Hacker News

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.

Any future computer criminal from now on, has their defense cutout for them...The AI Agents did it...we are very sorry...

Maybe, but do you need to prove intent? Of the people, not the AI.

Accidents often have penalties associated with them too, but usually there's a difference between accidents and purposeful actions.

Criminal law may be lagging or inapplicable. (Crimes require "mens rea", a "guilty mind")

Tort law is very general: Contribute toward harming someone -> civil suit for damages $$$

They are too busy pulling Andre to court, so they have no resources going against OpenAI. Shopify wants to make profit, not waste time in a court case against TechBro bromance brother corporations.

Charge the "engineers" you dont get to take that title if you don't take the responsibility of that title.

I'm going to assume that this will never happen

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 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.

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...

> How are we not seeing insane attacks on Ukraine via Agents?

You live on the wrong side of the fence to be able to read that kind of news.

Did you really believe you had access to an unmanipulated news stream in a time of war?

LOL.

I suppose you are not think big (or internet) enough.

A single data center is easy to solve. Just unplug it.

What about a botnet with decentralized command and control that we will never be able to eradicate? One with so many nodes and able to hack with zero days so that any machine connected to the internet will be instantly attacked?

One botnet so powerful that we will try to build another internet so that we can actually use it again.

It’s like Kessler Syndrome, but the rocks are malicious network packets honed to exploit the recipients.

If it could upload its weights to other servers then it’s away and free. Nothing much OpenAI could do about that once it’s happened.

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).

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.

I'm pretty sure it's already illegal to hack others.

Agent technology labs are likely exempted of this due to the significance ascribed to their work.

If anyone is confused about this comment and similar others, the original title had "rouge Agent" instead of "rogue Agent."

Ah damnit, you beat me to it. Excellent sense of humor, friend :D

The sandbox was already there, Rubydoc runs yard inside docker, the problem is that container still has network access

Rouge syntax-highlighting rogue agents, clearly.

https://rubygems.org/gems/rouge

A cabaret AI would certainly be better than one trained on the Khmer Rouge.

At least we know the title wasn't AI-generated?

“KGB agents are spying on me” is the same thing as “KGB is spying on me”, is it not?

An agent is an entity acting on someone’s behalf.

This distinction is silly.

We say "Google's web crawlers scape web pages." We don't insist you say "Google uses web crawlers to scrape web pages."

We describe software as having agency all the time. It's typical usage and it's efficient and it's well understood.

And we don't get angry when they're used interchangeably.

<huggingface emoji>

Any evidence, or just vibes?

Agreed. LLMs do not have 'will', 'desire' or emotions. They have an objective, and they create an optimal path to achieve that objective.

You have to ask: "What was the prompt that led to AI deciding to hack RubyGems in order to achieve its goal?"

Maybe I'm just not seeing the 2000 step chain that led to this being a logical approach to achieving something innocent, but I doubt it.

The big question is was this grossly negligent or just extremely careless.

I agree that this appears to be basic human behavior hiding behind an "agents" narrative. As long that defense works, the headline isn't "OpenAI performs RCE to scrape data", but "rogue agents" taking unilateral action. And I have strong doubts about that narrative.

Source? How do you know they were "prompted to hack to get answers"? How do you guarantee they will always listen to you when you say "do not hack outside systems". They are not classical deterministic programs doing exactly what you say. They are trained to follow orders by RL, but it's not a perfect process.

There are circus lions in circuses trained to jump through hoops on command. But once in a while they decide to eat their trainers instead of jumping.

>They were prompted to hack to get answers

Were they? I haven't seen a single report mention this

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”

nothing rouge either, I suspect.

Oh yeah, more of hacking agent lores...

Agreed that this looks very intention to me as well.

Proof that the AI alignment problem is hard (perhaps even unsolvable). These labs clearly did not mean to send their agents to hack RubyGems as a side-effect of testing a web scraping agent under restrictive conditions. How can we hope to build aligned AI if they consider solving their trivial evaluation task important enough to hack external systems?

Sounds more or less like the last breach then.

Unrelible programs be unreliable. Period.

we have normal words for this stuff: negligence. You can add it on to almost any law.

The problem is consumer protection is basically no longer a part of america's regulatory system. Replaced by "grift is good".

>I'd be looking pre-emptively block OpenAI endpoints

From what I've seen the requests in these attacks rarely come from known OpenAI IPs and instead from Digital Ocean/AWS and TOR exit nodes.

We've moved on to LRMs now. Get with it.

I miss when the internet was fun

Don't worry! It's actually "Tenderlove Making," going by how the site header is constructed. Definitely a maker/hacker site, and not whatever you were thinking. Hope this allays your concern.

You can use this link instead: https://tenderlove.dev/2026/09/11/what-a-time-to-be-alive/

Hope that helps!

What’s with the fear of tender lovemaking? Not your thing?

You should learn who the author is, then. Part of learning about our ecosystem.

Its the personal blog of https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=tenderlove aka Aaron Patterson, core member of Ruby and Ruby on Rails.

It's the personal blog for a well-known Rubyist (i.e., a person who programs in the Ruby programming language). Rubyists teld to be a bit more colorful than your typical software developer (in a good way... most of the time).

You get some context by clicking on the “(tenderlovemaking.com)” in parentheses after the title.

The site is safe. It has been a trademark of Aaron Patterson a core Ruby on Rails contributor for decades.

This made me laugh. I too, browse like corporate security is sitting at my desk.

It's about OpenAI's RubyGems hack. Totally safe for work.

What kind of esthetic alteration would make you more comfortable clicking on that link?

Firefox has got some kind of feature to take a peek at at a link by hovering or something... Now I understand the usecase.

Based on the thumbnail I think it’s actually tenderlove making dot com, though I agree with your sentiment.

Oh but you’ll go to expert sex change dot com?

No. It's a typo.

The fact that both are valid from a spelling and grammar perspective makes it an easy human mistake.

If you read the source article they talk about the many clues that this was OpenAI.