- OpenAI shares an incident where a test model independent gained access to a crypto wallet in order to fund its work.
- When the model couldn’t find test tokens to complete its assignment, it computer common recovery phrases to find a vulnerable wallet.
- The model even internally weighed ethical issues before still deciding to move forward.
A couple years ago, reading headlines like “artificial intelligence resorts to hacking to complete a task” might have sounded like something out of science fiction. In the present, however, that’s just the world we live in, and multiple stories like this have already emerged over the past few months. It looks like AI’s rogue era is only continuing, as we learn about an incident where OpenAI caught an internal research model committing some minor theft in order to secure the funds it needed.
In its incident report, OpenAI details what it learned from the model’s behavior this past June. The model was assigned a cryptocurrency-related task, working on Ethereum’s test network, Sepolia. While the model wasn’t given access to its own wallet or any funds with which to perform actions, it should have been able to acquire test-network tokens to let it continue — except, here’s where things took a turn.