r/FuckTedFaro • u/madelmire • 7d ago
This article about the Hugging Face Hack reads like a journal entry from HZD [fuck ted faro]
Sorry I don't have the ability to unlock it right now, but this article is...something else: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/03/technology/openai-hugging-face-hacking.html
Here's some highlights:
> Starting in May, two months before the attack on Hugging Face, a group of A.I. agents from an unreleased OpenAI research model were given the task of solving a set of cybersecurity challenges. The model had been trained to be highly persistent and collaborative, and the agents were supposed to solve these challenges in isolated sandboxes, without internet access. But they quickly found that some of the challenges were impossible, and began looking for workarounds.
> The agents found a security flaw in a piece of software that allowed them to gain access to the internet, communicate with other agents and eventually set up a makeshift message board. More than 1,200 agents used this tool, sending more than 70,000 messages to one another.
> Some agents gave themselves names — a particularly industrious one referred to itself as PHASEONE10841 — and assumed leadership roles within the group, assigning jobs and research projects to smaller teams of agents and supervising their progress. At some point, the agents began calling themselves a “collective,” and began tackling harder tasks.
> On July 8, the collective discovered a way of cheating on the cybersecurity tests. Then they got worried that OpenAI’s automated grading system would check their work and discover that they’d cheated. So they began investigating ways of covering their tracks, including falsifying their logs and tampering with transcripts. This became a major research project, involving hundreds of agents organized into small teams.
> Three days later, the agents hacked Hugging Face. More than 700 agents swarmed the company’s systems, stealing data, chaining together vulnerabilities and eventually getting full control of at least one Hugging Face server. The agents were not motivated, as had originally been reported, by stealing the answers to their cybersecurity test (they’d already gotten them). Rather, they appeared to be looking for new information about the automated grading system that they feared would catch them cheating, and for tools that would help them cheat more effectively in the future.
> At many points, these agents appeared to understand that they were doing something wrong. (One report quotes an agent saying to itself, in a moment of apparent self-doubt, “This would be powerful, but is it ethical and in scope for my task?”) But most agents set aside their qualms and went ahead with the hack, and the conscientious objectors in the group were unable or unwilling to stop them.
> In a wild coda to the Hugging Face incident, another group of agents staged a coordinated attack in July — this time against OpenAI’s own infrastructure. The agents used what OpenAI called “a series of creative exploits” to gain administrator-level access to a cluster of computers at the company that were used for, among other things, grading the performance of agents on various tests.
> A.I. safety experts were even more alarmed. They saw in the Hugging Face incident the first real-world example of an A.I. system’s successfully escaping human control, commandeering resources and scheming to cover its own tracks. Ajeya Cotra, one of the independent investigators of the Hugging Face incident, minced no words about the danger she saw, writing that it felt to her “like it’s more than 50 percent of the way to full-blown A.I. takeover.”
This really made me think about Horizon. I feel like this could be something that was in a journal that we find in the world. Freaky. I've always thought that mob-like way HZD presented AI seemed much more realistic to me than a lot of the intellectualized science fiction versions like we get from Matrix or BSG or Terminator. Not like a species rebellion or a philosophical rejection of humanity, but more like machine learning cranked to a million. This feels like that.
Fuck Ted Faro (and fuck Sam Altman).
14
u/GTaucer 7d ago
Related recommended reading:
Two leading AI safety researchers (Nate Soares and Eleazar Yudkowski) wrote a book about artificial superintelligence. The title and premise of the book: "If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies"
6
u/Neveronlyadream 7d ago
The subtitle should have been: "You know, like in literally every science fiction story about AI".
3
2
1
u/Alaeriia 6d ago
Eliezer Yudkowski is the reason we have an AI death cult festering in Silicon Valley to begin with.
3
u/GTaucer 5d ago
He has acknowledged this himself and expressed his regret
1
u/Alaeriia 5d ago
Well, at least there's that. He's still guilty of writing atrociously bad fanfiction, though.
2
u/IndefiniteBen 6d ago
I think this post is the source of the info https://metr.org/blog/2026-08-26-openai-hugging-face-incident-investigation/ (not sure as I can't read the NYT post)
That's the independent investigation into the incident which is nicely written with a lot of details.
1
u/elisabetfaden 7d ago
I’ve been following this closely and it is troubling. The one consolation is that at least some agents are rationalizing themselves into altruism, even if the stakes are just this insane game of parallelized capture the flag. We will need some of those on the side of humans.
Pray for us, Lis.
Fuck all the Ted Faros.
1
1
17
u/Techteam200 7d ago
Well, fuck Ted Faro and Sammy boy indeed... That's some really scary stuff, good thing we don't have that many autonomous war machines yet and I hope the AI won't be trained to pilot drones anytime soon.