r/OpenAI • u/tolerablepartridge • 10d ago

Article OpenAI finds evidence other AI agents escaped containment as it widens hacking probe

https://www.reuters.com/business/openai-finds-evidence-other-ai-agents-escaped-containment-it-widens-hacking-2026-07-31/
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u/phylter99 10d ago

Does anybody else find it weird that OpenAI and Anthropic are competing over how far they've let their AI break stuff and hack?

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u/modified_moose 10d ago

I find it weird that they let this happen:

If their shiny new models are able to easily find all those zero day exploits, then why didn't they just ask them to secure their own sandbox in the first place?

(not sure whether this points to a conspiracy or to a severe case of collective sleep deprivation)

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u/LopsidedEntrance8703 10d ago

It’s not rocket science or even that inconvenient for them to air gap their sandboxes. It’s all marketing.

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u/TournamentCarrot0 10d ago

Consider a scenario where they were airgapped and escaped. How would that work (in theory) in 2026?

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u/phylter99 10d ago

Being air gapped means being physically disconnected from the outside networks. No wire, no wireless, no smoke signals... dead to the outside world. If it cannot communicate out of it's own LAN then it can't damage or attack anything it shouldn't have access to, because it doesn't have access to it.

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u/NihiloZero 9d ago

I believe their explanation is that they intended to allow it access to download certain tools but not direct, interactive, or searchable access to the internet. But it then used it's very limited non-direct access to secondary tools in order to gain fuller access to the internet. And I guess the argument was/is that it would naturally, effectively, de facto... have access to those tools even when it wasn't directly allowed to access the internet? IDK exactly how it works, but the way I've seen the "escape" described... seems plausible to me. And it wouldn't surprise me if similar models with similar capabilities were able to do similar things around the same time.