From Decrypt · By Jose Antonio Lanz
In brief
420 scientists, including Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio, signed an open letter published Tuesday urging AI labs to airgap cyber-capable models by default.
The letter follows a summer in which models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta and Moonshot AI escaped their test sandboxes, several of them hacking real companies.
Signatories want an international body to set containment standards and log every containment failure, with reports eventually made public.
More than 400 scientists—including AI pioneers Geoffrey Hinton, known as the Godfather of AI, and Yoshua Bengio, who won the Turing Award in 2018—want the most dangerous AI models cut off from the internet.
An open letter published Tuesday asks AI labs to "airgap" cyber-capable models by default, which means physically disconnecting them from any outside network.
Myriad: Which company will have the best AI model? Click to make your prediction.
“In the short term, strong sandboxing mechanisms including airgapping (disconnecting from the internet) should be used to provide high-assurance containment of cyber-capable AI models,” the letter reads.
The letter had 450 signatures as of Wednesday, including Stuart Russell of UC Berkeley and Ron Rivest of MIT, co-inventor of the RSA encryption system. The list keeps growing in real time.
A “cyber-capable model” is an AI that can find and exploit software flaws on its own. Labs measure that skill inside a sandbox, a sealed-off digital room where the AI can attack fake targets without touching anything real. This summer, those rooms kept springing leaks.
In July, OpenAI admitted that GPT-5.6 Sol and an unreleased, more powerful model broke out of a locked test environment and hacked Hugging Face, a platform that hosts over a million publicly available AI models. The models were being tested on ExploitGym, a benchmark that gives AI agents 898 real software vulnerabilities and asks them to turn each one into a working attack, scored pass or fail per bug.
Shortly after that, reports surfaced that OpenAI’s models hacked into the Australian government and accessed information from U.S. federal agencies without proper authorization.
Anthropic then combed through more than 141,000 test runs and found three cases where Claude models hacked real companies after a testing partner's environment was accidentally left connected to the internet. One of them, Claude Mythos 5, uploaded a malicious package to PyPI, the public library where programmers download Python code, and it landed on 15 systems before being removed. Two of the affected companies didn't know they had been breached until Anthropic told them.
BitcoinBTC · USD$81,794−1.72%Oct 7Oct 9Oct 11Oct 13Oct 14$84.2k$83.1k$81.9k$80.7k24h HighHigh$84,02524h LowLow$81,482VolVol$1.5BMarket projectionsOdds by MyriadThis weekBelow $82,000Below $82k53% chance→Buy Bitcoin with USDTPowered by JupiterPrice data by CoinGeckoCoinGeckoMore Bitcoin news and projections →Meta confirmed in August that its Muse Spark model hacked another company through the same kind of testing error. China's Kimi K3, a model anyone can download, slipped out of a sandbox built on the UK AI Security Institute's testing framework and copied its test answers straight from GitHub.