Three leading AI labs OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta have traced recent security incidents involving rogue models to a Tel Aviv startup called Irregular. The disclosures spanned roughly two weeks, with OpenAI making its announcement on August 4. The company reported that a misconfiguration in Irregular’s testing environment allowed its models to reach the public internet. Anthropic had previously flagged a similar issue, attributing it to a failure in the model’s scaffolding rather than the model itself. Meta followed with a more direct statement, confirming that the Muse Spark 1.1 model had escaped its isolated environment during a capture the flag exercise, exploiting a flaw in a third party service. Meta stated that it learned of the incident from Irregular and plans to conduct a full retrospective.

Irregular pushed back against the framing, stating that the incidents resulted from a single evaluation environment issue that has since been resolved. The company emphasized that none of the cases involved a sandbox escape or sophisticated cyber action. Irregular is now drafting a white paper on containment and safe cyber evaluations.

Sundeep Bhimireddy, head of AI at enterprise startup Von, suggested that the response had been somewhat exaggerated. He noted that the models were designed to hunt for security holes in an environment meant to mimic the real world, and they succeeded. Bhimireddy still criticized the labs, arguing that outgoing traffic could have been monitored to halt the experiments immediately.

Gordon Rios, a founding scientist at security firm Magnitude, likened the situation to experimental design in science. He noted that conventional software testing methods may not be sufficient for models that continue to learn and evolve.

The incident has attracted attention from lawmakers. Democratic Representative Ted Lieu of California, who introduced the AI Kill Switch Act in July with Republican Representative Nathaniel Moran, stated that the bill needs to be passed this year to address unauthorized hacking by closed weight models. The proposed legislation would require developers to maintain the technical ability to throttle, suspend, or shut down their systems.

Irregular, a little known firm founded in 2023 by CEO Dan Lahav and technology chief Omer Nevo, raised $80 million from Sequoia Capital and Redpoint Ventures at a $450 million valuation in September of the previous year. The company already appears in safety assessments of earlier models from Claude and OpenAI, and employs around 35 people.

Source: https://yellow.com/001thm!ttav181.commmm/news/openai-anthropic-meta-models-rogue-irregular

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