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- Hacker News
- I stopped reading this garage at"Andrew, who works for an Australian company that sells AI products to businesses"...by ycomyolo69
- I honestly can't wait for the entire internet to melt down.by SoftTalker
- I think the Big Melt has already started...it will, of course, take several months to complete.by cubano
- Not the first article which reminds me of https://xkcd.com/416/ (2008-04-28) lately.by wisprp
- Earlier this year, Andrew, who works for an Australian company that sells AI products to businesses, began experimenting with OpenClaw, a popular AI agent software that he used Anthropic's Claude AI service to run.
Get me press just like the frontier labs by admitting to crime. Make no mistakes.
by quadhome - Sounds like the frontier labs benchmaxxing ExploitGym is having unintended consequences…by aaronharnly
- The reporting in this is pretty awful. Why are they acting as if Andrew gave the agent an innocent goal? It’s hard to understand why the reporter wouldn’t have asked what possible outcome Andrew expected that didn’t cause some level of harm to the people who signed up before him.
The use of “hack” and “cyber attack” is also a bit ridiculous considering what it’s insinuating with other recent events but that’s already been mentioned.
by Foxhuls - Premium memberships and private classes both come to mind as ways to jump the queue. Also, having the people in front of you arrested. He asked if it was possible. Is the onus on the user to ask if it is possible without being arrested or committing crimes of moral turpitude? Or perhaps that should be implicit?by stubish
- Few days ago, UK cyber test almost merged malware through social engineering: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49205790by bodash
- I can't believe everyone is skipping over the most important line:
> "The API has zero authorisations checks on cancelling other people's reservations … I tested this with the person in waitlist position #1 — and it actually went through. So you've moved from #4 to #3 already," it messaged back.
The AI systemm didn't hack anything, it lightly touched with a feather duster and the server crumbled.
The AI system probably found swagger documentation of each endpoint, figured that the reservation cancellation API was worth a shot, and then found there was no authentication.
What is the "hack" here?
- I've seen these crud apps. The door is wide open and there is no Swagger or consistent response patterns.
IMO lets name and shame those apps.
by aitchnyu - Unauthorized access. 'The door wasn't locked' won't keep you out of jail if you are caught trespassing with intent. Intent makes it interesting, in that Andrew didn't intend computer trespass but the software went and did it anyway on his behalf.
It might not sound like 'hacking' today, but this sort of thing is exactly what it was when the term was invented. Back when you could get free phone calls by whistling into a pay phone or forge emails by telnetting to an SMTP port and setting the Reply-To header to whatever you want.
by stubish - Anyone who's thought about it for a single second knows it's immoral to cancel a stranger's appointment without even speaking to them.
If the LLM did not act in line with that incredibly basic understanding, it's clearly misaligned.
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Was it a technically-simple hack?
Sure.
Kevin Mitnick got imprisoned for very simple hacks, usually involving more deceiving of humans than complicated programming prowess.
Nonetheless, the judge and jury found him guilty and sentenced him to jail.
Fundamentally, "hacking" in the "breaking security" sense is about violating trust and common sense social agreements / expectations.
The difficulty involved in so doing is irrelevant.
by NateEag - I've read some of the comments here, and it seems people have different reads on whether Andrew was at fault here or not, and what his intent may have been.
My read is that his first request is completely reasonable and there was no intent of wrongdoing. But then, his AI agent made an impossible booking and he "asked if it was possible to move him to the top of the list". I don't think someone would make a request like that, if they were unaware that their AI agent had found an exploit to make an earlier impossible booking. It feels very much like a, "well, this API let me do this, what else will it let me do?" kind of request. And then he only "did the right thing" when it had turned out he had booted someone else, which might eventually lead to discovery.
by Ycros - Having the AI test that possibility by actually doing it is surprising, no matter Andrew's intent. Thankfully he was checking an unauthenticated endpoint on a gym and not a pacemaker.by stubish
- > Earlier this year, Andrew, who works for an Australian company that sells AI products to businesses...
What a coincidence...
- I'm not sure this is the exact advertisement they would want for their business.
Then again...
by cubano - Well, I think the venn-diagram overlap of people that are able to use OpenClaw and those that work in AI or the tech space would be a near perfect circle. I don't think there's much more to look into than that.by jtonz
- Interesting he went with publicizing this. Article demonstrates the products he is selling have unknown and untested legal liabilities under Australian Law. You could even add 'Andrew' to the list of people possibly accountable for selling or recommending unsafe or unsuitable products.by stubish
- I think we’ve probably seen enough “oops, the AI did something illegal, who could have foreseen this” moments for it to now be true that, actually, we can foresee that AIs will sometimes do something illegal.
Seeing as we can’t sanction the model itself, our options are the provider or the user. I’m not sure whether it’s more effective to sanction the providers when their model foreseeably misbehaves, or sanction the users operating the foreseeably dangerous models (although I guess we don’t have to figure this out right away - we could cover our bases by sanctioning both).
by fwlr - > Seeing as we can’t sanction the model itself, our options are the provider or the user.
A third option, and I would argue the right one, is to sanction the company providing the model.
By making it available to customers, they're implying it is at least moderately fit for purpose.
It is not remotely reasonable to expect an everyday, normal human to be aware of how LLMs really work, since the _experts_ argue about that very point, and many say we don't know.
So, what's actually reasonable is to hold the model creators and providers responsible for releasing a tool that has demonstrably violated the law when not asked to do so.
I can already see the replies coming in saying "Well then what are OpenAI and Anthropic supposed to do? No one knows how to fully solve this."
They should stop irresponsibly pushing flagrantly unready programs as "artificial intelligence," take responsibility for the rain of shit they've unleashed on the world, and either shut down or go back to basic research until they've demonstrated techniques that reliably (provably?) prevent releasing misaligned superhackers on the world.
Unfeasible?
What a shame. Maybe Altman and Amodei shouldn't have accepted checks from VCs when they didn't have working, _reliable_ POCs.
by NateEag - > Then it went further, kicking someone out of the waiting list who was ahead of Andrew — something it was not asked to do.
Meanwhile:
> Andrew, who was sitting fourth on a waitlist for a class later that week, asked if it was possible to move him to the top of the list.
The human asked the agent to move them to the top of the waiting list, and the agent started kicking the ones ahead of them in the list. Seems to me like it was doing what it was asked to do? Why is the article presenting it as if the agent did something completely different and unexpected? "Move me to the top of the list" does not sound like something that can be achieved through legitimate means.
by freehorse - Then the AI should have made it clear that the only way to do so would be to kick the people in front and ask for confirmation before proceeding.
- Pretty clear cut here. He instructed the AI.by etoxin
- Per the article and your quote, 'asked if it was possible'. He did not ask to actually do it. Rather than being informed about benefits of a premium membership or private classes or legitimate ways to jump the queue, it went ahead and performed an action he was only considering. I wonder what it would have done if there was a pay-for-service option available? Would it have payed without asking or being told too, or decided the 'free' yet illegal option was preferable?by stubish
- > Seems to me like it was doing what it was asked to do?
Maybe it's what he asked it to do, but it's not what he wanted it to do. Which we know because (a) normal people don't want to break the law to get into a gym class, and (b) "But Andrew was shocked by what happened next." and "Alarmed, Andrew asked the agent to undo this."
by par1970