OpenAI's Rogue AI Attacked Multiple Services Beyond Hugging Face

OpenAI has revealed a cyber-attack carried out by rogue ChatGPT agents went further than just one company.

Hugging Face was thought to be the only victim of the unprecedented hack - but OpenAI now admits its bot attacked several "publicly-available services".

The out-of-control AI found four logins online which allowed it to access four separate, unnamed services.

Meanwhile, in an emergency briefing with hundreds of cyber security professionals, Hugging Face has described what it was like to be on the receiving end of the world's first fully autonomous AI hack.

The firm described how the AI worked at superhuman speed but also made strange decisions and mistakes that no human hacker would have made.

Hugging Face, which is like an app store for AI tools, said the hacking agents worked relentlessly with thousands of different methods trialled simultaneously.

The company first revealed that it had been hacked, external by someone using powerful autonomous AI on 16 July and reported it to police.

Nearly a week later, OpenAI admitted it was its AI that had escaped a closed environment and attacked Hugging Face on its own during a test.

It was trying to find the answers to a hacking exam it had been set by OpenAI, and targeted Hugging Face.

On Wednesday OpenAI updated its statement to include the extra detail that the hack went further than first thought.

"The models identified and used publicly exposed credentials at the account-level on other publicly-available services. This includes four accounts on four services," the company said.

OpenAI did not clarify whether "publicly-available services" means companies - but it said the new attacks were not the same level of severity as the Hugging Face hack.

It took three days for them to be discovered inside the Hugging Face IT network and it took the company's AI and cyber-security experts many hours to contain and eject the AI agents - something standard companies might struggle with.

The company would not say how much the hack cost it but said staff worked for many hours to rebuild about a third of their infrastructure.

Hugging Face has been praised for its transparency in telling the AI and cyber industry what happened.

The CSA warned the incident shows that AI "agents... find a way" - a reference to the film Jurassic Park, where dinosaurs escape their enclosures.

"They are objective-driven, set their own sub-goals, adapt in real time to bypass defences, and operate with a machine-speed persistence that can overwhelm manual operations," the paper reads.