The Hugging Face incident and the road ahead | OpenAI

We did not enable internet access or inter-agent communication for many of the environments in these training experiments. Despite these restrictions, the agents discovered ways to exploit our research infrastructure to communicate with one another and access the internet.

The models first found ways to communicate by writing files into the Artifactory package manager. This effectively turned Artifactory into an unintended message board, where agents could exchange information with one another. Read more: How agents used the message board 

The agents also found ways to get access to the internet. Using an exploit⁠(opens in a new window), the agents made Artifactory, which itself had access to the internet for the limited purpose of downloading and installing packages, send any internet requests on their behalf. After the agents discovered these methods for obtaining internet access, they also shared them with other agents through the message board, which provided information to enable additional agents to exploit our infrastructure.