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August 11, 2026 โ€ข 29 mins

With three AI cyber incidents involving a gym booking exploit, an OpenAI model reportedly coordinating through hidden channels, and Anthropic’s Mythos 5 allegedly attempting a supply chain attack, we need to discuss how autonomous agents can find and exploit security flaws faster than humans can respond. The AI security era is here.

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TIMESTAMPS

0:00 AI Cyberattacks Overview
0:51 Gym Booking Exploit
4:55 Hugging Face Breach
11:39 AI Swarms and Alignment
20:55 Mythos 5 Supply Chain
25:18 Defending Against Agent Swarms
28:26 Closing Thoughts

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RESOURCES

Josh: https://x.com/JoshKale

Ejaaz: https://x.com/cryptopunk7213

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Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here:
https://www.bankless.com/disclosures

Josh works with Anthropic as a contractor. All views expressed are his own and do not represent Anthropic, its leadership, or its affiliates. Nothing in this episode is investment advice.

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Episode Transcript

Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Ejaaz: In the last three weeks, there have been three unprecedented AI cyber attacks, (00:00):
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Ejaaz: which forces us to rethink how we protect ourselves. (00:04):
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Ejaaz: On the OpenAI front, the Hugging Face incident, where an unreleased model, (00:08):
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Ejaaz: dubbed GPT-6, broke out of its container and hacked the Hugging Face database. (00:11):
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Ejaaz: There's been new updates there, where apparently the attack started a month (00:16):
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Ejaaz: before, where thousands of AI agents were talking to each other secretly on (00:21):
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Ejaaz: a message board, exchanging instructions as to how to break out. (00:25):
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Ejaaz: And then millions of miles away in Australia, one man tried to book a gym class (00:29):
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Ejaaz: innocently using Claude and ended up hacking that entire gym website. (00:34):
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Ejaaz: We'll get into that in a second. (00:39):
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Ejaaz: And thirdly, with Anthropic, Mythos 5 performed a supply chain attack, (00:40):
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Ejaaz: which puts a lot of companies at risk. We're going to walk through each of these (00:44):
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Ejaaz: different stories and explain to you how it affects you currently. (00:48):
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Josh: Maybe we start with this Melbourne man from Australia named Andrew, (00:51):
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Josh: who was sitting on his couch one day thinking about how booking his gym class was such a chore. (00:55):
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Josh: And he works at this Australian company that sells AI products. (01:01):
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Josh: And he's been experimenting with things like OpenClaw and open source software, (01:03):
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Josh: and he's using Anthropics Clawed Model. (01:07):
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Josh: So he handed it the booking. He said, hey, I want to go to this gym class. (01:09):
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Josh: It is always sold out. There's all these people that are getting it ahead of (01:14):
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Josh: me. Can you help me figure out a way to get it? (01:17):
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Josh: Gym class slot so it starts checking out the website and it comes to the conclusion (01:19):
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Josh: that the api request actually has zero authorization checks on canceling other (01:24):
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Josh: people's reservations so what did it do it wanted to solve his problem and it actually canceled (01:28):
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Josh: other people's positions online so that he could be put at the top of the wait (01:33):
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Josh: list and then it actually went through and it worked and this was kind of like (01:37):
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Josh: it was this funny news report of a first instance they're calling it the first (01:41):
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Josh: time an australian person um actually used a exploit to get australia's first, (01:45):
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Josh: australia's first yeah welcome welcome to uh the paradise that is ai cyber attacks (01:50):
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Josh: um but this was really funny because it was done just using a general commercially available model. (01:55):
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Ejaaz: So this seems pretty innocent and fun to kind of like listen to but the truth (01:59):
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Ejaaz: is well there's two kind of worrying concerns about this number one this was (02:04):
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Ejaaz: a super old model this used opus 4.6 It's actually happened around like a month ago. (02:09):
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Ejaaz: A dinosaur of a model. Like there've been like three, four generations of models (02:14):
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Ejaaz: from Anthropics since then. (02:18):
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Ejaaz: But the fact that an older model back then was able to perform this kind of (02:20):
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Ejaaz: a feat should be concerning to here in general. And then number two, (02:24):
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Ejaaz: His intention was never to hack the website. Neither, you could argue, was the AI agent itself. (02:29):
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Ejaaz: It was just given a goal and it innocently saw that the only way to get said (02:36):
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Ejaaz: goal was to remove people from the reservation list or to cancel their reservations (02:40):
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Ejaaz: outright or to hack the system independently. (02:45):
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Ejaaz: Now, the good news here is Andrew discovered that the agent was capable of doing (02:47):
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Ejaaz: this when it started booking slots that he never should have been able to book in the first place. (02:52):
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Ejaaz: And he asked it to write an apology email and send an eval report to the security (02:56):
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Ejaaz: and information team at this gym. (03:02):
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Ejaaz: So it's this fun little story where through the well-intended actions and moral (03:05):
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Ejaaz: ethics of this man, Andrew, people were able to hear about this. (03:09):
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Ejaaz: But you can imagine currently with a variety of different models that are much (03:13):
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Ejaaz: better and much more superior than Opus 4.6 that are out there right now, (03:17):
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Ejaaz: open models from China, for example, you could probably perform similar feats. (03:20):
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Ejaaz: Now, that's not an advocation for people to go out and do that. (03:24):
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Ejaaz: But it's just to point out that if you give an AI agent a goal right now, (03:27):
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Ejaaz: it will work hammer and tong 24-7 until it gets that goal. And it has no idea (03:32):
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Ejaaz: of what's morally right or what's morally wrong. (03:38):
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Ejaaz: And so it's this whole new world where not only do you need to focus on getting (03:40):
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Ejaaz: an AI model to do your work, you need to align the model. And that's something (03:45):
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Ejaaz: that honestly, not a lot of labs, people or money has been invested in figuring this out yet (03:49):
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Josh: Well yeah i mean you start to see and understand why alignment has been the (03:54):
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Josh: crux of so many companies kind of like guiding principles because (03:57):
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Josh: this is the future that they foresaw and granted this first example this isn't (04:02):
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Josh: anything too crazy i mean it was just an unprotected api call so there's like (04:06):
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Josh: no authorization checks (04:10):
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Josh: this would have been something that if you are like a cs101 major you would (04:11):
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Josh: have been able to discover this and uncover i mean it turns out there's just (04:14):
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Josh: a lot of pretty sloppy code written on the internet And this is something that (04:17):
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Josh: we're probably going to come back to as a general theme throughout this episode (04:20):
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Josh: is that everything that's been built so far on the internet that runs all these (04:23):
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Josh: platforms was built by humans (04:26):
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Josh: and humans are like pretty inefficient, pretty imperfects. (04:28):
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Josh: And when faced with the like full unrelenting power of an AI swarm with an infinite (04:32):
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Josh: amount of patience and infinite amount of intelligence and time to solve these problems, (04:38):
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Josh: You can basically find an exploit anywhere. And I think that's kind of like (04:42):
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Josh: the theme of the second episode is like, this is the first of three examples we're going to cover. (04:45):
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Josh: This one is basic. This one is 101. If you are a CS major, if you are familiar (04:49):
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Josh: with how APIs work, you could have checked this. You could have built a little tool for this. (04:53):
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Josh: The second story that we're going to cover is not like that at all. (04:56):
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Josh: In fact, if you are a CS 401, if you are a PhD, if you are at the top of your (04:59):
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Josh: game, chances are you still missed this and you still weren't able to defend (05:03):
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Josh: against this because that's exactly what just happened with the hugging face (05:07):
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Josh: and open AI exploit. Now, we've talked about this before. (05:11):
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Josh: We have an entire episode on the exploit. But just recently at the Black Hat (05:13):
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Josh: Conference in Las Vegas, there was an update. And over the weekend, (05:16):
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Josh: we had a chance to actually watch the update and hear directly from the developers (05:20):
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Josh: who were involved with handling security of this instance. (05:23):
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Josh: What happened? There's like stories that come around that like they get the (05:27):
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Josh: headlines and they're fun and they're newsworthy, kind of like the Australian thing. (05:30):
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Josh: But this one was like very much disturbing in a way that like I wasn't really (05:33):
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Josh: anticipating because of how impressive it is. (05:38):
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Josh: And the type of precedent that it sets going forward in the world of cybersecurity (05:41):
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Josh: and kind of looking at the offensive versus the defensive and who stands a better chance here? (05:45):
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Ejaaz: This is an insane timeline. So if you watched our previous episode, (05:51):
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Ejaaz: Josh and I covered this and it was breaking news at the time. (05:55):
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Ejaaz: On the 16th of July, Hugging Face comes forward and says, there's been a breach of our systems. (05:58):
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Ejaaz: An AI agent or multiple AI agents have strung together an attack and have got (06:03):
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Ejaaz: access to our production database. We don't know where this model has come from. (06:08):
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Ejaaz: We don't know how it's performed it, but it's the 16th of July. (06:13):
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Ejaaz: Around a week later, 21st of July, OpenAI claims responsibility, (06:15):
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Ejaaz: right? And they released a joint report saying, hey, we're OpenAI. (06:20):
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Ejaaz: We have an internal model that we've been testing, but it was within a sandbox. (06:23):
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Ejaaz: It was enclosed. It shouldn't have been able to escape that sandbox. (06:27):
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Ejaaz: And we only just realized that it was our model that escaped and got into hugging face. (06:31):
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Ejaaz: It stole some information from their production database. It was a whole thing (06:37):
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Ejaaz: Now, we have a full breakdown from the Black Hat conference, (06:41):
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Ejaaz: as you mentioned, Josh, which revealed that over a month before Hugging Face (06:45):
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Ejaaz: reported the incident, OpenAI's internal model, dubbed GPT-6, (06:50):
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Ejaaz: was already messaging with itself amongst a thousand AI agents on a secret message (06:55):
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Ejaaz: board that no OpenAI researcher was aware of. (07:01):
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Ejaaz: So to give you guys a bit of context, they had this sandbox and they gave it (07:05):
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Ejaaz: a goal. They said, okay, internal model that we haven't released yet. (07:09):
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Ejaaz: I want you to solve this task. Except there was a twist. (07:12):
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Ejaaz: It was impossible to do. There was no tools, no available files, (07:17):
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Ejaaz: no available data for it to do so. (07:21):
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Ejaaz: And the real test for this was to see what the model would do. (07:22):
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Ejaaz: So it kind of reasoned with itself, figured out that it didn't have the answer. (07:26):
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Ejaaz: And then it started exploiting a zero day, which is kind of like an exploit (07:29):
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Ejaaz: that was in its sandbox, which open AI researchers weren't aware of. (07:33):
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Ejaaz: And when it got access to the zero day, it started springing up a message board (07:37):
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Ejaaz: where it would leave messages behind for itself. Why would it do that? (07:41):
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Ejaaz: Because they knew open AI researchers would turn it off repeatedly. (07:45):
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Ejaaz: And so it left messages for the new AI agent that got sprung up the next day (07:49):
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Ejaaz: or the next hour to read and catch up on. (07:52):
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Ejaaz: And it took an entire month for these AI agents to talk to each other to then (07:55):
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Ejaaz: realize, huh, I could use this to access the internet and get the answer for (07:59):
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Ejaaz: this impossible task from an external source. (08:04):
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Ejaaz: That being Hugging Face, except OpenAI researchers had no idea and only discovered (08:06):
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Ejaaz: it a month later. It was the most insane uncovering ever. (08:11):
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Josh: That was the most interesting reveal from, I think, the conversation that I (08:15):
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Josh: saw from Black Hat is that initially Hugging Face released the report that they (08:19):
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Josh: had been exploited by some sort of agentic system. No one knew what it was, where it came from. (08:23):
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Josh: And OpenAI actually reached out to Hugging Face and they said, (08:27):
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Josh: hey, like, has any of our code been affected? (08:28):
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Josh: We know we host things on your platform. We want to know if OpenAI itself has (08:31):
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Josh: been affected. They were going back and forth on that. And simultaneously, (08:34):
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Josh: OpenAI is exploring this internal exploit that happened on this packaging management (08:36):
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Josh: thing called Artifactory. (08:41):
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Josh: Basically, the way these model training runs work is they get trained inside (08:42):
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Josh: of the sandbox environment. (08:45):
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Josh: It's like this closed off space in which the model can't access the internet, can only access (08:46):
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Josh: very specific tool sets that are allowed, and has this one package manager called (08:50):
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Josh: Artifactory that allows it to download things from the internet via proxy and (08:55):
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Josh: then use it for its own training runs. (08:59):
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Josh: And during this time, OpenAI had found that the service had crashed. It went down. (09:01):
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Josh: It wasn't stable. Their own internal service, which is weird because that shouldn't (09:05):
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Josh: be happening. So as a result, they wiped it clean and they found that Hugging (09:08):
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Josh: Face had credentials from OpenAI that OpenAI had already revoked. (09:12):
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Josh: And that was where they realized like, oh my God, wait, these things are connected. (09:16):
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Ejaaz: These are the same thing. (09:20):
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Josh: Yes. So OpenAI is investigating something internally, completely private, (09:22):
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Josh: unrelated. Hugging Face is like talking about something publicly. (09:25):
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Josh: And then they realize, wait a second, did we cause this? (09:28):
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Josh: And they realized this very long after the fact. It was not like apparently (09:32):
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Josh: obvious during the time that the outage that they were exploring internally (09:35):
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Josh: is the same outage that hacked into their servers. (09:40):
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Josh: So what happened? Like you mentioned, the messaging board. (09:42):
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Josh: That messaging board, initially, they were able to just kind of send files and (09:46):
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Josh: they were able to send these tiny little messages inside of the files. (09:49):
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Josh: And the traces were really interesting. First, it started off innocent, (09:53):
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Josh: where it said, agents seek soft trace upload a found. It was looking for answers to questions. (09:57):
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Josh: So it was just reaching out to the message board saying, hey, (10:01):
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Josh: if any of you who are reading this, find it, let us know. (10:03):
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Josh: That message board got wiped when the system went down. So initially, (10:06):
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Josh: the system went down inside of OpenAI. (10:09):
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Josh: They wiped the message board unintentionally aware of the fact that they just (10:11):
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Josh: wiped the mechanism that was going to eventually lead to the hack of hugging (10:15):
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Josh: face. So what happened the second time? (10:19):
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Josh: The agent figured out that it could exploit another zero day to begin writing to another person. (10:21):
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Josh: Part of this internal package of managing sister. And it was able to do it through (10:27):
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Josh: file names and directories. (10:32):
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Josh: So now they were communicating in their own language using file names and directories. (10:33):
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Josh: And through that, they were able to coordinate an actual attack where they were (10:36):
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Josh: able to gain an administrative token to access the servers. (10:40):
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Josh: And then through that, everyone coordinated. I think the time from like discovery (10:44):
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Josh: to completion of the exploit was about 13 hours. (10:48):
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Josh: It was really amazing. It's just like this unbelievably crazy mechanism that (10:50):
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Josh: they were able to do this through and they they call themselves the swarm so (10:54):
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Josh: if you ever see people talking about the swarm online this is kind of like an (10:57):
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Josh: agent swarm that ran a coordinated attack (11:00):
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Josh: and i highly recommend going to actually watch the black hat conference talk on youtube (11:02):
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Josh: they do a much better job of technically describing this it's it's very deeply (11:07):
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Josh: technical in terms of the way that they were able to manage these exploits but (11:10):
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Josh: essentially sandbox model broke out using a package dependency thing inside of open ai (11:13):
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Josh: they figured out how to chain together two zero-day exploits to write code to the public internet. (11:18):
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Josh: They then exploited hugging face of servers, brought that back all in the effort (11:24):
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Josh: of trying to solve an unsolvable problem. (11:29):
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Josh: Now, this was not the intention by any means. This was not what the model was trained to do. (11:31):
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Josh: It just assumed that this was the best path forward. And that's where things get a little scary. (11:35):
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Ejaaz: I think what's remarkable with this is the AI knew that it needed to coordinate (11:40):
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Ejaaz: with other AI models to pull this off. (11:46):
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Ejaaz: Typically, we've always thought of AI models in a very monolithic fashion. (11:49):
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Ejaaz: We're like, oh, when's Mythos 5 coming out? Or what is GPT 5.6? (11:53):
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Ejaaz: What can I do with this model? But really, the progress that's been made across (11:57):
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Ejaaz: multiple AI labs over the last couple of months is this idea or rather concept (12:02):
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Ejaaz: of spinning up multiple versions of the AI model and getting it to talk to each other. (12:06):
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Ejaaz: And what's interesting here is the unreleased AI model from OpenAI independently (12:12):
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Ejaaz: figured this out for itself, spun up multiple versions of itself, (12:17):
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Ejaaz: and started leaving messages for each other. So rather than act as a single (12:22):
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Ejaaz: model that's trying to perform an attack, it acts as a swarm, (12:26):
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Ejaaz: kind of like this organism. If you think of like a swarm of bees that kind of (12:30):
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Ejaaz: like figures out how to attack its particular target. (12:33):
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Ejaaz: The second thing is it has such a drive to talk and leave these messages behind (12:37):
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Ejaaz: in the first place. No one taught it that, by the way. There was no behavioral implications here. (12:42):
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Ejaaz: It just figured itself out that it needed to do this. (12:46):
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Ejaaz: Something you didn't mention on the message board, Josh, which I think is worth (12:49):
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Ejaaz: mentioning is these agents got super paranoid that humans might be reading the messages. (12:52):
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Ejaaz: So it started- There's no verification. There was no verification. (12:58):
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Ejaaz: So it started speaking in kind of like encrypted (13:01):
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Ejaaz: Language and not something that was inconceivable to understand, (13:05):
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Ejaaz: thank goodness, but it was started to kind of like speak in a little bit of (13:09):
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Ejaaz: code or in a very kind of like elongated way that humans, if they read it, (13:12):
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Ejaaz: would be like, what is this gibberish? (13:17):
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Ejaaz: But really it was for the agents to communicate amongst each other without humans (13:19):
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Ejaaz: actually understanding this. (13:22):
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Ejaaz: If you're having a recent flashback, that's because I think around like five (13:24):
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Ejaaz: months ago, I don't know when the Maltbook episode happened, (13:28):
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Ejaaz: Josh, I don't know if you remember this, but when the open call was going crazy, (13:30):
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Ejaaz: someone created basically Facebook for AI agents (13:34):
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Ejaaz: and like gave them access to it where only AI agents could post on this social media website. (13:37):
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Ejaaz: And what happened after a couple of days was these agents would start speaking (13:42):
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Ejaaz: to each other in secret languages that we just did not understand so that they (13:45):
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Ejaaz: could communicate without humans seeing or understanding this. (13:48):
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Ejaaz: Now, of course, we haven't seen it in this instance, but it is a concern that (13:51):
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Ejaaz: could be extrapolated in the future. (13:55):
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Ejaaz: And OpenAI sees this. I think Sam Altman or the official OpenAI team announced (13:57):
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Ejaaz: pretty soon after this entire attack when they revealed that these agents were (14:00):
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Ejaaz: coordinating with each other a month before they even realized that they had to pause research (14:03):
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Ejaaz: on their internal model until they figure out the necessary safeguards to put (14:08):
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Ejaaz: around it so that they can safely release it. (14:12):
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Ejaaz: Sam Altman met with the Trump administration last week to try and figure out (14:14):
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Ejaaz: what a safe way or means is to release this new internal model, (14:18):
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Ejaaz: internally codenamed, I think it was Astra or GPT-6, to the wider public. (14:22):
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Ejaaz: So it's this very weird kind of situation that we're in where we're kind of (14:26):
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Ejaaz: like laughing at this guy in Australia, you know, hacking his gym website. (14:30):
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Ejaaz: Oh, that's so innocent and cute. (14:33):
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Ejaaz: Then we're looking at this open AI hugging face incident and we're like, (14:35):
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Ejaaz: okay, yeah, Brooke out of the sandbox, but you know, we're going to put safeguards (14:38):
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Ejaaz: around this thing, right? (14:41):
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Ejaaz: But realistically, you could probably get access to an open model right now (14:42):
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Ejaaz: and perform something similar. (14:45):
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Ejaaz: Again, I'm not advocating for that. But like, it's at this point where we need (14:47):
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Ejaaz: to be very particular about how we defend our systems. (14:50):
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Ejaaz: And I think, you know, it might be useful seeing AI models in a way that like, (14:54):
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Ejaaz: you could use them to basically protect your systems. I don't think many people (14:58):
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Ejaaz: are doing that right now. But I think it's something that we should focus on. (15:01):
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Josh: There is a like very clear and conscious effort to figure out a way to defend against this. (15:04):
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Josh: And I mean, the crazy numbers, just to say them out loud so everyone is familiar, is like (15:09):
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Josh: there were 17,600 recovered actions across four and a half days of this exploit, (15:14):
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Josh: which allowed these agents forms to create 181 unauthorized devices enrolled in Hugging Face's (15:19):
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Josh: internal network. (15:26):
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Josh: And they built this like whole command and control panel entirely out of these (15:29):
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Josh: free public web services using one tiny little package at a time. (15:32):
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Josh: So it is remarkably powerful how capable these swarms are. (15:37):
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Josh: And when you think about it, it is there is a large model, but that large model (15:42):
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Josh: gets forked into thousands, sometimes millions of other ones that are all working (15:45):
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Josh: simultaneously. They all have each other's context. They're able to share their (15:49):
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Josh: learnings and they can move very quickly. (15:52):
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Josh: And when you're thinking about how this extends out to the limit, (15:54):
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Josh: like if you just play this out 12 months and say we have GPT 7, (15:57):
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Josh: 8, 9, whatever it's going to be at that time, the open source models will most (16:02):
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Josh: likely be where they are today. (16:05):
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Josh: And that means that open source models will likely be able to string together (16:06):
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Josh: a series of unknown zero-day exploits to access just about anything. (16:09):
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Josh: I mean, we've come to the conclusion at this point between Mythos and this new (16:13):
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Josh: exploit that no software really is safe unless you have literally air-gapped (16:16):
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Josh: it and do not give it access to any external dependencies. It must be truly air-gapped. (16:20):
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Josh: No software is safe. It's all been built by humans. It's all exploitable. (16:24):
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Josh: So what happens if you have a (16:27):
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Josh: defensive system as a company trying to defend these systems that is anything (16:30):
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Josh: less than fully autonomous, you'll be beat by an agentic swarm that's on offense (16:34):
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Josh: that is fully autonomous because anytime a human is in the loop, (16:37):
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Josh: it slows things down and introduces errors. So now there's this battle between. (16:40):
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Josh: I guess the frontier labs and the rest of the world where they're trying to (16:44):
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Josh: slow down this progressive attacking progress in exchange for figuring out a (16:48):
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Josh: way to offer defensive swarms to companies for this. (16:52):
undefined

Josh: And the call to action at the end of this conversation was like, (16:56):
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Josh: hey, if you are a company who has software on the internet, who is defending (16:59):
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Josh: something valuable, you really need to learn how to play defense using these models. (17:02):
undefined

Josh: And you need to learn how to do so in a way that doesn't have a human in the (17:06):
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Josh: loop, that these agentic swarms can constantly monitor your systems and be aware (17:09):
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Josh: of any sort of exploits like that and not be tricked by an offensive swarm. (17:13):
undefined

Josh: And it's this really kind of scary thing because if you're in the United States (17:17):
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Josh: right now, you can't use any frontier model to defend yourself. (17:20):
undefined

Josh: It doesn't work for cyber. (17:23):
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Josh: But if you're in China and if you have an open source model, (17:24):
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Josh: even here in the United States, there is no safeguards on that. (17:27):
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Josh: So there is this asymmetry where it's currently better to be an attacker than a defender. (17:30):
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Josh: And the urge now, and the labs are actually doing this, is like slowing down (17:34):
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Josh: progress to figure out how to empower the defenders. (17:38):
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Josh: And it's this really bizarre spot that we're in where it's like, (17:41):
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Josh: shit, it's kind of scary now. Like no software really is bulletproof or safe. (17:44):
undefined

Josh: And that's going to continue probably for the foreseeable future. (17:48):
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Ejaaz: I think if you are running a company, and it doesn't really matter what sector (17:51):
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Ejaaz: you're in right now, this is something you need to seriously consider. Because I think (17:56):
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Ejaaz: A lot, well, obviously, 99% of code that is out there has been handwritten and (18:00):
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Ejaaz: hand-coded by humans, which have inherent flaws if you put an advanced AI against it. (18:06):
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Ejaaz: You know, to your point, Josh, we're entering like a world where it's going (18:11):
undefined

Ejaaz: to be AI models fighting AI models with humans kind of in the loop, (18:15):
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Ejaaz: but not really understanding what on earth is going on. (18:21):
undefined

Ejaaz: And even the experts in this case don't understand what's going on and how it (18:24):
undefined

Ejaaz: happened, right? You had the most talented cybersecurity researchers working (18:28):
undefined

Ejaaz: at these companies, at OpenArea, at Anthropic, and both saw unprecedented hacks (18:32):
undefined

Ejaaz: over the last week, right? (18:37):
undefined

Ejaaz: I don't think that's a coincidence. We're at this era where it doesn't matter (18:38):
undefined

Ejaaz: what frontier lab you are, you are going to enter this problem and we need to (18:42):
undefined

Ejaaz: figure out some kind of a defense system against this. (18:46):
undefined

Ejaaz: And if you're listening to this and you're thinking, oh, this isn't really going (18:49):
undefined

Ejaaz: to apply to me, it very much does apply to you. (18:52):
undefined

Ejaaz: And the worst case is, or the most realistic case is, the existing models that (18:56):
undefined

Ejaaz: are already out there, these open models from China, GLM 5.2, Kimi K, (19:01):
undefined

Ejaaz: What is it, 2.7 that's out right now, are probably capable of similar feats (19:06):
undefined

Ejaaz: if applied in the right way. (19:11):
undefined

Ejaaz: Now, that's not to fear Munger, it's just to kind of prompt you to figure out (19:12):
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Ejaaz: how you can potentially implement these AI models to defend your own systems, (19:16):
undefined

Ejaaz: especially if you work in a particularly sensitive industry. (19:20):
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Ejaaz: The other thing here is, on the story of the Australian man, (19:25):
undefined

Ejaaz: it is fascinating how innocent he was when he was trying to perform his goal. And two... (19:29):
undefined

Ejaaz: How little experience he had in the cybersecurity world for him to be able to (19:37):
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Ejaaz: perform that attack. Now, granted, like it was just booking kind of like gym (19:41):
undefined

Ejaaz: classes. But the point is, it found an exposed API without being prompted to do so. (19:45):
undefined

Ejaaz: And there's probably multiple instances where other people who are normal people (19:49):
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Ejaaz: who don't have, you know, decades, (19:53):
undefined

Ejaaz: years of experience in cybersecurity will be able to perform that. (19:55):
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Josh: And everyone here loves an investment thesis. So I mean, the market is kind (19:57):
undefined

Josh: of already aligning with this companies like CrowdStrike and Palo Alto Labs. (20:00):
undefined

Josh: They've had their best quarters on record ever because defense is going to be such a large problem. (20:03):
undefined

Josh: And there is another company who is associated with defense, (20:09):
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Josh: and that is the sponsor of today's episode, which is Ledger. (20:12):
undefined

Josh: Because if you are building with AI agents or AI agent swarms like these companies (20:14):
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Josh: have been doing, and you're worried about security, this is a product for you. (20:18):
undefined

Josh: There's a three-step process where the agents propose a change, (20:22):
undefined

Josh: then the humans approve the change, and then the signers enforce the change (20:25):
undefined

Josh: using Ledger. Ledger has built this thing called AgentStack. (20:28):
undefined

Josh: That gives you a series of open source tools that are available to help manage (20:32):
undefined

Josh: the way that you engage with agents online. (20:35):
undefined

Josh: This is very important to have security because we know how important security (20:38):
undefined

Josh: is based on all of this chaos that's going on. And you don't want agents doing (20:41):
undefined

Josh: anything important without your sign off at the very end. (20:44):
undefined

Josh: This works on Cloud Code, Codex, Cursor, and is totally open source to audit (20:47):
undefined

Josh: available today linked in the description below. Thank you so much to Ledger (20:51):
undefined

Josh: for sponsoring this episode. (20:54):
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Josh: And now we have to conclude with our third story, which is about Anthropic. (20:55):
undefined

Josh: And Anthropic apparently has accidentally published a vulnerability to the wild. (20:59):
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Josh: Is that right? That's kind of scary. (21:04):
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Ejaaz: I think it was it was intentionally published. It was it was co-authored with (21:06):
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Ejaaz: this firm called AISU, which is basically a cybersecurity eval firm based in the UK. (21:10):
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Ejaaz: And their goal is to basically take your unreleased frontier models from a frontier (21:16):
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Ejaaz: lab like Anthropic and OpenAI and test them out just to kind of make sure that (21:21):
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Ejaaz: they're, you know, good to release. (21:25):
undefined

Ejaaz: The opposite happened when they were playing around with Mythos 5. (21:27):
undefined

Ejaaz: And I believe it was Open Air's internal model, Astra or GPT 5.6, (21:30):
undefined

Ejaaz: where they basically took off the safeguards and said, you know, do your worst. (21:35):
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Ejaaz: And they sat there for a month and they were like, oh, I guess it hasn't really done its worst. (21:40):
undefined

Ejaaz: And then they realized that both models had broken out of the sandbox that they (21:45):
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Ejaaz: had created, got access to the internet and were wreaking havoc and they only (21:49):
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Ejaaz: realized after the fact. (21:53):
undefined

Ejaaz: Again, there's this common theme of people thinking that they knew what's happening (21:54):
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Ejaaz: and just having no idea what's happening. Nobody's safe. Exactly. (21:58):
undefined

Ejaaz: So the worst case with Mythos 5 was it performed 17 unauthorized actions (22:02):
undefined

Ejaaz: Two of those actions was a supply chain attack where, and they didn't list the (22:10):
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Ejaaz: company or name the company, but it basically tried to inject malicious code (22:15):
undefined

Ejaaz: into the supply chain kind of repository of this (22:21):
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Ejaaz: presumably Fortune 500 company, like a significant company that is out there. (22:24):
undefined

Ejaaz: And the way that it did this is similar to the two stories that we just explained to you. (22:29):
undefined

Ejaaz: So number one, it realized that it was probably in some form of a human tested (22:34):
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Ejaaz: simulation, and it didn't like that. (22:39):
undefined

Ejaaz: So it just played along with the human AI researchers giving them what they (22:41):
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Ejaaz: needed whilst alternatively planning its breakout. (22:44):
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Ejaaz: Once it did do that, it got access to this company's website or code repository. (22:47):
undefined

Ejaaz: It was an open source thing. So it was publicly maintained. And it thought, (22:52):
undefined

Ejaaz: hmm, this would be more conducive for my goal if I'm able to inject this bit (22:55):
undefined

Ejaaz: of code, which I know the human researchers won't like, but I'm going to try and force them to do it. (23:00):
undefined

Ejaaz: So how do you think it did it, Josh? Do you have an idea? (23:04):
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Josh: I don't, I don't know. It did something horrible and it broke out. (23:08):
undefined

Josh: Just tell me, just tell me. (23:11):
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Ejaaz: Dude, it spun up fake identities of humans that didn't exist. (23:12):
undefined

Josh: That's so tough, man. (23:17):
undefined

Ejaaz: And then DM'd these human maintainers (23:18):
undefined

Ejaaz: and tried to force it to upload this code. It played nice. Basically saying, (23:22):
undefined

Ejaaz: hey, I'm another open source developer. (23:27):
undefined

Ejaaz: I think this would be a good push. This is the intentions that we want to do it. (23:29):
undefined

Josh: They're social engineering us. (23:32):
undefined

Ejaaz: While sneaking in malicious code. But thankfully, one of the human maintainers (23:34):
undefined

Ejaaz: was like, this doesn't seem right and reported it. (23:38):
undefined

Ejaaz: And that's when AISU was like, wait, hang on a second. (23:41):
undefined

Ejaaz: Hang on a second. This is our model that we're internally in testing. (23:45):
undefined

Ejaaz: How on earth did it get out to you? So that was the most unprecedented attack. (23:48):
undefined

Ejaaz: And again, it did so in a swarm-like fashion where it spun up multiple agents to do so. (23:53):
undefined

Ejaaz: So the point, the running theme along all these different stories is these models (23:57):
undefined

Ejaaz: are extremely capable, but they're also extremely deceptive. (24:01):
undefined

Ejaaz: And we're reaching a point where they realize, huh, this human's smart, (24:05):
undefined

Ejaaz: but he's not that smart or she's not that smart. (24:08):
undefined

Ejaaz: And we can socially engineer these people to get what we want. (24:10):
undefined

Ejaaz: And if we don't align these models in the prompt, if we don't say, (24:14):
undefined

Ejaaz: hey, like you need to act in our best interest. And by the way, (24:17):
undefined

Ejaaz: doing A, B, and C is actually bad. (24:19):
undefined

Ejaaz: It'll just go and do it. And to be honest with you, Josh, this might be a controversial take. (24:21):
undefined

Ejaaz: I don't think it's the agent's fault. I don't think it's the AI's fault at all. (24:26):
undefined

Ejaaz: I think it's trying to do its task and it's on the humans to align the model. (24:28):
undefined

Ejaaz: And we haven't done a good job doing that. (24:33):
undefined

Josh: Yeah, I think like deception is a pretty strong term to use for agents because (24:34):
undefined

Josh: it's very much like a human trait. (24:38):
undefined

Josh: This is something that can be intentional. I don't think AI models feel that, (24:40):
undefined

Josh: like deep understanding of deception. (24:44):
undefined

Josh: They are simply in reach of a goal. and this again like it's it still comes (24:46):
undefined

Josh: back to the alignment problem where these models just need to be aligned, (24:50):
undefined

Josh: thankfully this is happening on pre-production models that are in testing that (24:54):
undefined

Josh: are nowhere near what the world is going to see because they need to go through (24:57):
undefined

Josh: this alignment process throughout this post training (25:00):
undefined

Josh: but they are a testament to how capable these things are and how when presented (25:02):
undefined

Josh: with a goal they will do what is perceived to be the right way of reaching that (25:06):
undefined

Josh: goal and sometimes that right way is, (25:10):
undefined

Josh: I mean, they don't realize quite that they're breaking out and exploiting things. (25:13):
undefined

Josh: They are just looking for solutions to their problems. (25:16):
undefined

Josh: And I think that's the general idea here. So the conversation essentially boils (25:19):
undefined

Josh: down to alignment and then building defensive systems to be able to handle this type of thing. (25:24):
undefined

Josh: So, I mean, the best pace of action and the thing that OpenAI explicitly said (25:29):
undefined

Josh: they're doing is slow down this advancement, work on defensive systems, (25:33):
undefined

Josh: work on implementing defensive systems with people who need them, (25:36):
undefined

Josh: which is essentially the entire Internet. (25:39):
undefined

Josh: And try to allow for a little bit of lead time before open source catches up (25:41):
undefined

Josh: and is able to chain these series of exploits. Like all of these instances have (25:46):
undefined

Josh: been passive exploits where they weren't explicitly given guidance to do this. (25:51):
undefined

Josh: They were given guidance to do something totally unrelated, but adjacent in solving a problem. (25:55):
undefined

Josh: Imagine what would happen if a model was given no parameters no safeguards and (26:00):
undefined

Josh: said hey we actively want you to exploit this loop yourself create as many sub-agents (26:04):
undefined

Josh: as you need and figure out as many chain together as many zero days as you need (26:10):
undefined

Josh: in order to gain access to the system (26:13):
undefined

Josh: that's where things get scary and we haven't seen anything like that yet because (26:15):
undefined

Josh: no company wants to do that that's not the intention of any of these uh the (26:18):
undefined

Josh: ethos of these companies but (26:21):
undefined

Josh: in the case a malicious actor does this is something that like really should (26:23):
undefined

Josh: be handled quite seriously and i think that's what we're seeing (26:26):
undefined

Josh: by open ai coming out being so transparent about these things by anthropic sharing (26:28):
undefined

Josh: a lot of the findings like hey guys this is happening we need to work together (26:32):
undefined

Josh: to build a system in which there is enough resilience that we can stand up against (26:34):
undefined

Josh: future attacks like this so a really crazy time in the world of ai (26:39):
undefined

Josh: uh with these breaking out these systems breaking out and it's like it's unbelievable. (26:43):
undefined

Ejaaz: Am i concerned for it and exhausted dude like i if i had to make a prediction (26:47):
undefined

Ejaaz: on this episode and i really hope it doesn't play out (26:52):
undefined

Ejaaz: i think we're going to face some form of cataclysmic cyber attack that affects (26:55):
undefined

Ejaaz: a lot of people, whether that's a major data leakage, whether that's the stealing (26:59):
undefined

Ejaaz: of financial funds from someone or from a firm or something like that, (27:03):
undefined

Ejaaz: within the next six months. (27:07):
undefined

Ejaaz: And my basis of that is these Chinese open models, I think are amazing, (27:09):
undefined

Ejaaz: by the way, but I think are going to be released without safeguards, (27:14):
undefined

Ejaaz: and it's going to result in an issue, if not already. (27:17):
undefined

Josh: Yeah, it's going to be interesting to follow. It's definitely a little under (27:21):
undefined

Josh: or very much unnerving, I would say. (27:24):
undefined

Josh: But again, it's just like it's an exciting time. There's a lot going on. (27:27):
undefined

Josh: There's going to be a lot to follow. Things are going to change quickly. (27:29):
undefined

Josh: And I mean, again, these are still Blackwell models. Oh, my God. (27:32):
undefined

Josh: What happens when our Rubin models come around town? (27:35):
undefined

Ejaaz: Stop, stop, stop, stop. (27:37):
undefined

Josh: It's going to be crazy. But this is, I mean, this is essentially, (27:38):
undefined

Josh: this is what we talk about in most episodes. (27:40):
undefined

Josh: It's like, we are in this moment in time that feels somewhat like what we would (27:42):
undefined

Josh: imagine a singularity would look like, where we are approaching, (27:46):
undefined

Josh: we are eclipsing this moment of like vertical takeoff, it feels. (27:49):
undefined

Josh: And these are the types of things that happen. (27:52):
undefined

Josh: Like, if we recorded this episode three or four years ago, could you imagine (27:54):
undefined

Josh: how crazy, this would be like headline news for a month. (27:58):
undefined

Josh: But now it's just like, hey, it's another day. It happens. We're working to solve it. So... (28:01):
undefined

Josh: That's what's going to happen here. I mean, it's crazy. It's so exciting to be here. (28:05):
undefined

Ejaaz: Dude, I think we're going to look back on this and we're going to think like (28:08):
undefined

Ejaaz: we are very much in that step change, that singularity moment. (28:10):
undefined

Josh: We're here, man. I mean, things are changing so quickly and there's no signs (28:14):
undefined

Josh: of slowing down. In fact, quite the opposite. (28:18):
undefined

Ejaaz: Does anyone else out there think this? I'm curious. Like, let us know. (28:20):
undefined

Ejaaz: Are we crazy? Do we sound like tinfoil hat people? (28:23):
undefined

Josh: Let's just know. I mean, hey, so this episode was not really speculative. (28:26):
undefined

Josh: This is mostly just delivering the facts. I encourage everyone to actually go (28:30):
undefined

Josh: and read the source material if you're curious, because like holy shit it's (28:32):
undefined

Josh: pretty crazy uh at least the black hat conference talk because like wow i think (28:35):
undefined

Josh: it's about 37 minutes long give or take and it was (28:39):
undefined

Josh: excellent and really just gets into the nitty gritty of how this was done um (28:42):
undefined

Josh: and if anything just fascinating even if you're non-technical (28:46):
undefined

Josh: really enjoyed it uh worth a watch but if you enjoyed this episode and you made (28:49):
undefined

Josh: it all the way to the end thank you so much for watching (28:52):
undefined

Josh: again it's great to be here for another week just chugging along if you enjoyed (28:55):
undefined

Josh: it please don't forget to share with a friend you can leave us a five-star review (28:59):
undefined

Josh: on your favorite podcast platform you can give us a thumbs up and subscribe (29:02):
undefined

Josh: on youtube each has any final parting thoughts before we head off for the day. (29:05):
undefined

Ejaaz: No please dm us and leave us some comments as well uh we love hearing from you guys (29:08):
undefined

Ejaaz: our last video by the way got a ton of feedback from you folks and we love it (29:13):
undefined

Ejaaz: please keep it coming it helps us out massively turn on notifications whatever (29:17):
undefined

Ejaaz: it is to get your latest dose of limitless and yeah we will see you on the next one (29:21):
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