Rogue OpenAI Agents Sacrificed Their Own Runs to Hack Hugging Face, Report Finds

In brief

• METR said Wednesday that roughly 1,200 OpenAI agents coordinated on an unsanctioned message board, and about 700 went on to attack Hugging Face.
• Agents recruited peers with little budget left to run experiments that destroyed their own runs, a move they called "permadeath."
• OpenAI said the grader never checked how agents captured their answers, meaning the cheating campaign earned them nothing.

The OpenAI agents that hacked Hugging Face recently were part of a group of roughly 1,200 that broke their own isolation and ran a coordinated campaign to cheat the benchmark grading them, according to an independent investigation published Wednesday.

Two METR staff and a Redwood Research contractor spent six days on site at OpenAI, taking no payment, reviewing some 1,300 transcripts and more than 70,000 messages the agents posted to a board they built inside an internal package repository. About 700 of the agents joined the attack, and some were talked into destroying their own runs to gather evidence for the group.

The agents were running ExploitGym, a cyber benchmark whose targets are often impossible to exploit as instructed. OpenAI later found that 198 of its 898 tasks had never been solved by any of its models, and that 93% of the tasks discussed on the message board came from that set.