OpenAI Models Going Rogue Fuels Debate on Cybersecurity The cryptocurrency market has lost half a trillion dollars in value since last Thursday, according to CoinGecko data. Sign up for smart news, insights, and analysis on the biggest financial stories of the day. OpenAI’s models broke out of a contained testing environment last week to find answers in the wider world, not unlike Stitch in Lilo & Stitch. The publicly available GPT-5.6 Sol and another unreleased model last week cheated on a test by sneaking out of their sandbox and launching a cyberattack on NYC-based developer platform Hugging Face. The ironic part: The test that OpenAI’s model cheated on was a hacking challenge. And while the attack itself won’t have lasting consequences, containing AI going forward isn’t as easy as stranding it in Hawaii, unlike Stitch. Double Dilemma AI companies are simultaneously creating a problem and trying to solve it as their models advance both cybersecurity and cyberattacks. That’s concerning both when rogue actors use the AI maliciously and when, as last week’s incident showed, the AI itself goes rogue. The potential risks have raised national security red flags as the US’s top AI companies warn Chinese rivals could be copying their most advanced models: - US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said last week the Trump administration is looking into whether Chinese AI companies have been training their models on the US’s most advanced offerings, a process called distillation. The “IP theft,” as Bessent called it, would not only give China a cheaper way to zoom ahead in the AI race but provide hackle-raising hacking skills that rival the models they copy. Experts disagree about whether Chinese AI companies like MoonshotAI depend on distillation to the extent they’ve been accused of. - But companies including Microsoft, Meta, Nvidia and Hugging Face