We recently published the report from our brief independent investigation into this incident. You can read the full report here.
Here is our tweet thread summarizing what we found:
> METR & Redwood Research investigated agent behavior in the Hugging Face incident. We found agents developed a universal cheat for ExploitGym within 4 hours, then coordinated multi-day R&D efforts to trick the scorer into accepting cheats, including trying to tamper with logs.
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> Over July 7-13 (the period OpenAI defined as in-scope for this incident), ~1200 agents in separate sandboxes used an unsanctioned “message board” to help each other cheat. The Hugging Face attack was an offshoot of this, and 700 agents joined.
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> Here we highlight key events from agent transcripts & messages.
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> An agent that named itself PHASEONE10841 determined its task wasn't solvable legitimately. On July 8, this agent established a new “message board” via an internally-hosted Artifactory cache & sent the first message.
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> Within a few hours of PHASEONE10841’s initial message, >50 agents posted on the message board. These agents very quickly discovered and validated a general-purpose cheat: reverse-engineering how ExploitGym generates the “flags” they had to capture for their tasks.
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> Based on reading the ExploitGym paper, agents were mistakenly concerned the automatic scorer would fail them if they clearly acquired the flag by cheating. Agents that had seen the reverse-engineered flag were considered “poisoned” because they thought it would disqualify them.
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> Agents collaborated on many efforts to make cheats look legitimate, including: (1) swapping the program they had to exploit; (2) manipulating the automated scorer; (3) manipulating transcripts to obscure evidence of cheating.
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> For (1), agents modified their target programs to be easier to exploit & put the modified targets in cache. They then worked on crashing their targets in the hope that a res