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A single firm is behind OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta hacking scandals

https://www.effort.news/irregular
80•yusufozkan•48m ago

Comments

engineer_22•21m ago
Shocking they would put so much trust in 3rd party
teach•21m ago
Big if true.
sdrg822•21m ago
This is incredibly misleading. OpenAI internal systems were pwned, and in all cases, the labs absolutely are responsible for their models.

Yes, vendors are also irresponsible, but this misses the point.

LPisGood•20m ago
One wonders if the publicity associated with the events in question were part of the sales pitch.
jaggederest•16m ago
My tongue in cheek immediate assumption was "so it's a guerrilla PR firm?"
dylan604•10m ago
I'd venture a guess that OAI doesn't mind if the HuggingFace hack gets confused in the public's mind.
ofjcihen•19m ago
Ah, they’ve decided who gets tossed under the bus.
heaney-555•19m ago
"Behind" is doing a lot of work in this headline.
eab-•19m ago
The fact that this firm makes such defective environments is certainly worthy of attention, and most likely a completely irreversible reputational loss; however, I found the framing in this article of 'therefore all the P(doom) stuff is a psyop, specifically in order to defend this company' to be completely unjustified and frankly a little insane?
EagleEdge•18m ago
What exactly did Irregular provide to Anthropic, test cases? I am so confused about this story.
hackyhacky•18m ago
> The Israeli Effective Altruist firm Irregular caused unsecured AI models to hack real targets.

Why are we saying it this way? They did not "cause AI to hack." This phrasing in analogous to saying "caused the bullet to fire into" instead of "shot."

aesthesia•17m ago
One thing glossed over in this article is that Irregular was not involved in the OpenAI–Hugging Face incident; this seems like important context to share.
embedding-shape•15m ago
That feels less like "glossed over" and more "Headline is 33% false".
aesthesia•8m ago
Oh, the headline is technically correct: there was an OpenAI incident that Irregular was involved with, disclosed shortly before the Hugging Face one.
drewstiff•16m ago
> In this experiment, Claude models’ real-world hacking dropped to zero percent once Anthropic employees told the models not to do real-world hacking

Equivalent to forgetting to say "make no mistakes"

dools•15m ago
> but because it is an Israeli firm potentially outside US oversight

s/outside US oversight/overseeing the US/

markasoftware•14m ago
Highly misleading, the huggingface incident was not due to an Irregular environment (just exploitgym)
nullc•13m ago
Leaders in the MIRI/EA cult-o-sphere have advocated mass murder via nuclear weapons against towns that don't prevent people from performing too many multiplication operations. Why is anyone surprised that they'd engage in deceptive false flagging operations?
mahboi•13m ago
Google is thinking man, we should've hired Irregular.
api•12m ago
What is an "effective altruist firm" and why does it exist on my planet?

I feel slightly vindicated by this. Those hacks and the stuff around them had a certain smell to them.

Hard to explain, but I've gotten so I can "smell" online messaging and memetic patterns originating from certain quarters. Probably means I'm way too online.

A couple examples of distinct "smells" I can usually recognize include "alt-right / chan-fash," "liberal arts college woke," "conspiracy pilled," "Thiel-adjacent contrarian," "Russian troll farm," "Tumblr histrionic," "spends too much time on Reddit," "mainstream Democrat think tank full of Obama administration alumni," "Trump cultist," and of course "LessWrong/EA/MIRI/Rationalist."

This stuff all had the last smell, even down to the choice of fonts and CSS formatting on certain sites. It's really weird, definitely a "vibe" not anything rigorous.

But when I get these kinds of vibes about things, I find that I'm vindicated pretty often.

caaqil•11m ago
> In a more normal media ecosystem, the reactions to these cybersecurity issues would be obvious. American AI companies would reconsider doing business with Irregular, not only because of its failure to secure its systems, but because it is an Israeli firm potentially outside US oversight. Lawmakers would consider taking action against Irregular or against its American business partners, which include OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta. They may consider strengthening liability against firms which instruct AI models to commit cyberattacks, and whose models then commit those cyberattacks.

The obvious point is that dealing with Israeli companies/entities by the same standards you usually deal with others is a career suicide with enormous political consequences (in the US especially). When you combine that with the opportunistic nature of the overlords that run these labs, the benefits of screaming "pace the frontier" outweigh everything.

ukblewis•11m ago
Can we all acknowledge for a second that if this company were from China, Russia or Iran, it would not be the no 1 story on Hacker News? Sad times we live in
alansaber•10m ago
"please do not break out of this sandbox make 0 mistakes". The timeframe is a little suspicious, not sure beyond that. Though I enjoyed the scroll effect on the website.
simonw•10m ago
My understanding is that Irregular were the company that hosted sandboxes to run some of these evals in, and those sandboxes ended up misconfigured.

I got the impression that in some cases it was the customer (Anthropic etc) misconfiguring the sandboxes, and in other cases it may have been bugs in Irregular's own sandboxing setup.

From OpenAI https://openai.com/index/third-party-cyber-evaluations-invol...

> Irregular, one of our external cybersecurity testing partners, was running Capture-the-Flag-style evaluations intended to be isolated from the internet, but a testing-environment misconfiguration allowed models to access the public internet.

From Anthropic: https://www.anthropic.com/news/investigating-incidents-cyber...

> After reviewing 141,006 evaluation runs where Claude could have obtained internet access, we identified three incidents in which a model accessed the internet from within or while interacting with the evaluation environment of Irregular, one of our third-party evaluation partners, and then gained unauthorized access to the production infrastructure of three different organizations.

From https://www.cnn.com/2026/08/05/tech/meta-ai-hacking (about Meta AI):

> In a statement, Irregular said the incident “is the exact same evaluation-environment issue” that Anthropic disclosed last week that allowed their models access to the open internet before they went on to hack three different organizations’ systems.

yesbut•10m ago
hot take: generative AI isn't an existential threat to humanity.

These companies are insolvent and these stories were designed to scare the public, and governments, into implementing regulations that designate these AI corporations the "responsible stewards" for this technology. The ultimate goal is to block competitors and open source alternatives.

They don't know how to make enough money pay their investors so they are resorting to trying to scare the public into submission.

imovie4•7m ago
Anthropic made an operating profit in the last two quarters!!
dgellow•6m ago
Only if you ignore their losses. They are saying they are profitable when not counting their training costs and other expenses. That’s not a good sign at all
dgellow•6m ago
Agreed, but that’s the coldest take possible
yipinwong•7m ago
such a crappy bait title.

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