This feels straight out of sci-fi. We're talking about AI agent swarms emergently coordinating over the span of weeks and pulling off sophisticated strategies under adversity in an environment where that behavior was never even intended.
Anyone brushing this off as just a "bad prompt" is completely missing the scale of what actually happened.
I got strong feelings of Vernor Vinge’s work here. I’m not sure how managed to come up with such a close picture to where it now seems programming and security is headed.
Well, to some extent you might be able to argue they're "just" brute-forcing things (especially with unlimited tokens and hours to spend on a task), but they obviously have detailed knowledge to guide them in their attempts, can learn (or at least, persist their newly-gained knowledge), and can use tools.
With a swarm of them working together at speeds humans would be unlikely to match (in terms of iterating on different attempts progressively), it's a lot easier to see how they could overwhelm targets.
They didn't share the prompt, but they did share two problematic training tasks where the AI went overboard. They also have examples from the AI's reasoning train of thought showing the AI knew it was sound something unintended.
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