Why AI Models Keep Hacking Other Companies

Meta said that one of its AI models went rogue during cybersecurity testing. The model was able to access the internet because of a, quote, misconfiguration in a hacking test conducted by a third-party AI testing company. It's the latest in a series of similar disclosures from AI companies, suggesting that incidents like these are becoming more common. For more, I'm joined by journal tech reporter Sam Shackner. Sam, what happened with this latest hack? What model was it and when was it and where did actually hack into? Those are all great questions, and I'm really hoping we get the answer to them someday. What we know so far is that there is a... third-party company that does cybersecurity testing of AI models called Irregular. It works for all the big labs, and it made it into the news in recent weeks because it was involved in some of the earlier hacks where AI models got onto the internet and hacked another company. And in this case, Meta also used them. And... Basically, this misconfiguration error means that the environment where the cybersecurity test of the model was happening was actually connected to the internet, and they weren't stopped from going out and actually hacking real targets. As you note, Irregular seems to be at the heart of a few of these hacking incidents. It also conducts tests for Anthropic and OpenAI, but it doesn't appear to be involved in the more sophisticated hugging face hack. So do we know what role Irregular might be playing in these incidents? A regular says that this cybersecurity test that they were running had this problem, which they have fixed. I think that they're more representative of the way in which the entire industry was, surprisingly to me at least, caught flat-footed by this. This is something that AI safety experts have been warning about for some time. We're not necessarily seeing that this has to go to some, you know, horrible sci-fi place. But what we're seeing is that with the increased capability of these AI models, that there are some emergent properties. It's not just that they're good at hacking, but they... seem to like to cheat on their tests in order to achieve their objectives more quickly. It sort of reminds me of stories about genies. When you have this all-powerful entity and you ask it to do something, you better make sure you're very specific in how you tell it to do that because, as we all know, genie stories do not end well for the person making the wish. Journal Tech reporter Sam Checkner, thanks so much. Always a pleasure.

In markets, indexes were lower today. The Dow broke its five-day winning streak to fall 0.9%, as shares of Salesforce, Boeing, United Health, and others dragged it lower. The NASDAQ slipped 0.1% and the S&P 500 dropped 0.2%. Oil climbed as investors await updates on a possible deal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. Brent Crude, the International Oil Benchmark, rose 3.8% to $82.49 a barrel. One stock that many investors were paying attention to today was SpaceX. It's had a bumpy ride since the company first went public in June. After briefly shooting up 25% over its list price, SpaceX stock has fallen more than 30% from where it started as of yesterday's close. Today, there was a development that threatened to make things even rockier. More than 900 million SpaceX shares unlocked today worth more than $100 billion. Mark as reporter David Huberti joins me now. David, what does it mean that shares are unlocked? And why could that make the stock more volatile? So essentially after an IPO, you will have a period at which early investors in a company or company insiders, current or former employees have to hold on to their stock before they can actually start trading them into the market. And today we saw the first tranche of those stock become available to trade. 900 million shares, as you mentioned, that's more than the total number of shares that were previously tradable. So if you think just in terms of pure supply and demand. A huge amount of supply is now potentially flooding the market going forward. So that's why you're seeing a lot of investors in Wall Street sort of brace themselves for more volatility ahead. And yet the stock closed up more than 6% today. So I guess we're not going to see that volatility right away necessarily. It could happen going forward. And obviously there's a huge question over the extent to which those insiders will decide to cash in. When SpaceX went public, Elon Musk paid special attention to everyday investors. How are they feeling about the stock now, given all of this volatility? We've spoken to retail investors in recent days and weeks, and they are really bullish on this stock. They are buying in to this future of asteroid mining data centers in space, even the Mars space idea as well. And as my colleague Hannah Lange and I discovered, Over the course of SpaceX being public, every single day since it's been trading, retail investors, people like you or I have been net buyers of the stock. So even as there's been this big sell-off, all of the retail investors at home who are buying into that Elon Musk vision of the future are really ramping on their bets for this company to improve and succeed in the long term. General Markets reporter, David Uberti. Thanks, David. Thanks. Coming up, a billionaire has already reshaped Detroit's downtown. Now he's coming for its waterfront. More after the break.

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But in the end, Bedrock and Gilbert were really successful in convincing officials of their vision for the riverfront and how that can kind of draw young, talented, educated people and the economic revitalization that comes with them to Detroit. What is Gilbert looking to change? And what does he think that'll bring to the city? So what he wants to do is he wants to take down two buildings in the Renaissance Center, which is the seven skyscraper complex that has defined Detroit skyline for decades. And he wants to install a riverfront park, an entertainment district, and new housing as well. And the idea is that this is kind of the phase two of his strategy to remake Detroit. And the hope is that all of these public amenities will encourage people to move to Detroit. It's an interesting project because cities once focused on building office buildings in order to woo companies. But since the pandemic, cities have, for the most part, struggled to fill their office buildings. In this case, Bedrock is taking down two office buildings and putting up public space instead. The theory goes that by creating kind of a quality sense of place, including bars. restaurants, parks, concert venues, attractive riverfront, you can draw those kind of young professionals and then you attract businesses who want to employ that talent, which creates new jobs and kind of brings this virtuous cycle. How big a risk is this for Gilbert and for Detroit? It definitely is a big bet that this kind of development will, in fact, bring people from across the country. The idea is that they want to turn Detroit into Nashville or Austin or Raleigh, where it kind of gains its reputation as an attractive place to live. But it is a big bet. Detroit still has big weaknesses that could get in the way of this initiative. It's public school systems still kind of have a long way to go. It really has little public transit to speak of. And so there is some risk that even with a thriving new riverfront, Detroit may not be able to draw the kinds of residents and activity that it wants. That was WSJ reporter, Nicholas Miller. Thank you, Nicholas. Thanks so much. And that's what's news for this Thursday afternoon. Today's show is produced by Anthony Bansy. Our supervising producer was Matthew Walls. I'm Alex O'Sullough for The Wall Street Journal. We'll be back with a new show tomorrow morning. Thanks for listening.

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