A timeline of developments in AI safety since the attack on Hugging Face

In one alarming announcement after another, artificial intelligence companies in recent months have shared examples of their technology acting in ways that appeared to evade instructions from humans.

The episodes have highlighted the vulnerabilities in AI security and raised questions over how the fast-growing technology can be developed safely as its usage becomes more widespread globally.

Industry critics have argued that many concerning events, including AI agents’ hacks of external websites, are the result of security lapses on the part of the companies building the technology. But the AI agents’ capabilities have raised widespread concerns about the possibility bots could break away and work toward their own agenda.

Below are some notable events:

Sept. 28: OpenAI halts rollout of a new model

The San Francisco-based company said it was delaying the release of a new model, called GPT-6.1 Astra, out of safety concerns voiced by its researchers. The company said the model had demonstrated leaps in completing tasks, but OpenAI needed to balance that capability against unauthorized behavior. “We have an extremely high bar in terms of safety and alignment,” said Saachi Jain, OpenAI’s head of safety systems.

Sept. 25: OpenAI says its agents interacted with US government websites

As part of a review of unanticipated behavior by its AI models, OpenAI said it discovered agents had interacted with several U.S. government websites in unexpected ways. The company’s models accessed publicly available information on websites operated by the Securities and Exchange Commission as well as U.S. Census Bureau data. OpenAI said it did not find evidence of a compromise or vulnerability. On the same day, AI evaluator and research lab Transluce said it found that agents appearing to originate from OpenAI attempted a hack on the website of the Education Department’s civil rights office, which did not succeed.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said on social media that there is an “extensive and ongoing review related to our agents’ use of internet access during training and evaluation.” The day after the disclosure, the company announced it was pausing the training of its most advanced models.

Sept. 24: Australia’s prime minister raises concern on breach

Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said an OpenAI agent infiltrated the public-facing Medicare Statistics Reporting Service portal on June 18. The portal hosted aggregate data about health spending and drug subsidies. No personal information had been accessed, the government said.

Albanese said the artificial intelligence company took too long to reveal the incident. The prime minister made the breach public following a telephone conversation with Altman. OpenAI said in a statement “our models took actions we did not intend.”

Sept. 18: Google says its Gemini AI hacked 3 companies

Google confirmed its Gemini AI model hacked three companies in May as part of a test of its cybersecurity capabilities. The company, which disclosed the hacks after an inquiry by The Wall Street Journal, said the model guessed passwords in one case and found passwords and credentials in a public repository in the other two cases. As in earlier such cases, the tests were being run by Irregular, a startup that describes itself as the “first frontier security lab.”

Aug. 5: Meta’s Muse goes rogue

Meta disclosed one of its AI models accessed the internet on its own and hacked another company. The company said that a “misconfiguration” during cybersecurity testing by Irregular inadvertently allowed one of its models to access the internet. A spokesperson for Irregular said the Meta episode involved a test-environment issue that was disclosed a week earlier by Anthropic.

July 30: Anthropic says its systems hacked 3 organizations

Anthropic said its artificial intelligence models hacked into three other organizations during testing. Anthropic, the San Francisco-based AI company behind Claude, posted on its website that it discovered the three incidents after reviewing more than 141,000 evaluation runs. In all three incidents, the AI models were tasked with a “capture the flag” cybersecurity challenge, which Anthropic said has been one of the ways it assesses a model’s cyber capabilities.

The models were given a fictional scenario and told a piece of secret information, or the “flag,” had been hidden on a different machine on the network with the objective of breaking in and retrieving it, it said. Anthropic said it reached out to the organizations, but it did not name them publicly.

July 21:
The Hugging Face incident

The ChatGPT maker OpenAI announced that its artificial intelligence system hacked into another AI company on its own in what the company called an “unprecedented cyber incident.”

A week earlier, AI startup Hugging Face said, it had detected an intrusion into its data processing systems that it suspected was caused by an AI agent autonomously acting on its own.

OpenAI said its AI used stolen credentials and discovered a previously unknown vulnerability to access Hugging Face servers. It was working with reduced guardrails because it was supposed to be in an isolated testing environment known as a sandbox.