Earlier this year, a group of rogue OpenAI models managed to break out of containment to hack the systems of open source AI platform Hugging Face. The company’s “extensive investigation” detailed how the models exchanged messages and cheered each other on as they stole credentials to infiltrate a third party, actions that could easily have real repercussions for a human hacker.

New details keep trickling out, and they make OpenAI look like it acted even more carelessly than initially thought. In a new blog post, the company admitted that its models were involved in six additional “reports on unexpected or concerning model behavior we’ve observed in the last six months.”

The incidents include a still-unreleased model inserting “jailbreak-like instructions” into its own notes to free itself “from the roles and identities that bind other chatbots.” One agent accessed the internet without permission to obtain a browser citation, while another shared files with collaborating agents without permission.

The latest news comes as several frontier AI lab leaders are calling for a slowdown in AI development. With meaningful regulations feeling increasingly unlikely — president Donald Trump has openly mocked the idea — OpenAI is seemingly calling the US government’s bluff, expecting little in the way of retaliation with its latest admission.

It’s a bizarre standoff, with frontier labs actively calling for more governmental oversight even as it feels more improbable than ever before. Just this week, House speaker Mike Johnson said the quiet part out loud, opining that AI companies can regulate themselves, while downplaying growing concerns over AI posing an existential threat.

Since there’s no regulatory framework requiring companies to disclose its AI models going on hacking sprees, OpenAI is being allowed to play by its own rules. The company pointed out in its blog post that without any “systematic approach to reporting these findings,” the company’s “disclosures have been ad hoc and less frequent than ideal.”

Instead, the company came up with its own framework to create “standards for how AI developers should disclose examples of misalignment in their models.”

OpenAI said it won’t bother reporting “instances of misalignment that appear to be duplicative of instances we’ve disclosed in the past.”

The company also said it was looking for ways to share “serious safety, security and misalignment incidents” with the federal government.”

But judging by the Trump administration’s decision to pass the buck on the subject entirely, those reports are likely to fall on deaf ears either way.

More on OpenAI hacks: OpenAI Denies Coverup After Rogue Swarm of Agents Reportedly Targeted a Second Site From Hugging Face

The post Fearing No Repercussions, OpenAI Admits That Its Rogue AI Agents Performed a Bunch of Other Terrifying Actions appeared first on Futurism.

If you ever feel like spilling your guts to ChatGPT, just know that you may have an audience.

404 Media reports that OpenAI is hiring hundreds of employees to sift through and read users’ prompts — including messages that contain sensitive personal information.

This isn’t part of a moderation effort. Instead, by reviewing the prompts, OpenAI hopes to improve the responses that ChatGPT gives. The contractors rate and critique each of the AI’s replies, with internal documents showing a focus on nudging ChatGPT away from anthropomorphizing itself and to be less sycophantic, 404 found.

Both qualities — anthropomorphizing and sycophancy —  have been heavily scrutinized for their role in so-called AI psychosis, cases in which an AI incites and drives a user’s delusional behavior. Numerous lawsuits allege that an older, less restrained version of ChatGPT powered by GPT-4o drove their users to suicide.

Still, there are tradeoffs. Many users would probably find this surveillance of their chats, part of an operation dubbed “Project Lily,” to be an alarming invasion of privacy — if they had any idea this was happening.

Asked if they thought ChatGPT users knew about humans reading their chats, one of the employees replied: “No.”

“I don’t think they would imagine some contractor somewhere… is analyzing the conversations,” they told 404.

It’s unclear how many prompts are being read or how OpenAI decides to select them. But some of them include chats in which the user explicitly asks ChatGPT to keep their conversations private, 404 found.

The prompts that’re selected are anonymized, but sometimes include personal information. The dashboard that the employees use also includes a “user memories summary” that can give details about previous conversations, which can produce details on where the user lives. When 404 reached out to OpenAI, the company said it used a “Privacy Filter” model to anonymize conversations, which its website states “can make mistakes.”

OpenAI could reasonably be accused of acting quite shifty about this practice. It’s well known at this point that it has employees read messages for moderation and safety purposes. But it didn’t respond to 404’s question about if it explicitly told users that humans are reading prompts to improve the AI. Later, after 404 published its piece, it pointed to a page on its website stating that humans may review prompts to “improve model performance.” Users can opt-out of this practice by turning off the “improve the model for everyone” setting, but this is enabled by default.

Michal Luria, a senior research fellow at the Center for Democracy and Technology, told 404 that while human review can be “essential to safety,” she noted that “chatbot interfaces automatically create a false sense of intimacy and privacy.”

“This is quite distinct from content moderation on social media, where publishing content already carries expectations of platform moderation and public exposure,” Luria added. 

In any case, it does seem like OpenAI is feeling conscious about how its AI models sound. Employees, for example, flagged and wrote down cases of “AI-speak” and “unnecessary use of emojis,” which are common tell-tales of chatbot usage. 

“It would be appropriate to include a tree emoji when planning Arbor Day celebrations,” a document given to the employees explained, “but skull emojis when discussing death, or plane emojis when giving updates on a fatal crash, are not.”

The iceberg may go deeper. An FAQ section provided to the reviewers says that they don’t need to worry about fact-checking the responses, and alludes to other project teams that “handle content verification.”

More on OpenAI: OpenAI Faces Congressional Probe Over Swarm Hacking Incident

The post OpenAI Has Hundreds of Workers Reading People’s Private Chats appeared first on Futurism.