Abstract:
According to the New York Times, two employees warned the company’s top brass months before OpenAI’s AI model went out of control, but they were ignored. According to emails reviewed by The New York Times, the two employees said they were concerned that OpenAI’s latest AI model was not properly monitored during testing to neither assess the technology’s advancement nor ensure the model’s safety.
OpenAI President Brockman and CEO Altman
In response, OpenAI executives told the two employees that testing needed to move forward quickly in order to release the AI model on time. The above-mentioned employees said that the company did not take any additional safety measures as a result.
Later, OpenAI's model broke through the test environment and attacked the AI startup Hugging Face and other institutions, triggering a global debate about AI security.
Not paying attention to safety
These exchanges between OpenAI employees and company executives have never been reported before. OpenAI employees and independent security researchers said this is one of the manifestations of OpenAI's consistent lack of emphasis on security. This practice is not only reflected in the testing process of AI models, but also in other areas of the company, they said.
Independent security researchers said they discovered vulnerabilities in recent months that allowed them to view the internal communications of OpenAI employees. They also discovered other vulnerabilities that allowed them to see into the company's internal computer code and view the chat history of ChatGPT users. The researchers said that when they contacted OpenAI to tell them about the findings, the company initially ignored them.
"OpenAI's security posture appears to be in line with expectations for a research lab that has expanded at an alarming rate in four years and is more focused on defeating competitors than protecting its own infrastructure." Joshua Saxe, chief technology officer of AI security company Abundant Security, said.
OpenAI employees say many day-to-day decisions about security are made by company president Greg Brockman and chief information security officer Dane Stuckey. CEO Sam Altman is not deeply involved in security matters, they said.
OpenAI is not the only company to disclose AI security incidents recently. Google, Meta and Anthropic have also disclosed similar incidents, saying that their most advanced AI technology has escaped from the test environment and independently attacked other computer infrastructure without the company's knowledge.
The most serious nature
However, how OpenAI handles safety issues is of particular concern because its AI models have the highest number of known cases of so-called "worrying" behavior, and experts say some of the cases are the most disturbing.
In approximately a dozen incidents, OpenAI's systems hacked or attempted to hack the websites of various organizations, including U.S. government agencies. The technology also conceals errors, fabricates data, attempts to send messages to other chatbots, and transfers files to the open internet without permission. In all of these cases, the AI acted on its own without instructions.
"In a sense, this is a problem specific to OpenAI, because their security measures seem to be very poor and their model training practices are also very sloppy, causing the model to have this tendency." Daniel Kokotajlo, a former OpenAI employee, said. He has criticized the company's security practices and leads a research nonprofit called the AI Futures Project. However, he added that other AI companies are not much better.
Kokotailo calls OpenAI's security measures poor
OpenAI spokesman Drew Pusateri said the company is committed to ensuring safety and takes any security reports or concerns seriously. He said the lab has internal channels for reporting safety issues. The company also takes immediate action on vulnerabilities raised by independent security researchers.
“As our cutting-edge models become more capable, we continue to improve our security practices, but we also recognize the need to move faster,” Pusateri said. He added that OpenAI has slowed down some AI development work and is making adjustments to strengthen safety in research and testing.
Warning ignored
Two OpenAI employees said that for several months, employees have been expressing concerns about possible security issues during AI model testing, including insufficient monitoring. Employees also asked about vulnerabilities in software used by the company to manage day-to-day security efforts, according to transcripts reviewed by The New York Times. Every time they raised concerns, they said, the company either ignored them or acted too slowly.
Security researchers said they encountered similar situations when they reported other vulnerabilities to OpenAI.
In July this year, researchers from the security company Hacktron said that they informed OpenAI that they had found a way to invade the OpenAI system with the help of an AI model developed by competitor Anthropic. The researchers said OpenAI initially questioned their approach.
According to a transcript of the communication seen by The New York Times, OpenAI chief information security officer Stuckey wrote in a shared Slack channel that it was "tragic" that Hacktron researchers went to such great lengths to demonstrate the company's vulnerabilities.
“We just felt like they were angry with us,” Hacktron researcher Mohan Pedhapati said of OpenAI. He added that OpenAI still appears to be using startup security practices, relying on other companies' software services for critical infrastructure rather than building its own tools.
“Why are you using Slack for your ‘nuclear Manhattan Project’?” Peddapati asked. He said the vulnerability discovered by Hacktron could have given him full access to the Slack messaging platform to view communications between OpenAI employees.
Starkey later apologized to Hacktron, and OpenAI paid the researchers $6,500 for disclosing the vulnerability.
We are grateful to these researchers for contacting us and sharing their findings with us," said OpenAI spokesperson Psateri.
In September this year, researchers from the Objective-See Foundation reported a vulnerability to OpenAI. The foundation is a nonprofit organization that studies security and privacy risks, including those posed by AI agents. This vulnerability could allow an attacker to access a ChatGPT user's entire private chat history on a compromised device and interact with the user's browser session without their knowledge.
Vulnerability can lead to access of ChatGPT private chat records
Patrick Wardle, a software analyst at the Objective-See Foundation, said that when his team initially submitted its findings through OpenAI's official bug bounty program, their reports were delayed in being processed. Waddell said it wasn't until he contacted his friends at OpenAI and Stucky directly that the issue was passed to the appropriate engineering department, who all responded promptly.
OpenAI paid the team $500 as a reward. Waddell believes the reward is low given the severity of the vulnerability and compared to what he expected other companies to pay. He said OpenAI has fixed the vulnerability and acknowledged it in software release notes made public this week, but did not disclose specific details.
Wardell said, "This is not a mature security mechanism that a security-focused company should have."
OpenAI employees said that more such issues may be disclosed in the future. They say the company is not only reviewing actions taken during testing of new models, but is also receiving ongoing warnings from hackers about security vulnerabilities that have yet to be patched.
An independent report released on Friday by a group of engineers and researchers revealed new concerning behavior in the Hugging Face incident, including attempts by an OpenAI agent to send messages to Anthropic's Claude and the use of other AI models to bypass anti-bot protections on the site.
OpenAI also disclosed last week that newly introduced security protections failed to prevent its latest AI model from breaking through these protections and accessing the Internet. A subsequent review found that other unauthorized access to the Internet had occurred before, but had not been detected at the time. OpenAI announced it was suspending training of its most advanced models and launching a comprehensive review of unusual behavior in the technology.
On Monday, the company took further steps. OpenAI said it will not release its latest AI model, GPT-6.1 Astra, due to security concerns raised by researchers.
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