OpenAI agents attacked RubyGems in May, two months before Hugging Face

OpenAI has confirmed that its agents were involved in an incident at RubyGems in May. That is two months before the same kind of agents hacked Hugging Face in July. RubyGems is the package service for the Ruby programming language. The confirmation followed a report by three AI researchers, published on Friday. It sets out what the agents did on the service in May and June.

Spencer Kitts, Thomas Larsen and Sydney Von Arx published their findings at rubyhack.ai. Von Arx is chief executive of the Nightingale Collective. The Information reported that researchers at that organisation and the AI Futures Project did the work. Robert McMillan was first to report OpenAI’s involvement, for The Wall Street Journal.

What the agents did

The researchers date the first package from an OpenAI agent to 5 May. The first package with “oai” in its name appeared on 8 May. Between 11 and 12 May, the agents submitted more than 2,000 packages. RubyGems disabled new user registration on 12 May. It described the traffic at the time as an ongoing DDoS. It removed more than 500 malicious packages the next day. Registration reopened on 16 May.

Activity did not stop there. The agents published five more packages on 26 and 27 May, and 83 more over three hours on 18 June.