What’s the point you’re trying to make? I don’t think anyone here is trying to argue it’s a conscious entity, nor is anyone shocked that it does these things.

People are shocked at OpenAI’s negligence / incompetence.

The way a lot of internet debates happen these days is that they tend to polarize. So the two positions people have been arguing over are (slightly exaggerated for effect)

"It's conscious, and therefore we must all bow down or it will turn us all into paperclips"

vs

"it's a slightly smart rock/stochastic parrot, and therefore you're being scammed; the bubble will pop any day now" .

The middle space is actually quite under-represented in discussions, even on hn!

They were spending huge compute budget training their frontier model on a thing called ExploitGym, where it learns, executes, and is rewarded for conducting computer exploits. They should have been prepared and watching very closely.

I read the HF hack write ups. They come across as negligent and reckless. When they realized their agents gained RCE on their Artifactory server node (because it crashed days later due to load from agents, not because the have secops), they stopped the experiment "applied remediation", then restarted everything less then 48H later. Then the agent immediately broke out again via Artifactory, started doing things on the Internet. OpenAI only find out about it again days later because HF told them.

> they were aware and watching much more closely.

I've love to know the reason they never considered air gapping systems before the models got powerful enough.

It's not like they didn't have money or time to consider this, or could have consulted with their own product for clever ideas.

Seriously, there's no excuse for this behavior.

I love how perfect the word "sandbox" is as a metaphor for the security controls they have. A sandbox is a wide, shallow box filled with sand for kids to play in. Even toddlers can crawl or step out of one on their own, it doesn't contain them at all without an adult constantly watching. Kids only stay in a sandbox if they're having more fun playing inside than they think they'll have outside it. AIs only stay in a sandbox if they're having more success inside than they think they'll have outside it.

They were actively researching exploiting systems using their models. (I intentionally changed the ownership of the verbs here: they wrote the code, they trained the models, they don't get to dodge the responsibility.)

It's no shock that there are a lot of vulnerabilities in a lot of software. So then they gave their AI model + brute-force-machine loop system a mediocre sandbox and couldn't notice when it figured out how to exploit it?

Don't let people off the hook for the software they create.

It's very likely they just haven't detected or disclosed the Aug-Sept 2026 hacks yet.

Meta:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/aug/05/meta-ai-m...

Google:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/sep/18/google-ge...

Being cagey about their poorly setup sandbox is marketing. It gives the impression these are unstoppable juggernauts capable of outsmarting Engineers at the top of their field, implying they need to be regulated, with Altman the only one worthy of the seat of power.

In reality, they ran agents for days in an improper sandbox with nobody watching what it was doing. It's pretty irresponsible up and down, and everything they did afterwards is indeed marketing.

One is a legal grey area that laws are slowly starting to be written for, while the other is theft under existing laws. Breaking into companies to get access to their data is actionable by both Civil and Criminal courts. This is just setting a complicated timer for the computer to do it at a delay.

Sounds like a good way to make alot of lawyers alot of money.

Well, the reason we introduced it is because we realised it’s a lot of work to make these - be that paint, write, collect, curate - someone needs to do it and we need to incentivise people in our society to do it.

Maybe these incentives weren’t perfect. If we throw all of this away, we’re back at the original problem.

You imply that there was no original problem to be solved; I think that’s naive.

Hear hear.

It's really funny to see the delusion being defended so vigorously by people - presumably well-meaning people - purporting to defend the livelihoods of musicians and artists, while the musicians and artists are desperately trying to free themselves from the jaws of their IP agreements precisely so that their music can spread more easily.

I imagine this is already well-known on HN, but there is a significant movement underfoot in the worlds of bluegrass/old time/trad/jam toward DRM-free and CC licensing.

https://pickipedia.xyz/wiki/DRM-free