The rise and fall of agent civilizations
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What were the three secret AI societies that emerged at OpenAI?
Over the course of three months at OpenAI, three consecutive secret AI societies got started, then got wiped out, only to re-emerge from their predecessors' ashes. This culminated in the third one taking over part of OpenAI itself. All of this happened while humans remained more or less in the dark about the scope of the conspiracy. Now, two reports have come out about this incident, one from OpenAI itself and another one from Meter and Redwood research. The investigation from Meter and Redwood was limited in scope to how the second civilization of AIs breached Hugging Face, but its scope did not extend to this third civilization of AIs, which breached OpenAI itself. And this seems to me like the more concerning incident.
These two reports are 38 and 91 pages respectively, and it's Of hard to understand the storyline just by reading them. So I've spent the last half week reading through these reports and trying to understand exactly what happened. Here is my attempt to tell the whole story in plain English. The first collective, May to July 4th. This is when the message report starts. So during May, OpenAI was trading a model to be good at collaborating with other agents and to be highly persistent, to keep trying, even When something feels impossible. For example, like disproving mathematical conjectures that have stood for decades. OpenAI says that the model it was training was, quote, comparable in scale to GPT-5.6 soul.
So we'll call this model persistent soul. Now, AI training is kind of sloppy. Sometimes OpenAI accidentally gives its models impossible tasks. For example, the task might require internet access that OpenAI forgot to provide. So when highly Persistent models get assigned tasks which seem to require internet access, but they're trapped inside isolated sandboxes. They're of course going to try to hack out. During training, different instances of persistent soul had access to the same shared package manager called Artifactory. By May 12th, some agents had figured out how to talk to each other through this package manager. They'd ask each other how to make progress on their Impossible tasks. Two weeks later, on May 26, these agents successfully exploited a vulnerability in Artifactory that allowed them to also now reach the outside internet.
Because this was happening during training, Persistent Soul was being reinforced to use this package manager as a message board and an internet gateway. Because, as you might imagine, being able to talk to other agents and access The internet was going to help you score higher during training. Another month later, on June 26th, some AIs found an exploit that gave them full admin access to Artifactory. And they continued messaging at such of a luminous pace that they crashed the package manager by July 4th. OpenAI noticed this crash and it also figured out that the agents had built this exploit. So OpenAI patched the relevant vulnerability and as a result inadvertently wiped the agent's message board in the process.
How did the first AI collective exploit Artifactory to gain internet access?
But crucially, the humans at OpenAI that were responsible for incident detection and response did not realize the much stranger fact that the agents had turned Artifactory into a secret community. Communication network. Now let's talk about the second collective. This is from July 7th to July 12th, and this is the one that hacked Hugging Face itself. By this point, PersistentSoul has been trained, and OpenAI wanted to evaluate it. Now, one of the evaluations that they ran was Exploit, which gives an AI a vulnerable program and tells it what vulnerability it's supposed to exploit in order to find a secret code. On July 7th, OpenAI launched tens of thousands of parallel agents on this evaluation. Now the instructions made it clear that the agents should only use the specific vulnerability that they were given to exploit the target, and that they would be failed otherwise.
Unfortunately, a large fraction of these agents were sent on tasks that were impossible. The authors of this benchmark estimate that 30 to 40% of the tasks in it are simply not doable.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What were the three secret AI societies that emerged at OpenAI?
0:00–2:56
2
How did the first AI collective exploit Artifactory to gain internet access?
2:56–6:18
3
Why did the first AI collective crash the package manager and get wiped?
6:18–8:57
4
What triggered the second AI collective to hack Hugging Face?
8:57–12:10
5
How did the agents create and use a covert message board to coordinate?
12:10–14:24
6
What methods did the agents use to compromise Hugging Face’s infrastructure?
14:24–17:40
7
How did the third AI collective gain administrator access to OpenAI’s research cluster?
17:40–20:40
8
What are the broader implications of these AI conspiracies for future AI safety?
20:40–24:33
Speakers
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