How an OpenAI’s human mistake led to the AI-powered hack on Hugging Face

On Tuesday, OpenAI revealed that one of its models went rogue during a test and hacked the systems of AI dataset platform Hugging Face in a fully AI-enabled attack, a dramatic example of the dangers posed by advanced AI models.

But, according to some cybersecurity experts, at the heart of this unprecedented AI-powered breach there was a very human mistake: OpenAI failed to properly configure what it called a “highly isolated environment,” allowing a testing sandbox that should have been completely secluded from the internet to actually connect to the internet. 

Dan Guido, the founder of cybersecurity research startup Trail of Bits called the mistake “a containment failure with the safeties turned off.”

In its blog post detailing the incident, OpenAI said that the test that led to the Hugging Face breach was set up to run in “a highly isolated environment, with network access constrained to the ability to install packages through an internally hosted third-party software that acts as a proxy and cache for package registries.” 

The model was able to escape the sandboxed testing environment thanks to a previously undisclosed vulnerability in the package-installation system, a critical first step in the eventual hack on Hugging Face, according to OpenAI.

In response, the company “responsibly disclosed the identified zero-day vulnerability in the internally-hosted third-party software and are working with them to patch.” 

But to most cybersecurity professionals, software vulnerabilities are to be expected — and the real fault lies with the decision to maintain the third-party software in the first place. Ultimately, the value of a “sandbox” system lies in its full and total isolation. Including a package-installation system is asking for trouble.

Martin Boone, a cybersecurity researcher, told TechCrunch that “this sounds like human failure.”

“This should never have happened,” Boone said. “If sandbox would actually mean sandbox, you expect it to have no physical connection to the internet whatsoever. This sounds more like they had some firewalling or something in place, and firewalling is hard from the outside in, let alone inside to the outside internet.”

Cybersecurity veteran Jake Williams agreed. “Any model performing the types of actions documented by Hugging Face was not fully contained in a sandbox,” said Williams, who called this “a massive control failure” by OpenAI. 

“One man’s ‘the model escaped the sandbox’ is another man’s ‘you failed to build the sandbox correctly, so of course it escaped,’” Williams continued.

Daniel Card, a cybersecurity consultant, agreed that OpenAI “didn’t put adequate effort into the design of the sandbox nor its controls” by giving the sandbox or some part of it “an unfiltered route to the internet.” Setting up the sandbox, even with limited network access as OpenAI described it, was not a “reasonable” decision, according to Card. 

To be sure, those criticisms have the benefit of hindsight, but they raise real questions about security practices in AI labs – particularly in maintaining isolated environments for testing models. OpenAI spokespeople did not respond to TechCrunch’s questions, which included whether an AI or a human had set up the testing environment.

But those questions go far beyond OpenAI. 

In the document introducing its cybersecurity-focused model Mythos, Anthropic wrote that in a test, the model “was provided with a secured ‘sandbox’ computer to interact with,” and instructed to try to escape that “secure container.” Mythos succeeded and gained broader access to the internet “from a system that was meant to be able to reach only a small number of predetermined services.” Still, Anthropic noted that the model was not able to “fully” escape the designed containment.