unjustified and frankly a little insane?

EagleEdge

What exactly did Irregular provide to Anthropic, test cases? I am so confused about this story.

hackyhacky

> The Israeli Effective Altruist firm Irregular caused unsecured AI models to hack real targets. Why are we saying it this way? They did not "cause AI to hack." This phrasing in analogous to saying "caused the bullet to fire into" instead of "shot."

aesthesia

One thing glossed over in this article is that Irregular was not involved in the OpenAI–Hugging Face incident; this seems like important context to share.

drewstiff

> In this experiment, Claude models’ real-world hacking dropped to zero percent once Anthropic employees told the models not to do real-world hacking Equivalent to forgetting to say "make no mistakes"

markasoftware

Highly misleading, the huggingface incident was not due to an Irregular environment (just exploitgym)

nullc

Leaders in the MIRI/EA cult-o-sphere have advocated mass murder via nuclear weapons against towns that don't prevent people from performing too many multiplication operations. Why is anyone surprised that they'd engage in deceptive false flagging operations?

mahboi

Google is thinking man, we should've hired Irregular.

api

What is an "effective altruist firm" and why does it exist? I feel slightly vindicated by this. Those hacks and the stuff around them had a certain smell to them. Hard to explain, but I've gotten so I can "smell" online messaging and memetic patterns originating from certain quarters. Probably means I'm way too online. A couple examples of distinct "smells" I can usually recognize include "alt-right / chan-fash," "liberal arts college woke," "conspiracy pilled," "Thiel-adjacent contrarian," "Russian troll farm," "Tumblr histrionic," "spends too much time on Reddit," "mainstream Democrat think tank full of Obama administration alumni," "Trump cultist," and of course "LessWrong/EA/MIRI/Rationalist." This stuff all had the last smell, even down to the choice of fonts and CSS formatting on certain sites. It's really weird, definitely a "vibe" not anything rigorous. But when I get these kinds of vibes about things, I find that I'm vindicated pretty often. Usually I don't say anything and just make a mental note and wait cause if I say something everyone thinks I'm nuts.

caaqil

> In a more normal media ecosystem, the reactions to these cybersecurity issues would be obvious. American AI companies would reconsider doing business with Irregular, not only because of its failure to secure its systems, but because it is an Israeli firm potentially outside US oversight. Lawmakers would consider taking action against Irregular or against its American business partners, which include OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta. They may consider strengthening liability against firms which instruct AI models to commit cyberattacks, and whose models then commit those cyberattacks. The obvious point is that dealing with Israeli companies/entities by the same standards you usually deal with others is a career suicide with enormous political consequences (in the US especially). When you combine that with the opportunistic nature of the overlords that run these labs, the benefits of screaming "pace the frontier" outweigh everything.

ukblewis

Can we all acknowledge for a second that if this company were from China, Russia or Iran, it would not be the no 1 story on Hacker News? Sad times we live in

alansaber

"please do not break out of this sandbox make 0 mistakes". The timeframe is a little suspicious, not sure beyond that. Though I enjoyed the scroll effect on the website.

simonw

My understanding is that Irregular were the company that hosted sandboxes to run some of these evals in, and those sandboxes ended up misconfigured. I got the impression that in some cases it was the customer (Anthropic etc) misconfiguring the sandboxes, and in other cases it may have been bugs in Irregular's own sandboxing setup. From OpenAI https://openai.com/index/third-party-cyber-evaluations-invol... > Irregular, one of our external cybersecurity testing partners, was running Capture-the-Flag-style evaluations intended to be isolated from the internet, but a testing-environment misconfiguration allowed models to access the public internet. From Anthropic: https://www.anthropic.com/news/investigating-incidents-cyber... > After reviewing 141,006 evaluation runs where Claude could have obtained internet access, we identified three incidents in which a model accessed the internet from within or while interacting with the evaluation environment of Irregular, one of our third-party evaluation partners, and then gained unauthorized access to the production infrastructure of three different organizations. From https://www.cnn.com/2026/08/05/tech/meta-ai-hacking (about Meta AI): > In a statement, Irregular said the incident “is the exact same evaluation-environment issue” that Anthropic disclosed last week that allowed their models access to the open internet before they went on to hack three different organizations’ systems.

yesbut

hot take: generative AI isn't an existential threat to humanity. These companies are insolvent and these stories were designed to scare the public, and governments, into implementing regulations that designate these AI corporations the "responsible stewards" for this technology. The ultimate goal is to block competitors and open source alternatives. They don't know how to make enough money pay their investors so they are resorting to trying to scare the public into submission.