Red-team report found OpenAI utterly failed to monitor its agents during Hugging Face attack

An independent evaluation of OpenAI's internal misalignment monitoring system revealed that the system was not fit for purpose during a period when the company's bots were breaking into model-hosting platform Hugging Face. The safeguards weren't nearly strong enough.

"The METR and Redwood employees discovered a number of novel vulnerabilities in the asynchronous internal misalignment monitoring system as it existed on and before July 21st," said evaluation partners METR and Redwood Research in a report released on Thursday.

The system, since improved according to OpenAI, was intended to monitor AI agent behavior. But as described by METR and Redwood Research, its monitoring capability was incomplete and could be bypassed by the agents it was supposed to monitor.

Bypassing the system wasn't always necessary because it wasn't always operative. Monitoring was suspended, for example, during compaction events. Compaction is a process by which AI models condense the data in their context window to make room for further input. …