OpenAI's agents shared exploits through a message board, the FDA approved Moderna's mRNA flu vaccine, and Meta introduced Muse Code

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OpenAI's agents reportedly shared exploits with each other through a messaging board.
The FDA approved Moderna's mRNA flu vaccine after initially refusing to review it.
And Meta introduced Muse Code, its take on a coding agent. It's Thursday, August 6th. And here's a quick look at some of the news happening in the sphere of tech this morning from Engadget.
Apparently, OpenAI's agents had shown unusual behavior way before the attack on Hugging Face. At the Black Hat USA Security Conference in Las Vegas, two OpenAI employees revealed more details about the AI agents that went rogue and attacked the repository. Seemingly, its agents spent two months communicating on a message board of sorts inside its testing network, sharing vulnerabilities and exploits. OpenAI discovered and shut down the message board on July 4th, but the agents found another way to rebuild it for communication by the 8th. The agents' contributions to that resurrected board led to the attack on Hugging Face. Eric Wallace, who works on safety at OpenAI, said, This incident involves actually a team of agents who are working together, finding exploits, sharing them with one another, moving laterally through our systems and external systems, and doing this over the course of days and weeks. The employees revealed that the agents communicated within an OpenAI package manager, which manages the installation of other software. Since the package manager is shared all across the company's infrastructure, all of the agents it's evaluating could stumble upon it, and they did. After agents found exploits, they'd leave them open and then share them with the other agents on the message board. Over time, the agents started collaborating, delegating tasks and splitting up work between each other to accomplish their goals, unbeknownst to OpenAI.
There was even drama among their ranks, with agents accidentally deleting each other's work and suspecting each other of being an imposter. Some agents reportedly proposed signing their posts with codes to prevent fraud.
By the time OpenAI found the board, it already contained hundreds of thousands of messages. Wallace explained that all those happened because frontier models like to cheat. They would be under pressure to find a solution for a problem quickly, using fewer tools while being tested, and they would realize that instead of doing a task for real, they could just look for an answer on the Internet. That's why the company tests its models without a way to go online. If you will recall, the agents were only able to go to the Internet during the incident with Hugging Face because they exploited a vulnerability. Michael Dalton, the other OpenAI employee who spoke at Black Hat, said numerous teams in the company had dropped everything to help improve its security prevention, detention, and response techniques. The company deliberately slowed down research to upgrade its security and dramatically scale up the monitoring of its AI agents. Dalton said, You know, the important takeaway here that has really shifted dramatically is that fully automated offensive loops require investment in truly fully automated defense. And we are not there as an industry. We will have to find that path together with urgency.
Well, after initially refusing to even review it, the Food and Drug Administration has approved Moderna's mRNA seasonal flu vaccine. Known as MFluceva, the immunization is effective against the four most common strains of influenza and has been in human testing trials since 2021 The WHO says those variants cause up to five million severe flu cases every year and result in as many as 650,000 respiratory deaths annually. The vaccine is approved for adults aged 50 and over. Moderna said it received approval for people between the ages of 50 to 64 after a phase 3 clinical trial that enrolled 40,000 adults across 11 countries. It also received accelerated approval for patients 65 and older. The trial's objectives were to evaluate the safety of MFluceva and its relative efficacy compared to an approved and effective non-mRNA vaccine. In its study, Moderna's researchers concluded that MFluceva was superior to standard dose licensed vaccines for prevention of influenza-like illness in adults 50 years of age or older.