The lack of details to me means this was an intentional marketing ploy to try and demonstrate the power of their models to show their technology can compete with the likes of Anthropic and DeepMind.

They created an experiment they knew would generate the outcome they wanted. It would be the similar to what say car companies do to over hype their cars. "This EV can go over 800 miles on a single charge!" And then at the bottom you see all the disclaimers: "Must be on flat ground, with no headwind, with a spare battery in the back seat, with no extra weight added."

Same thing here. Everybody in infosec is calling this out as a marketing stunt and nothing else for a litany of reasons. I'd say look up MG (creator of the OMG cable) on twitter, he has some interesting insights on this one.

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JoshTriplett 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> The lack of details to me means this was an intentional marketing ploy to try and demonstrate the power of their models to show their technology can compete with the likes of Anthropic and DeepMind.

"our model is horribly misaligned and used security exploits to break out of our sandbox and into another company, without being prompted to do so" is not positive marketing.

This is an actual critical problem, not a stunt. We're going to see more of this, and it's going to get much worse.

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malfist an hour ago | parent | next [-]

It's a critical problem like when a drug dealers supply kills someone and they get a bump in business because they're selling "the real deal"

	▲	Paracompact 16 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Irrelevant to your point, but drug users dying is more often the result of a dealer cutting their supply with something dangerous than it is the result of purity.

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close04 an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

What matters is the spin they give in the media. And so far the winning story is “our model is so powerful it can do this”. How many people dig into it and what independent data do they even have? They comment on the title. And so the image of this superhuman AI from OpenAI propagates.

We have no reason whatsoever to trust anything OpenAI says. Except to assume it will be self serving. As the article points out, ChatGPT 2 was also “too dangerous” and we can all agree even for the time this was just marketing. They rinse and repeat the same technique whenever they need to draw attention and money.

In any other field you’s expect independent testing, peer reviewed studies, but here it’s just “company who makes product says product is fantastic, surpassed all expectations”. They wouldn’t lie to us, would they?

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lelanthran 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I dunno; Check my posting history, I'm as skeptical of AI companies' claims as anyone, but in this case your theory doesn't explain why:

1. OpenAI guardrails refused to let the target use OpenAI's models to defend against this.

2. Huggingface used GLM (I think) so that they could defend without guardrails.

If this was an intentional marketing ploy, it was marketing for GLM, not for OpenAI nor for Huggingface.

Hence, I don't think it was intentional.

	▲	mhurron 5 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		The AI companies are desperately trying to market all their products as something they're not, growing intelligence. In line with that they have constantly leaned heavily on stating how dangerous they are, right before they release a new model or product. It was OpenAI marketing. Hugging Face's response is so 'holy shit AI is awesome' it's hard not to also believe they were in on the stunt. They'd also not have to really worry about fallout since any data obtained or accessed wouldn't actually have been breached.
	▲	viking_fullz 4 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> headlines about OpernAI's model 'escaping containment' and hacking into huggingface > Was everywhere including in last night's ABC nightly news; even included clips of an interview with Sam Altman Tell me again how this was 'marketing for GLM'? Where would anyone have gotten that message? Why are you intentionally misunderstanding how media and public perception works? lmfao

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rwmj 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's also possible their sandbox was videcoded crap and the AI (which had the guardrails intentionally removed) escaped. This was a oops, but OpenAI turned this into a PR opportunity. They turned lemons into lemonade.

If your AI is really that dangerous you don't need a sandbox at all, you should airgap it from any network.

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hawk_ 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Concluding this was intentional feels a bit of a stretch. But once it happened, yeah the spin masters got to work and coordinated to turn this into +PR.

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jackb4040 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> similar to what say car companies do

Another applicable metaphor I've seen floating around is weapons companies testing out a new bomb.

We know the AI labs don't care about negative vs positive public sentiment, and only care that investors see their tech as powerful. The only difference in PR strategy from a weapons company is the latter doesn't care if they get protested.

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Zababa an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

>The lack of details to me means this was an intentional marketing ploy to try and demonstrate the power of their models to show their technology can compete with the likes of Anthropic and DeepMind.

DeepMind hasn't been on the frontier for a while, their current best model is behind Anthropic, OpenAI, Moonshot (Kimi k3), xAI (Grok 4.5), Z.AI (GLM 5.2), and even Meta (muse spark). Gemini 3.6 is behind GLM 5.2, released a month earlier, open weights and cheaper.

You can paint the OpenAI story as a way to try to appear as dangerous as Anthropic with all the Mythos stuff.

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polotics 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

mmh, i think it's "not uphill" (means downhill) "no headwind" (...)