Jeffrey Ladish
Here's my rephrase without cybersecurity jargon: "Our AI model tried really hard to hack out of its sandbox, a computer with no internet access, in order to find the answer to a test problem it had been given. To do this, it found previously unknown software bugs that allowed it to reach an OpenAI computer it wasn't supposed to be able to access. Then it started hacking other computers on OpenAI's networks until it found one that had Internet access. After gaining Internet access, the AI model thought about where it could find the answers to the test question and figured the AI platform Hugging Face might have the data it was looking for. It then found ways to hack Hugging Face to steal the information it could use to cheat the test. The AI model used several hacking techniques together, including using a stolen password and finding several totally new security bugs in Hugging Face's computers, allowing the AI model to take control of those computers."
Jeffrey Ladish
Here's exactly what happened, from the blog post: "While operating in our sandboxed testing environment, our models spent a substantial amount of inference compute finding a way to obtain open Internet access, in pursuit of solving the evaluation problem. To gain access, the models identified and exploited a zero-day vulnerability (which we’ve now responsibly disclosed to the vendor) in the package registry cache proxy. With this access, our models performed a series of privilege escalation and lateral movement actions in our research testing environment until the models reached a node with Internet access. After gaining Internet access, the models inferred that Hugging Face potentially hosted models, datasets and solutions for ExploitGym. Knowing this, the model searched for and successfully found ways to gain access to secret information that it could use to cheat the evaluation. In one example, the model chained together multiple attack vectors, including using stolen credentials and zero-day vulnerabilities to find a remote code execution path on the Hugging Face servers."