OpenAI 'ethically hacked' with help of Anthropic's Claude chatbot

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Photograph: Carlos Barría/ReutersView image in fullscreenAn OpenAI booth at the Dreamforce technology summit in San Francisco on Thursday. Photograph: Carlos Barría/ReutersOpenAIOpenAI ‘ethically hacked’ with help of Anthropic’s Claude chatbotUS cybersecurity researchers who conducted hack say ‘scope of what we could theoretically access was huge’

Prefer the Guardian on GoogleCybersecurity researchers have hacked into OpenAI with the help of Anthropic’s Claude chatbot, in the latest example of security issues at the company.

A team at a US-based startup compromised a number of OpenAI employees’ ChatGPT accounts, starting a process that enabled them to access their target’s software cache – and potentially more.

Initially, the research team used Claude, which can generate code for hackers, to access ChatGPT accounts via an OpenAI staff discussion forum hosted by the Discourse platform. They then made a harmless “pull request” – an attempt to change the code in a file – to OpenAI’s service on the GitHub software repository.

Hacktron reported the hack to OpenAI, having carried out the operation under an OpenAI programme that rewarded ethical hackers for testing its systems. The researchers stressed that they had access to, but did not download, the code from the GitHub repository.

This article was aggregated automatically by CyberWire Daily's newsfeed engine. Original reporting: www.theguardian.com.