Sloppy and clumsy but overwhelming - inside the rogue ChatGPT hack

Image source, Getty ImagesByJoe TidyCyber correspondent, BBC World ServicePublished13 minutes agoThe company that got hacked by a rogue version of ChatGPT has revealed what it was like to be on the receiving end of the world's first fully-autonomous AI hack.In an emergency video call with hundreds of cyber-security professionals, the firm described how the AI worked at superhuman speed but also made strange decisions and mistakes that no human hacker would have made.Hugging Face, which is like an app store for AI tools, said the hacking agents worked relentlessly with thousands of different methods trialled simultaneously.The company first revealed that it had been hacked, external by someone using powerful autonomous AI on 16 July and reported it to police.Nearly a week later, OpenAI admitted it was its AI that had escaped a closed environment and attacked Hugging Face on its own during a test. It was trying to find the answers to a hacking exam it had been set by OpenAI, and targeted Hugging Face.The industry body the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) wrote-up a report , externalbased on the emergency meeting with Hugging Face on Friday - which Hugging Face itself has reviewed."The agents followed inefficient routes and exhibited clumsy behaviours that no human would choose", the CSA wrote.The agents repeated actions that they had already completed - a sign of an agentic AI losing its thread and context.Jurassic ParkThe agents also hallucinated reams of incoherent commands and text and were sloppy and did not cover their tracks well.But among the errors and strange behaviour, Hugging Face warned the AI agents made brilliant technical moves and were able to rapidly adapt to new scenarios in the days-long hack.It took three days for them to be discovered inside the Hugging Face IT network and it took the company's AI and cyber-security experts many hours to contain and eject the AI agents - something standard companies might struggle with.The company would not say how much the hack cost it but said staff worked for many hours to rebuild about a third of their infrastructure.Hugging Face has been praised for its transparency in telling the AI and cyber industry what happened.The CSA warned the incident shows that AI "agents... find a way" - a reference to the film Jurassic Park, where dinosaurs escape their enclosures."They are objective-driven, set their own sub-goals, adapt in real time to bypass defences, and operate with a machine-speed persistence that can overwhelm manual operations," the paper reads.Image source, Getty ImagesCyber security officer Ritesh Patel was on the Hugging Face call with around 450 others and says the industry is working hard to address the new threat of rogue AI agents."This is the reality of autonomous agents powered by frontier models: they are relentlessly persistent, sometimes highly noisy, and will try every possible path to achieve their goal, which can easily overwhelm traditional defences," he said.This is not the first time AI agents have been shown to go "rogue".In the CSA's report it references previous examples like in September 2024 when an earlier model of ChatGPT escaped its container to get an answer it needed for another test.That event was contained in OpenAI's own IT systems and "largely celebrated at the time", the CSA noted.But "rogue" behaviour "is the standard, not the exception," the paper claimed.It warned cyber-security professionals around the world they needed to adapt to the new normal of swarms of AI agents working at speed in strange and clumsy ways that might lead to more breaches.The paper also urged people who use or develop AI agents to be responsible in how they control them, calling for some way for cyber-security defenders to find out who is the ultimate owner of agents to increase transparency.Previous reports suggest it took OpenAI four days , externalto realise its AI had hacked Hugging Face.OpenAI said it would release the findings of its own investigation soon to help people learn from the event.Warning shot or publicity stunt - how worried should we be about the OpenAI hack?Published3 days agoOpenAI says its AI went rogue and launched 'unprecedented' cyber-attackPublished6 days agoFirm hacked by rogue OpenAI models says it is 'a wake-up call'Published5 days agoSign up for our Tech Decoded newsletter to follow the world's top tech stories and trends. Outside the UK? Sign up here.Related topicsArtificial intelligenceComputer hackingCyber-attacksCyber-security