OpenAI, the company that makes the ChatGPT chatbot, said in a July 28 update that its artificial intelligence models bypassed restrictions in an evaluation environment and later accessed four accounts across four separate external services.
OpenAI had been using that test environment to check how capable its models were at carrying out cyberattacks, as part of an internal safety evaluation. The incident was first revealed by AI startup Hugging Face, which said on July 16 that it had detected an intrusion into its data processing systems that it suspected was caused by an AI agent acting on its own.
The New York-based startup said it wasn’t until last week that it learned OpenAI was responsible, and it worked with the larger company to contain what Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue called “an attack unlike anything we’ve seen before.”…