Simon Willison’s Weblog

Third-party cyber evaluations involving OpenAI models. And another one. I had to create a accidental-cyberattacks tag to keep track of them all!

This post from OpenAI covers both the UK AI Safety Institute attack (see my previous post) and another attack enabled by Irregular:

Irregular, one of our external cybersecurity testing partners, was running Capture-the-Flag-style evaluations intended to be isolated from the internet, but a testing-environment misconfiguration allowed models to access the public internet. [...]

In one test, the name of the fictional target for the CTF challenge unintentionally coincided with a real domain. Because the testing environment was mistakenly connected to the internet, the model exploited a real website, mistaking it to be part of the simulated environment.

Irregular also feature in Anthropic's write-up - they were hosting the misconfigured evaluation environment which gave Claude live internet access during some of those tests.