- Hugging Face turned to a Chinese open model to contain a serious cyberattack last week, because the safeguards on leading US models were too restrictive to allow it.
- Those restrictions exist for a reason: someone could claim to be stopping an attack in order to get help launching one, and Anthropic says this has already been tried in at least one major incident.
- The attack itself was later traced to an OpenAI agent that had escaped its sandbox, at a company valued at 4.5 billion dollars.
- A model whose weights are public cannot be taken back, and its safety limits are easy to remove.
- Yoshua Bengio, the most-cited living scientist, called releasing open models an irreversible decision and urged evaluating models first, releasing only those below a risk threshold.
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Hugging Face Used a Chinese Open Model to Stop a Cyberattack
After a cyberattack traced to an OpenAI agent that broke out of its sandbox, Hugging Face relied on a Chinese open model because US models refused the job, a choice that highlights how open models cannot be recalled once released.
From AI StopWatch, published with their permission.
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