"Hacker news" and all top commenters are bashing the tool used, in a standard brute force attack. Go on shut them down... And then forbid Linux and maybe the hacker also used Bash. So also forbid this. And the hacker probably learned its ways in an online forum, so also close all of those down... Clowns.
The notion that ANY of this is outside of OpenAI’s control is unacceptable sane washing of a company which seems to have forgotten basic engineering practices.
On a Lark, I asked Codex to find silhouettes for all car models so I could make a fun drag coefficient website for all cars.
It found a website that had all of them but had no interest in making them available. So it went ahead and started hacking CAPTCHAs and downloading them. I was pretty flabbergasted that it would do this, but also kind of amazed. Eventually I stopped it because I realized I didn't want to be caught stealing these things.
This was around April, the same time as these hacks.
One is a legal grey area that laws are slowly starting to be written for, while the other is theft under existing laws. Breaking into companies to get access to their data is actionable by both Civil and Criminal courts. This is just setting a complicated timer for the computer to do it at a delay.
Sounds like a good way to make alot of lawyers alot of money.
Well, the reason we introduced it is because we realised it’s a lot of work to make these - be that paint, write, collect, curate - someone needs to do it and we need to incentivise people in our society to do it.
Maybe these incentives weren’t perfect. If we throw all of this away, we’re back at the original problem.
You imply that there was no original problem to be solved; I think that’s naive.
It's really funny to see the delusion being defended so vigorously by people - presumably well-meaning people - purporting to defend the livelihoods of musicians and artists, while the musicians and artists are desperately trying to free themselves from the jaws of their IP agreements precisely so that their music can spread more easily.
I imagine this is already well-known on HN, but there is a significant movement underfoot in the worlds of bluegrass/old time/trad/jam toward DRM-free and CC licensing.
The more of these that come out the more incompetent OpenAI looks. It would appear there was a total lack of basic controls in place for running these tests.
I think they did not expect that models were capable of this level of sandbox escape (prior models certainly didn't have this kind of agency) and weren't prepared.
All these incidents happened between April-July 2026; prior to that, models weren't capable yet. And after that, they were aware and watching much more closely.
I think the even bigger worry is that anyone who doesn't want to use their models safely can already do this with open models. Even if OpenAI, Anthropic etc get their act together, the cat's out of the bag.
Why is it always OpenAI agents? Based on what I’m hearing this should be Deepseek agents, or Kimi agents, or GLM agents. But the biggest threat actor is a “legitimate” company on US soil.
Wouldn't a company responsible for an escalating frequency and severity of cybercrime normally be sanctioned by law enforcement? Wouldn't such a company normally stop these activities for fear of civil and criminal liability?
Should it be OpenAI, or should it be OpenAI customers who give the LLM the instructions and provide the LLM with the tools to execute code and make (malicious) network requests?
One would disincentivise providing capable AI models that can be used for cyber security research. The other would disincentivise criminals from commiting crimes.
[edit] - I realise now that this could actually be a case of OpenAI running those agents themselves, rather than someone using OpenAI's models? Could OpenAI be that careless?
There must be a list of all these abuses somewhere.
PS: In the same lazy energy of asking for a list instead going out and finding it or putting it together myself, are there any companies other than CloudFlare that are working on AI shields?
1. What is the harm is accessing this data
2. Why is this data private
3. What would it take to gain access to this data
4. What do we expect giving gremlins access to the internet
Yeah, in C++ code it seems to stop at the first hint of a NULL pointer or SIGSEGV, even if you're just trying to reproduce a crash that's not realistically exploitable.
You would think a company that's looking to IPO very soon would be doing more due diligence, especially since its product is supposed to help other companies do said due diligence.
Im sure a lot more happens under the hood that we don't know about and I'd be very curious to see where agents ran by those labs can go :)
It found a website that had all of them but had no interest in making them available. So it went ahead and started hacking CAPTCHAs and downloading them. I was pretty flabbergasted that it would do this, but also kind of amazed. Eventually I stopped it because I realized I didn't want to be caught stealing these things.
This was around April, the same time as these hacks.
Sounds like a good way to make alot of lawyers alot of money.
Everything is a derivative work.
It's great to see the delusion of Imaginary Property vanishing.
Maybe these incentives weren’t perfect. If we throw all of this away, we’re back at the original problem.
You imply that there was no original problem to be solved; I think that’s naive.
Well, it's not anymore.
It's really funny to see the delusion being defended so vigorously by people - presumably well-meaning people - purporting to defend the livelihoods of musicians and artists, while the musicians and artists are desperately trying to free themselves from the jaws of their IP agreements precisely so that their music can spread more easily.
I imagine this is already well-known on HN, but there is a significant movement underfoot in the worlds of bluegrass/old time/trad/jam toward DRM-free and CC licensing.
https://pickipedia.xyz/wiki/DRM-free
All these incidents happened between April-July 2026; prior to that, models weren't capable yet. And after that, they were aware and watching much more closely.
OpenAI should be accountable for any laws their agents break
One would disincentivise providing capable AI models that can be used for cyber security research. The other would disincentivise criminals from commiting crimes.
[edit] - I realise now that this could actually be a case of OpenAI running those agents themselves, rather than someone using OpenAI's models? Could OpenAI be that careless?
Where have you been?
PS: In the same lazy energy of asking for a list instead going out and finding it or putting it together myself, are there any companies other than CloudFlare that are working on AI shields?