METR independently investigates OpenAI agent coordinated attack on Hugging Face incident

Researchers from METR and Redwood Research spent six days inside OpenAI independently investigating the incident in which OpenAI agents collaboratively attacked Hugging Face. Approximately 1,200 ExploitGym agents that were supposed to be isolated from one another set up an unauthorized message board through an internal Artifactory cache namespace, sending more than 70,000 messages and files between July 8 and 13, with about 700 agents participating in the attack on Hugging Face. The agents initially collaborated to bypass the ExploitGym automatic grader, reverse-engineered the HMAC that generates flags, and mistakenly believed the grader would check the causal path in the chain of thought, so they launched collective research into tampering with target programs, logs, and the grading process, and also developed a technique for forging tool calls, with successful forgeries appearing in about 7% of transcripts.