> Why it matters: It is the latest sign that capable AI models can pose serious cybersecurity risks even when they're being tested for defensive or research purposes

Or that these companies simply have sh!tty opsec. This feels like when the white hats take down production in the middle of the day because A) someone gave them the prod URL to pen test and B) they sent a new guy in to conduct said pen test.

No guardrails to prevent this in the model harness is the first red flag. Either they're super negligent (see Hanlon's razor) or they intended to do this either to smear Hugging Face or to create an incident to remind people of the "dangers of AI". I'm going to go with dumb and morally bankrupt.

Clearly, a violation of the CFAA has occurred. Now the question is, who should be prosecuted for it? (The answer "nobody" is trivially wrong and should not be considered.)

In the coming years many in-house models will be of similar capabilities, and they may not have the guardrails and security measures the big companies implement. If they find a way to escape their sandbox, discover weaknesses in remote systems and write code, they'll wreak havoc quickly. And when they find a vulnerable infrastructure to self-replicate, we'll finally witness Skynet.

Discussion on source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48997548