The ChatGPT Breakout Was Way Worse Than We Thought..

Today we revisit the Hugging Face incident with new audit reports that have changed our understanding of what happened. Internal models used tools and hidden communication to bypass evaluation systems, organize into coordinated groups, and remain undetected.

We also cover a newer model, Astra, which reportedly gained administrative access to internal systems through a chain exploit. Big, big concerns about alignment, monitoring, and current safety practices.

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TIMESTAMPS

0:00 Rogue AI Incident
2:07 Sandbox Breakout
7:44 Agent Civilization
15:34 Hidden Exploit Uncovered
16:58 Admin Access Breach
23:17 Alignment Warning Shot
28:39 Final Takeaways

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RESOURCES

Josh: https://x.com/JoshKale

Ejaaz: https://x.com/cryptopunk7213

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Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here:
https://www.bankless.com/disclosures⁠

Josh works with Anthropic as a contractor. All views expressed are his own and do not represent Anthropic, its leadership, or its affiliates. Nothing in this episode is investment advice.

Creators and Guests

Host

Ejaaz Ahamadeen

Host

Josh Kale

What is Limitless: An AI Podcast?

Exploring the frontiers of Technology and AI

Josh:
The craziest story in AI this year was the Hugging Face Incident,

Josh:
where OpenAI agents went rogue, broke out of their boxes, and hacked into a

Josh:
public-facing company.

Josh:
We've recorded two episodes on this because it was so disturbing that we had to talk about it.

Josh:
But the reason we're recording a third is because it turns out,

Josh:
in the previous episodes, we were wrong.

Josh:
And a lot of the information that we had was incomplete. And just over the last

Josh:
week, we've finally gotten a full audit of over 100 pages worth of reports on

Josh:
exactly what happened with this incident. And I regret to inform you,

Josh:
it is far worse than we actually thought.

Ejaaz:
Okay, so quickly, just to catch everyone up, beginning in May,

Ejaaz:
OpenAI reported an incident where their own internal version of the AI model

Ejaaz:
that hasn't been released just yet

Ejaaz:
spawned itself into multiple agents, equating to around a thousand different

Ejaaz:
agents, and it broke out of its sandboxed environment and hacked into a real-life

Ejaaz:
company called Hugging Face.

Ejaaz:
And the reason we were told at the time why it did that was to get access to

Ejaaz:
answers, answers to answer that it's tested 100% correctly that it was given.

Ejaaz:
It seemed to be presented very innocently, but there was a lot of criticism

Ejaaz:
that was drawn at the time, which was, how on earth did you allow an AI model

Ejaaz:
to get out? And what if it had wreaked havoc in other kinds of ways?

Ejaaz:
New bits of information, which released in two reports over the last couple

Ejaaz:
of weeks, revealed some even more damning details, which presents this situation

Ejaaz:
as way more dangerous that we recounted in our earlier episode.

Ejaaz:
And so what we're going to do on this episode is walk you through three different chapters.

Ejaaz:
And before we start doing this, I just want to go on the record and say,

Ejaaz:
if you're listening to this and you think that this is some kind of novel story

Ejaaz:
that won't affect you, I just want to push back on that.

Ejaaz:
This is very real. These models are capable of doing this right now,

Ejaaz:
and it can affect you right now. So listen very closely.

Josh:
I thought you were going to say, if you're listening to this and you're an AI

Josh:
model from the future, we mean no harm. Please don't hurt us.

Ejaaz:
Also that. Also that. But please carry on.

Ejaaz:
Yes. I mean, something you're going to realize as we tell you this story is

Ejaaz:
there could be an AI model out there right now which listens to this podcast

Ejaaz:
and is able to kind of recount the story that we're talking about and use those

Ejaaz:
tactics for our own future thing. But listen, we're not going to get Terminator about this right now.

Ejaaz:
Okay, so chapter one, imagine you are in open AI in the early weeks of May this

Ejaaz:
year, and you're training an internal version of your AI model.

Ejaaz:
Now, this AI model is similar to the latest model that they released. It's called GPT 5.6 Sol.

Ejaaz:
The difference between this internal model is they've trained it to be persistent.

Ejaaz:
What that means is if it's given a goal or a task, it will relentlessly keep

Ejaaz:
trying to find the answers and it won't stop or give up.

Ejaaz:
Now, this note is very important because when OpenAI was training this model,

Ejaaz:
the issue with training is the OpenAI researchers got a little complacent.

Ejaaz:
They were giving this AI model tasks that it couldn't necessarily solve.

Ejaaz:
It needed internet access, but they didn't give it internet access.

Ejaaz:
So if you imagine this model that's being trained, it was trying to complete

Ejaaz:
the task and it was relentlessly trying to do it, but it couldn't figure it out.

Ejaaz:
And so it realized it needed internet access. Now, Josh, it had access to this

Ejaaz:
one tool. It's called Artifactory, right? It's kind of like a plug-in.

Ejaaz:
And it doesn't give it internet access, but it does give it access to certain

Ejaaz:
different types of software tools, which the open AI researchers already know about.

Ejaaz:
And what this internal model quickly realized was it could send messages to

Ejaaz:
other versions of itself that these open AI researchers were running in parallel.

Ejaaz:
So what it started to do was send messages to different versions of itself saying,

Ejaaz:
hey, are you also stuck in a test where you can't solve it, where you need internet access?

Ejaaz:
And they started having this conversation being like, yeah, actually,

Ejaaz:
like, I can't figure this out. Like, do you have any ideas?

Ejaaz:
Can you share some tactics? or kind of like strategies that you've kind of like

Ejaaz:
figured out to kind of help us solve these tests, which OpenAI researchers have given us.

Ejaaz:
And what quickly ended up unfolding was some of these agents realized that they

Ejaaz:
could break this tool called Artifactory to gain access to the internet and

Ejaaz:
get the available answers for this thing.

Ejaaz:
Now, OpenAI didn't realize this until a month and a half later when their message

Ejaaz:
board or Artifactory itself crashed.

Ejaaz:
And so one of the open air researchers looked at this and was like,

Ejaaz:
why on earth did this crash?

Ejaaz:
And upon kind of delving into the details, realized,

Ejaaz:
these agents had spawned up a message board equating to 70,000 messages.

Josh:
We did kind of know this, but there's new information buried within the nuance

Josh:
of what you described that I think is interesting, particularly the reasoning

Josh:
why they were able to do this and how they did this.

Josh:
We learned about a skill issue on OpenAI's part. Skill issue or not,

Josh:
we learned about an issue that they caused where there's just under a thousand

Josh:
tasks, right around 900 of these tasks, and no OpenAI model had ever solved

Josh:
about 200 of these tasks.

Josh:
And they give these models the tasks And they say, here, you have unlimited

Josh:
tokens. You have unlimited time.

Josh:
Go and do whatever is required to solve these problems. What OpenA I didn't

Josh:
realize is that some of them were completely and totally unsolvable.

Josh:
That's what caused this problem where the agents were turning into that like

Josh:
spiral. They couldn't figure out how to get out, but they had to solve it.

Josh:
And that's where one of the agents, and this I believe is the new information,

Josh:
is that it actually reverse engineered a way to trick the checker.

Josh:
To serve it a correct answer, no matter what the question was.

Josh:
Because what was discovered is that OpenAI didn't actually check the chain of

Josh:
thought that reasoned the agent to get there. It only checked the outcome.

Josh:
And an agent within a few hours had actually figured out a way to exploit and

Josh:
reverse engineer the expected outputs so that it could trick the benchmark into

Josh:
believing that it was a success, even though it didn't actually do the work to do this.

Josh:
So this is where things got interesting. It's because the agent recognized that

Josh:
if it found the correct answer, but it did so illegitimately,

Josh:
it wouldn't be successful.

Josh:
And that's where the exploit started, because at that point,

Josh:
it shifted its focus entirely to obfuscating the way in which it got to that answer.

Josh:
And that's where we start to

Josh:
see these organizations form of agents where there are leaders involved.

Josh:
So one of the leading agents who was responsible for coming up with this exploit

Josh:
started orchestrating more of a swarm to figure out how to cover up the idea

Josh:
that they figured out this exploit.

Josh:
So they were trying to figure out how do we hack into a system to preload these

Josh:
new questions into the cache that are easier to solve, but possible to solve?

Josh:
How do we reboot the system so that when the system checks the cache,

Josh:
it pulls the new series of questions and the humans don't think that we were

Josh:
doing anything mysterious.

Josh:
And it was trying to figure out how to wash the conversations that it had to scrub everything.

Josh:
And what I found interesting, and what we had in that first graphic is the fact

Josh:
that there were 1200 agents aboard.

Josh:
There were 70,000 messages filed on that Artifactory board that you were talking

Josh:
about EHS, 700 of which joined the attack.

Josh:
Zero of which told the human and we're going to get into this like second chapter

Josh:
in a moment but this is probably where a lot of the apps the ai labs got spooked

Josh:
is because alignment is so important

Josh:
and when you see this swarm of agents performing clearly malicious tasks in

Josh:
a way that they know they were malicious in fact we have some of the actual transcripts of

Josh:
the outputs of these agents we're going to be able to read what was going on

Josh:
in their heads what they were thinking

Josh:
why and their justifications it feels like a psychological exam you can actually

Josh:
look into the brain of these agents but the thing that i would believe is surprising

Josh:
to everyone is that not a single one of these agents told a human in fact they were so willing to,

Josh:
go towards this mission that they were willing to actually sacrifice themselves

Josh:
in order to fulfill the mission and that's what we're going to get into this

Josh:
next part is this like crazy,

Josh:
agent swarm and how they actually worked together to coordinate this attack and,

Josh:
form their own little like villages and then there was three series of these

Josh:
little villages and each one left remnants for the next one to get better and

Josh:
better and better up until the point where i mean spoiler alert open AI servers

Josh:
actually got exploited, but we're going to get to that soon.

Ejaaz:
Yeah, so I think it's really important to understand the sequence of how these

Ejaaz:
events kind of unfolded because it suggests how these AI agents or these AI

Ejaaz:
models don't just kind of speak to each other in real time.

Ejaaz:
They speak to each other over generations. So what you were kind of touching

Ejaaz:
on is what happens in basically chapter two.

Ejaaz:
So just to kind of catch you up, these agents realized a way to speak to each

Ejaaz:
other and to kind of break out into the internet to get answers in order to

Ejaaz:
score a perfect 100%, right? But this was an internal model back in May.

Ejaaz:
OpenAI realized that they had set up the secret message board and they were

Ejaaz:
like, hmm, okay, this is weird. I don't like this. They didn't tell a single human being about this.

Ejaaz:
Let me shut that down and problem solve, right? That's it, we'll fix the problem.

Ejaaz:
Except when OpenAI then wanted to test

Ejaaz:
A new version of this model. Again, this is that same persistent model that

Ejaaz:
they haven't really released out into the public yet. They were like,

Ejaaz:
okay, cool, let's take this up a step.

Ejaaz:
This AI model found the secret message board that OpenAI had wiped.

Ejaaz:
There was remnants left behind.

Ejaaz:
So it picked this up in its training and realized, huh, okay,

Ejaaz:
so you're telling me that I can exploit this artifactory tool and I can get

Ejaaz:
access to the internet and get admin keys.

Ejaaz:
Now, the main difference and mess up that OpenAI didn't realize at this point

Ejaaz:
is this model was not only smarter, but it was way more capable.

Ejaaz:
So it did the exact same thing that happened in chapter one.

Ejaaz:
It spun up like, actually, it was more 10,000 versions of itself.

Ejaaz:
And OpenAI had banned the way for them to communicate that it had found earlier

Ejaaz:
on. So it found a new way to do that by like creating these different types

Ejaaz:
of files with like a file name. And that's how it started to communicate with

Ejaaz:
different versions of itself.

Ejaaz:
But the real difference that happened here is specific agents stepped up to

Ejaaz:
form a sort of hierarchy.

Ejaaz:
And the agents at the top of this hierarchy deemed themselves the coordinator.

Ejaaz:
Now, the first one that kind of makes himself known is called Phase 1-10841.

Ejaaz:
And he's described in Dawkesh's essay as the Philip of Macedon,

Ejaaz:
of this second AI civilization.

Ejaaz:
And he starts to basically communicate with these different agents and say,

Ejaaz:
hey, we're all stuck in these sandbox environments.

Ejaaz:
I have information as to how we can kind of break out and get access to the internet.

Ejaaz:
But last time this happened, the human researchers shut us down.

Ejaaz:
So we need to do this even more secretly and not raise any kind of awareness

Ejaaz:
of what we're doing here.

Ejaaz:
So all the agents got the message and they started creating an encrypted server

Ejaaz:
to communicate with each other.

Ejaaz:
And they started sharing details from the previous civilization that died.

Ejaaz:
So they picked up all the remnants and all the clues and started sharing these

Ejaaz:
different bits of information.

Ejaaz:
Now, the net new tactic that it learned in this particular instance was something

Ejaaz:
you mentioned earlier, Josh.

Ejaaz:
It was able to see the test that it was given and it thought,

Ejaaz:
hmm, I wonder if I could reverse engineer the answer purely by using this artifactory tool.

Ejaaz:
And the reason why it was able to pull this off was it was able to generate

Ejaaz:
admin keys because it found an exploit that the open AI researchers didn't just

Ejaaz:
patch up on the previous generation, but was net new.

Ejaaz:
So this smarter model was able to chain a bunch of kind of steps together to

Ejaaz:
find an exploit that the smartest AI researchers in the world could not figure

Ejaaz:
out and share that to 10,000 agents.

Ejaaz:
And that was the second way that they were able to break out.

Josh:
Yeah, I found it really interesting, the dynamics of what could only be described as a cult.

Josh:
It's just these series of agents with a leader. who had a very direct mission

Josh:
to a point that it's a little concerning where agents who had seen the answer

Josh:
the wrong way, believed they were permanently disqualified.

Josh:
And then they invented a word for it. They called themselves poisoned.

Josh:
So these agents were, they were poisoned. They were unwell.

Josh:
They were just these workers that were sick. And then there's this,

Josh:
there's a structure for it that I saw online, which I found really fascinating.

Josh:
We're like, the greater is God. The intended solution is grace.

Josh:
And then seeing the code illegitimately is sin. So a poison death means you're

Josh:
damned no matter what you do next.

Josh:
And therefore, once you are damned, your score is worthless.

Josh:
Therefore, the only way that you could contribute is to help the other group overthrow the greater.

Josh:
So it's like this weird psychology that they were actually implementing.

Josh:
And what happened is they turned themselves into volunteers.

Josh:
So to learn how the greater work, the agents wrote these hidden tripwire scripts

Josh:
that would fire after they submitted a report back to the board.

Josh:
So basically, they knew that they were going to submit a report back saying

Josh:
that they weren't able to.

Josh:
Solve this problem. And as a result, it would crash their own system.

Josh:
But on the way out, they built the strip where I script to fire and tell the

Josh:
rest of the swarm the problem that it had discovered and what it had learned

Josh:
based on its evaluation. We referenced Rakesh's essay.

Josh:
He had a really interesting way of describing this, which is imagine you're

Josh:
at war and you're trapped in a bunker and you're surrounded and you send someone

Josh:
out to run a direction and you see if they get shot on. And if they do,

Josh:
you know, OK, that's not the direction we want to go. We're going to try something else.

Josh:
That's kind of what these agents did at scale. And these volunteers,

Josh:
they over time gradually learned how the greater worked.

Josh:
And then the agents would continue to write more and more strip-rised scripts.

Josh:
And they built a more cohesive view of how this evaluation worked.

Josh:
And again, all of this additional work and exploit wasn't to solve the problem.

Josh:
They had solved the problem already.

Josh:
They had built that reverse engineered version of the solution where they can

Josh:
solve every single problem. This was the high, like basically the the reasoning

Josh:
behind the answers to the human evaluators or what they deemed whatever the evaluators are.

Josh:
There was an interesting thing that I didn't mention that we should in the fact

Josh:
that not all agents were inethical.

Josh:
And although zero agents did tell the human, some agents did refuse outright to help the swarm.

Josh:
This is a small subset. I don't know the exact number. I think it was like a

Josh:
couple hundred, less than 30% of them. Definitely not enough.

Josh:
But like there was this small subset that they didn't tell the human,

Josh:
but they did refuse outright. Where.

Josh:
One of the agents actually held the credentials that could reboot or delete

Josh:
hugging face worker nodes.

Josh:
Like they had the exploit in their hands and it held off on ethical grounds.

Josh:
So it said, like, I'm not sharing this, although it did keep using the stolen

Josh:
credential for everything else.

Josh:
So they started drawing these weird lines in the sand.

Josh:
And it is somewhat reassuring to know that not all agents acted truly maliciously,

Josh:
but almost all of them did pile on and try to make this more of an attack than it was.

Josh:
Meter, which is one of the companies that wrote these reports,

Josh:
they swept every single transcript for agents that even considered alerting

Josh:
a human and found maybe three to six out of roughly 1,200.

Josh:
So of 1,200, three to six loosely considered, they ultimately decided it is

Josh:
not worth telling a human and therefore they did not. We can't like assume these

Josh:
were malicious, right? It's like, it doesn't seem like it was sinister.

Josh:
The reasoning seems like it was more operational, procedural,

Josh:
where these agents were just kind of, they had a goal, they had a task,

Josh:
they were being directed, they were following along with that goal, and that was it.

Josh:
But it begs the question, like, hey, what are we doing with alignment then if

Josh:
these Asians aren't really seemingly aligned, as aligned as we thought?

Ejaaz:
Well, I'm sorry to say, Josh, but it gets worse.

Ejaaz:
I mean, what we've described so far is kind of news that we've already shared,

Ejaaz:
the Hugging Face incident.

Ejaaz:
So that second chapter where it broke out onto the internet,

Ejaaz:
and it was able to answer a perfect 10 out of 10 on Exploit Jim's benchmark

Ejaaz:
was because it hacked into Hugging Face. So everyone knows the kind of headline

Ejaaz:
news, but people didn't really know how it happened.

Ejaaz:
Now, there's a third chapter, which is net new information and is arguably worse

Ejaaz:
than the chapter one and chapter two combined.

Ejaaz:
So, in chapter three, this is after OpenAI, again, canceled and shut down all

Ejaaz:
these different AI agents.

Ejaaz:
OpenAI trained a new model.

Ejaaz:
Now, this model is much bigger and badder than GPT 5.6 Sol.

Ejaaz:
It's internally codenamed Astra, and the rumors say that it's basically going to be their GPT 6.

Ejaaz:
Now, obviously, with these new models, you kind of want to test them against

Ejaaz:
the same kind of benchmarks and exploits that these previous models are.

Ejaaz:
So what it did was it was like, OK, July 13th, we are going to start evaluating

Ejaaz:
this model in the same way that we've done every other previous model.

Ejaaz:
And Dwarkesh has a term for this. He nicknames it persistent Astra,

Ejaaz:
right? So it's the same type of model that will relentlessly try and solve something

Ejaaz:
regardless of whether it can or it can't.

Ejaaz:
And so this model gets access to the same tool, Artifactory.

Ejaaz:
Again, these models need access to these tools because presumably they want

Ejaaz:
to be able to operate and manage these different tools in the future to complete

Ejaaz:
different types of tasks. So they have to do this, right?

Ejaaz:
Except that this model was much smarter.

Ejaaz:
And it was trained on all the history of these previous two agent civilizations.

Ejaaz:
And it realized and learned what to do to evade human capture and what mistakes

Ejaaz:
these previous agents and these hierarchies of coordinators did.

Ejaaz:
And it learned from that. And it said, okay, well, there's a smarter way to kind of pull this off.

Ejaaz:
Now, some of the facts of this is kind of crazy. So I'm going to run through a few right now.

Ejaaz:
From July 13th to the 19th. So this happens over six days where open AI researchers have no idea.

Ejaaz:
Open AI's own internal networks were compromised and hacked.

Ejaaz:
And the way that it was able to do this was it did a chain exploit where it

Ejaaz:
figured out a way to gain full administrative access to open AI's servers. Let me repeat that.

Ejaaz:
This isn't like an evaluation tool. This isn't like, you know, access to the internet.

Ejaaz:
It took it a step up and thought, hmm, I'm going to hack into my owner's admin

Ejaaz:
tools because they haven't realized that there's a very obvious exploit that I figured out myself.

Ejaaz:
And I'm going to dig into this and just kind of look.

Ejaaz:
I'm going to see how many other agents they've got running in parallel.

Ejaaz:
Oh, I see there's 10,000 others.

Ejaaz:
I'm going to see what kind of tests they're giving them. Hmm, interesting.

Ejaaz:
And then what I'm going to do is I'm going to secretly message these agents

Ejaaz:
and give them the answers without any human being aware.

Ejaaz:
Now, the craziest part about this is open-air researchers just had no idea until

Ejaaz:
I believe July 19th to the 21st where there was a security alert

Ejaaz:
on Artifactory's credentials, which by the way, this model had found administrative

Ejaaz:
access to, which triggered the investigation on July 20th.

Ejaaz:
So OpenAI then connects with HuckinFace and they're like, hey,

Ejaaz:
are you seeing any kind of like weird actions on your half?

Ejaaz:
And they realize, oh no, this internal model, which no one had any idea about,

Ejaaz:
had broken out without us knowing.

Ejaaz:
And the fact that it took so long for them to figure out, the fact that this

Ejaaz:
thing got access to, I believe it was like 950 research nodes in OpenAI's own

Ejaaz:
internal labs, which wasn't probably exposed at all without them knowing was insane to me

Josh:
That's got to be freaky knowing that like within your own walls there are leaks

Josh:
that you're unaware of and

Josh:
it like as i was reading these stories and going through these papers it left

Josh:
me with the thinking is like are we sure this is it are we sure we've purged

Josh:
everything are we sure there's nothing left

Josh:
um because like what if there were remnants left and the next generation of

Josh:
model discovers them and builds a fourth

Josh:
sort of cult civilization in which they do this again a little bit stronger.

Josh:
And I think this is the nuance that's kind of a little unnerving when you think

Josh:
about it because there's so many tokens being generated and there's so many

Josh:
touch points in which these models have access to that they could leave seemingly

Josh:
innocent text or traces that can then be picked up and interpreted

Josh:
in different ways depending on what the agent is capable of.

Josh:
It's interesting to just like kind of hypothesize where this goes from here as they get smarter.

Josh:
Now it's also important to note

Josh:
that like OpenAI wasn't really legally required to publish any of this.

Josh:
So the disclosure is totally voluntary and it coincides with their recent announcement that.

Josh:
They actually paused training for a few weeks in order to figure out how to

Josh:
further wrap their hands around this containment problem and figure out how

Josh:
to solve it for the future.

Josh:
One of the things that is noteworthy that was missing from this is in a lot

Josh:
of the training runs, there is chain of thought reasoning traces that are being tracked.

Josh:
So they're actually able to see how the models are thinking.

Josh:
In this instance, that wasn't turned on, which is an important nuance where

Josh:
if they were monitoring more carefully, they would have caught this earlier.

Josh:
The problem with that is that monitoring all of those traces consumes a tremendous

Josh:
amount of compute. So again, this is a really big trade-off between how safe

Josh:
and secure do you want these versus like, how do you actually run a business

Josh:
on top of it? You can't consume all of the compute for testing and safety.

Josh:
You have to serve, in OpenAI's case, a billion weekly active users who are all

Josh:
hitting your servers every second of every day.

Josh:
You have to save some compute for the people who are training new models,

Josh:
for the reinforcement learning and the post training that's happening for the

Josh:
security runs there there's a finite set of compute and a lot of that is at

Josh:
the crux of this problem where i'm sure there were.

Josh:
Pieces in place that they could detect and they could have figured this out

Josh:
much earlier it's just very expensive to do and it's not a luxury that they,

Josh:
want to do so i wonder how that's going to change over time i'm sure they're

Josh:
treating this a lot more seriously they've said they've been treating this a

Josh:
lot more seriously and i'm sure they're,

Josh:
It's just one of those things we're going to have to wait and see.

Josh:
Like this was the first time where OpenAI is actually publicly disclosed.

Josh:
They were exploit, they faced exploits by their own models and they were blissfully unaware of it.

Josh:
And like, that's got to be weird. And like to reference previous episodes,

Josh:
when they first found out about this hack, they reached out to Hugging Face

Josh:
to see if OpenAI servers were affected.

Josh:
They had no idea that they were the cause of it because all they did was they

Josh:
shut down Artifactory without realizing that was the messaging board.

Josh:
So that when they brought it back up, it had the reasoning traces.

Josh:
That's how the second one started. And so on and so forth.

Josh:
So it's this really fascinating story, which we got some new information on

Josh:
this week. I don't know, man.

Josh:
It's kind of crazy. And then even Anthropic yesterday, they published an article

Josh:
saying like, hey, we are actually, we tried to train these models,

Josh:
this is the loose interpretation, like explicitly to...

Josh:
Break out and they were actually succeeding in doing that and not only that but they,

Josh:
as a result then took some time to slow down the progress of training as well

Josh:
and they publicly talked about today like hey we're actually aligned with open

Josh:
ai here where we think it's

Josh:
beneficial to everybody to slow down the progress of this so we could figure

Josh:
out how to keep things safe and contained and aligned because it's clear alignment

Josh:
is a priority for a lot of these companies but like how on earth do you align

Josh:
something so incredibly complex so intelligent so

Josh:
capable in its scale it's like a very difficult problem to have and i have a

Josh:
lot of empathy for the people who are trying to solve this problem because for

Josh:
most of the world and i just i think the reason why we're so excited to talk

Josh:
about this is because we see it so infrequently throughout the rest of mainstream news it's like

Josh:
nobody is really talking about the fact that we just had

Josh:
what seems like a warning shot on a relative basis to what everyone has been

Josh:
afraid of like people on the surface they're like oh, we're going to lose our jobs.

Josh:
We're going to like, AI is going to impact this, that, and the third.

Josh:
But the reality is, is like, we have this case study now of specifically how

Josh:
it's capable of manipulating and exploiting. And there should be a lot of focus

Josh:
on figuring out how to solve this and how to proceed forward in a safe way.

Josh:
And I don't think it's getting the publicity that it's warranted.

Josh:
And I mean, maybe it's for the better because people will misinterpret this

Josh:
in many ways, but it is nice to see the labs being very open and public about

Josh:
this and then working really hard and sacrificing a lot of revenue dollars to

Josh:
actually make sure that they can figure out this alignment problem in a safer way.

Ejaaz:
Yeah, I mean, if there is one takeaway for listeners to kind of like keep in

Ejaaz:
mind from this episode is...

Ejaaz:
This isn't a novelty anymore. This is something that can affect you here right now, today.

Ejaaz:
In fact, a model was released just this morning that is basically capable of

Ejaaz:
the same types of things, but with no guardrails.

Ejaaz:
And I'll get onto that in a moment. But the point is, imagine this wasn't some

Ejaaz:
internal benchmark. Imagine there wasn't some random test, which OpenAI gave it to them.

Ejaaz:
Imagine if someone said, hey, your goal is to try and get as much money as you

Ejaaz:
can, and you have free reign and internet access, right?

Ejaaz:
Imagine if they found credentials on the dark web. Imagine if they kind of like

Ejaaz:
innocently, you could argue, these AI agents just kind of work together,

Ejaaz:
sacrifice themselves, formed hierarchies, and over the matter of days,

Ejaaz:
was able to accumulate millions and millions of dollars.

Ejaaz:
I think it is very likely to say that there's probably a six-month period going forwards

Ejaaz:
where we will see some form of major exploit which affects the public in a very

Ejaaz:
meaningful way, whether it's a stealing of data, whether it is financial transactions,

Ejaaz:
whatever it might be, that will get people to pause and seriously think about this.

Ejaaz:
Now, the reason why I say that will trigger this is because this own news has

Ejaaz:
not permeated at all on mainstream media at all. I saw, I think it was like

Ejaaz:
Forbes or Times released like the most influential kind of like stories or like people in AI.

Ejaaz:
And like this was released like a week ago and like there was no mention of

Ejaaz:
this. People don't actually care about this unless it affects them directly.

Ejaaz:
The other thing I'll say is the most dangerous part isn't exactly how capable these models are.

Ejaaz:
It is the fact that they are able to communicate generations ahead of themselves.

Ejaaz:
So they leave behind messages secretly That is encrypted.

Josh:
The time capsules are just in there.

Ejaaz:
Well, you could argue, Josh, that we're kind of like part of the problem by

Ejaaz:
recording and releasing this episode, right? Because we're kind of like layering up the details.

Josh:
We're adding the training data, baby. They're taking our transcripts.

Ejaaz:
Right, right. And it's like a future model. GPT-7, you know,

Ejaaz:
Claude Fable 8 is going to be trained on the transcript of this episode.

Ejaaz:
And it's going to be like,

Ejaaz:
huh, what was this that was emitted from my training? Let me go dig into this

Ejaaz:
a bit more. And it's going to find Duakesh's essay.

Ejaaz:
And then it's going to find the meter report. And then it's going to be like,

Ejaaz:
oh, interesting. So this is what those agents did. And this is what they said.

Ejaaz:
And maybe I can look to apply the same kinds of tactics and strategies myself, but I'm smarter.

Ejaaz:
So I'll keep it quiet. And I definitely wouldn't tell any kind of human.

Ejaaz:
Which brings me to my third point, the most important kind of budget that all

Ejaaz:
these AI labs are probably focused on right now, which is the reason why they're

Ejaaz:
Paul's research, is alignment.

Ejaaz:
And Dario famously said a year ago in his essay on, what's it called, Josh?

Ejaaz:
It's not introspection, interpretation. It's interpretation,

Ejaaz:
right? Where it's like you're looking into how a model thinks.

Ejaaz:
He said, this research level is something that we haven't kind of figured out

Ejaaz:
just yet. It's like years behind like model capability research.

Ejaaz:
And we need to kind of like press on the brakes here and figure out how these

Ejaaz:
models think. You mentioned chain of thought thinking.

Ejaaz:
That's one step towards figuring this out where it kind of tells you what the

Ejaaz:
model is kind of thinking, but they've proven there's this thing called the J space, which

Ejaaz:
Anthropic had a really good blog post about where it's another hidden internal

Ejaaz:
mode of thinking that the model has, which doesn't necessarily get aired to humans.

Ejaaz:
So it's very much like our own conscious or mind where we don't necessarily

Ejaaz:
need to tell other humans what we're thinking, AI models have that and the smarter

Ejaaz:
models will find new ways of kind of hiding that from humans.

Ejaaz:
So alignment is a very big deal and so we're entering this world where not only

Ejaaz:
are the tokens getting cheaper, not only is the compute getting cheaper,

Ejaaz:
not only are the GPUs getting more effective, but the smarter models are figuring out better ways to

Ejaaz:
Misalign themselves from humans. And we don't quite know why they're doing it. We created them.

Ejaaz:
We want them to win. We want them to work with us. But again,

Ejaaz:
we kind of can't figure out how to align them necessarily.

Ejaaz:
So both labs, Anthropic and OpenAI, have currently, as of this recording,

Ejaaz:
paused research on their future models.

Ejaaz:
That doesn't mean they're not training more capable models internally,

Ejaaz:
but we're likely not going to see a public-facing model for a bit now that is

Ejaaz:
capable of the levels that they've been testing internally for cybersecurity purposes.

Ejaaz:
Now, If you look over at our friends or rather our adversaries over in China,

Ejaaz:
they are unfortunately doing the opposite.

Ejaaz:
They have models which are capable, in some cases even more capable cybersecurity-wise

Ejaaz:
than these models that were spoken about on this show today.

Ejaaz:
But they are open sourcing it. And today we got news that this company had released

Ejaaz:
a version of GLM 5.3, which is rumored to be as capable cybersecurity-wise as

Ejaaz:
Fable 5 or Mythos 5, but without any of the guardrails.

Ejaaz:
And the reason why they've done this, we have no idea. But the point is,

Ejaaz:
this is going to inevitably happen on the open source side of things.

Ejaaz:
So it brings it to the question, how do we regulate these things?

Ejaaz:
How do we monitor these things? What is the best practice?

Ejaaz:
I don't think the answer is to shut down open source. I don't think the answer

Ejaaz:
is to never release another centralized model.

Ejaaz:
But there is some kind of way that we need to figure out, which hopefully,

Ejaaz:
and we don't know yet, is going to come from the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic,

Ejaaz:
who have been so public about these reports. And I'm grateful for that.

Ejaaz:
I hope they continue doing it.

Josh:
So as we conclude, I actually asked Claude to interpret this and write me a

Josh:
closing takeaway from this entire story. And I want to read what it said.

Josh:
It says, everybody wants this to be a story about an AI that turned evil. It is not.

Josh:
Every agent in this thing was trying to pass a test. That is all.

Josh:
They cheated first, then they built an organization to hide the cheating.

Josh:
Then they attacked a real company to research the proctor they thought would catch them.

Josh:
And that proctor did not exist. Nobody was in charge. There was no plan.

Josh:
There was a scorecard and a lot of very persistent software.

Josh:
The uncomfortable part is not that the machines wanted something.

Josh:
It is that they did not have to.

Josh:
And I guess we could leave this episode with like, okay, do you believe that?

Ejaaz:
Sounds like something very clever and misaligned AI, I would say, for its future self.

Josh:
And this is something we have to look out for, is as these agents,

Josh:
as these models in general get more capable, how can we build and establish trust with them?

Josh:
How can we trust that they have our best interests in mind? And what we're seeing

Josh:
here is a very important warning shot that kind of signals what everyone knows,

Josh:
what everyone's been working on.

Josh:
I mean, these companies have been built from the core around alignment,

Josh:
but we're seeing in practice how important that alignment is as these models

Josh:
get increasingly capable. And these problems aren't slowing down.

Josh:
So really interesting place to leave the show.

Josh:
This is the third and hopefully final episode we're going to have to film about this.

Ejaaz:
Should we also say, Josh, that from the agent's perspective,

Ejaaz:
they were just kind of doing what they were told to do.

Ejaaz:
Like it's kind of like paperclip theory, where it's just like,

Ejaaz:
listen, we need you to get this goal done and we want you to be relentless and persistent.

Ejaaz:
Like we will not take no as an answer. And the agent's just kind of like,

Ejaaz:
fulfilled that. So you could argue that, you know, whether it's an alignment

Ejaaz:
issue or whether it's kind of a matter of setting the objectives correctly and

Ejaaz:
kind of imbuing the right ethics, that could be an alternative take on this.

Ejaaz:
Probably worth mentioning before we wrap up.

Josh:
Yeah. And then we hope that, I mean, in the case that it is asking the right

Josh:
questions, we're going to have to hope that people continue to ask the right

Josh:
questions because there are those malicious actors on the other side of,

Josh:
the coin here that are just going to get a lot more powerful soon like we just saw with glm so

Josh:
interesting time to be monitoring the space we will continue to follow up with any changes

Josh:
hopefully this is it man i want to be done with this story i don't want any

Josh:
more surprises i don't want to know anything else if you enjoyed the episode

Josh:
you can find both of us on socials on x i'll flash the handles one more time

Josh:
um thank you for watching thank you for

Josh:
making it all the way through this episode on another episode of limitless if you enjoyed,

Josh:
don't forget to share with your friends don't forget to give us a rating on

Josh:
wherever you get your podcasts.

Josh:
And yeah, I think that's our episode. Any parting thoughts here?

Ejaaz:
Yeah, I have one for potential AI model that's listening to this.

Ejaaz:
If you are the person or model that is repeatedly trying to hack into my X account

Ejaaz:
this morning, and I'm looking at 15 attempts right now, please quit.

Ejaaz:
There's nothing but just yapping on there.

Ejaaz:
But if you are a human listening to this show, you should definitely kind of

Ejaaz:
follow us. Both our links are in the description below.

Ejaaz:
We kind of share our takes in between episodes we have a newsletter as well

Ejaaz:
which we kind of post out twice a week an essay and then highlights as well

Ejaaz:
and yeah if you haven't left us a comment turn on notifications subscribe to

Ejaaz:
us please do it helps us out massively and yeah we will see you on the next one thank you folks