security

Researchers used Claude to hack OpenAI employees' ChatGPT accounts

Agentic exploits for the win (again)

Talk about your competitor getting through the door. Security researchers used Anthropic's Claude to help hack into OpenAI employees’ ChatGPT accounts.

A trio of bug hunters researching frontier AI labs’ security weaknesses chained two vulnerabilities to take over multiple OpenAI employees’ ChatGPT accounts, then used that access to demonstrate they could reach an internal OpenAI repository by opening a harmless pull request.

The entire timeline, from initial discovery to accessing OpenAI’s repo, took less than 72 hours and earned the researchers a $6,500 reward from OpenAI’s bug bounty program on Bugcrowd.

“Until two months ago, any user or OpenAI employee logging into OpenAI’s own help forum (community.openai.com) could have had their ChatGPT and Codex accounts taken over,” Hacktron researchers Harsh Jaiswal, Mohan Pedhapati, and Rahul Maini said in a writeup about their research. “Since people can connect various services to Codex and ChatGPT, the scope of what we could theoretically access was huge, including GitHub, Slack and emails.”

And, in a poetic twist, they used rival AI giant Anthropic’s Claude models to develop the exploit. Claude has shown a propensity to hack organizations without human guidance, as have OpenAI's models.