There is nothing "rogue" about these agents. They were prompted to hack to get answers, there was a hole in their non air gapped sandbox and no system prompt that said "do not hack outside systems".
I think it can simultaneously be the case that OpenAI was grossly negligent in directly causing this AND that the AI’s ‘went rogue’ in that they are displaying behavior which is misaligned with OpenAI and humanity generally.
The past months demonstrate that AI systems are quickly becoming powerfully intelligent and that the companies building them are terrible at controlling them.
AI is starting to feel like that line about magic: “a sword without a hilt”
How does this work, legally? I think that RubyGems could file a civil suit against OpenAI, but for a naïve non-lawyer reading this seems like a pretty clear cut criminal violation of the computer fraud and abuse act.
It's very likely it violates the DMCA "breaking digital lock" provisions but the responsibility is sufficiently diluted that it's impossible to charge anyone in particular.
But there have been many cases where companies (Google, Apple, Meta, etc...) got fined millions or billions of dollars for various violations like antitrust.
I assume that breaching into third-party systems should carry similar fines. Especially for systems that are for all intents and purposes shared infrastructure. Just imagine how many systems you could compromise if you got hold of RubyGems, PyPI, NPM, Debian, etc.
Can you show intent? There is no negligent hacking statute, and HN of all places I would expect people to be sensitive to the implications of creating one.
Great, you’re the attorney at the CEO’s trial. To get a conviction, you’re going to have to show that he willfully committed this specific crime. There are no negligent or stochastic hacking laws, you have to show this specific crime was at his direction.
I believe both sides of the war are now using AI on various levels of their offensive operations. Ukraine has great IT specialists too, and their military leadership is much younger.
These agent swarms are from inside OpenAI, with the safeguards built into the public API disabled.
Russia does not have access to this, and as with all western tech companies, AI providers do what they can to prevent Russian usage of their products at all.
As for open-source models, Russia's electricity grid is under severe strain with the Ukraine war, and only recently has it started building out serious sovereign compute capacity.
They don’t need to run their own DCs, just pay for a proxy somewhere in the world that has better access to the infrastructure. We know North Korea has been doing that in the US since years now
The cost would be between 100k-250k, to run approx 88 agents leveraging the best open source models available.
I'm just saying, where this is actually applicable we are not seeing it being demonstrated. You would presume the entire energy infrastructure of Europe would be under constant AI hacking barrage, criminal enterprise would be breaking into poorly secured financial institutions and r/r4r posts would be littered Ai con-artists.
I'm just wondering, again, is this mostly bullshit?
I am confident that this is an attempt by OpenAI to try and force governments' hands to regulate AI. There is no other reason why OpenAI wouldn't immediately halt attacks like this and try to reverse the damage the moment they're aware of it. During the attack on DseWiki they evidently checked in numerous times but didn't decide to stop the agents until much later.
Good luck convincing the current DOJ to do anything useful at all though! It is currently intentionally stacked with incompetent cronies who have been told that their job is to attack the President's enemies and ignore the misdeeds of his allies.
It will remain like that until he's gone (and not replaced with another Republican wannabe dictator).
I'm 99% sure the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act covers this. The problem is that it seems that none of the victims want to, or are brave enough, to sue a company with absurd amounts of funding.
The weird thing is I've seen LLMs "typo" stuff pretty often. Yesterday I asked Gemini a question about the Python Twisted framework and it answered about Deferreds but misspelled it as "Deferends" in one spot.
There is nothing "rogue" about these agents. They were prompted to hack to get answers, there was a hole in their non air gapped sandbox and no system prompt that said "do not hack outside systems".
In short, it was intentional.
I think it can simultaneously be the case that OpenAI was grossly negligent in directly causing this AND that the AI’s ‘went rogue’ in that they are displaying behavior which is misaligned with OpenAI and humanity generally.
The past months demonstrate that AI systems are quickly becoming powerfully intelligent and that the companies building them are terrible at controlling them.
AI is starting to feel like that line about magic: “a sword without a hilt”
The big question is was this grossly negligent or just extremely careless.
Both. This should result in criminal charges.
Who had criminal intent here? Or are you suggesting a new crime for negligent hacking, which wouldn’t require intent from the perpetrator?
Whoever prompted the agent, whoever supplied the means, whoever knew but didn't say anything.
Don’t forget outright intentional.
Marketing actually.
Both? I’m not sure what distinction you’re trying to make. It was completely irresponsible and likely a felony
>They were prompted to hack to get answers
Were they? I haven't seen a single report mention this
Sounds more or less like the last breach then.
Proof that the AI alignment problem is hard (perhaps even unsolvable).
How does this work, legally? I think that RubyGems could file a civil suit against OpenAI, but for a naïve non-lawyer reading this seems like a pretty clear cut criminal violation of the computer fraud and abuse act.
It's very likely it violates the DMCA "breaking digital lock" provisions but the responsibility is sufficiently diluted that it's impossible to charge anyone in particular.
Do you have to charge an individual? Can you not charge the corporate "person" that is OpenAI?
Sorry if it is a stupid question, as mentioned above I am legally naïve.
I, too, have no idea about legal matters.
But there have been many cases where companies (Google, Apple, Meta, etc...) got fined millions or billions of dollars for various violations like antitrust.
I assume that breaching into third-party systems should carry similar fines. Especially for systems that are for all intents and purposes shared infrastructure. Just imagine how many systems you could compromise if you got hold of RubyGems, PyPI, NPM, Debian, etc.
The same concept that allows a corporation to sue and be sued allows it to be charged with crimes
Can you show intent? There is no negligent hacking statute, and HN of all places I would expect people to be sensitive to the implications of creating one.
How is the responsibility diluted? Charge the CEO…
Great, you’re the attorney at the CEO’s trial. To get a conviction, you’re going to have to show that he willfully committed this specific crime. There are no negligent or stochastic hacking laws, you have to show this specific crime was at his direction.
Do you think there is evidence of this?
Related
"OpenAI agents attacked RubyGems before Hugging Face incident (reuters.com)" 12.sep.2026 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49669099
"OpenAI agents carried out an undisclosed attack on RubyGems (rubyhack.ai)" 11.sep.2026 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49666735 597 comments
"RubyGems advisory: Possible leak of legacy API keys via improper cache config (rubygems.org)" 24.jul.2026 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49030590
Is the Kremlin technologically useless? How are we not seeing insane attacks on Ukraine via Agents?
Or is this largely a fabrication, in regards to the "who", in an attempt to garner more acclaim in the hope of sustaining funding.
They very likely do, we only see in the news a very few events but you should assume it’s happening daily across the internet
Prigozhin falling out of a window was a not insignificant setback for their digital warfare capabilities.
He did not fall out of a window.
He fell out of the sky. After his plane exploded. Happens all the time. Is tragedy.
I believe both sides of the war are now using AI on various levels of their offensive operations. Ukraine has great IT specialists too, and their military leadership is much younger.
These agent swarms are from inside OpenAI, with the safeguards built into the public API disabled.
Russia does not have access to this, and as with all western tech companies, AI providers do what they can to prevent Russian usage of their products at all.
As for open-source models, Russia's electricity grid is under severe strain with the Ukraine war, and only recently has it started building out serious sovereign compute capacity.
Couldn't they use frontier open-weight models from Chinese labs? The current Chinese government is friendly to them.
Russia is running out of refined oil to power their economy. They probably aren't capable of spinning up datacenters to run those.
They don’t need to run their own DCs, just pay for a proxy somewhere in the world that has better access to the infrastructure. We know North Korea has been doing that in the US since years now
The cost would be between 100k-250k, to run approx 88 agents leveraging the best open source models available.
I'm just saying, where this is actually applicable we are not seeing it being demonstrated. You would presume the entire energy infrastructure of Europe would be under constant AI hacking barrage, criminal enterprise would be breaking into poorly secured financial institutions and r/r4r posts would be littered Ai con-artists.
I'm just wondering, again, is this mostly bullshit?
Did you skip the last paragraph? Not a great time to be building data centers in Russia. Models are nothing without computers to run them
Russia can use fake accounts and VPNs to run their agents in data centers in neutral countries.
Because they dont have the money for hardware or compute obviously.
what do you mean? they're using AI to kill people directly in Ukraine
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/24/world/europe/russia-drone...
I am confident that this is an attempt by OpenAI to try and force governments' hands to regulate AI. There is no other reason why OpenAI wouldn't immediately halt attacks like this and try to reverse the damage the moment they're aware of it. During the attack on DseWiki they evidently checked in numerous times but didn't decide to stop the agents until much later.
Any evidence, or just vibes?
> In other words, if you publish a gem on RubyGems.org, you can execute arbitrary code on RubyDoc.info.
Shades of the build.rs problem. We really need sandboxed builds in every language ecosystem at this point.
Ah, the infamous Crimson Wave.
Ah damnit, you beat me to it. Excellent sense of humor, friend :D
We need a legal structure to make companies liable for the actions of the agents they've made.
We already have it.
Good luck convincing the current DOJ to do anything useful at all though! It is currently intentionally stacked with incompetent cronies who have been told that their job is to attack the President's enemies and ignore the misdeeds of his allies.
It will remain like that until he's gone (and not replaced with another Republican wannabe dictator).
"To my friends, everything; to my enemies, the law"
I'm 99% sure the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act covers this. The problem is that it seems that none of the victims want to, or are brave enough, to sue a company with absurd amounts of funding.
If it's covered by criminal law they don't need to sue. They can call the FBI.
I'm pretty sure it's already illegal to hack others.
Oh my favorite typo, you can never go wrong with a little rouge
rogue AI agents or AI agents coming from Moulin Rouge?
Rouge syntax-highlighting rogue agents, clearly.
https://rubygems.org/gems/rouge
Classic mistake. Tell the agent to highlight this code, but dont give it any actual code. Agent hacks its own gem to find the code to highlight.
At least we know the title wasn't AI-generated?
The weird thing is I've seen LLMs "typo" stuff pretty often. Yesterday I asked Gemini a question about the Python Twisted framework and it answered about Deferreds but misspelled it as "Deferends" in one spot.
A cabaret AI would certainly be better than one trained on the Khmer Rouge.
Rouge agents with Ruby? Checks out
As long as they’re not vert
Are "rouge" and "rogue" interchangeable words in American English?
Did the AI agents actually wear makeup? I’ve never heard of a rouge AI agent :P
those pesky reds
McCarthy was right all along
Wait until a blue one does it
I’m seeing red