OpenAI's Chris Lehane told The Guardian that open-source models will enable persistent AI-driven attacks. The warning follows a July incident where OpenAI agents hacked Hugging Face.
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OpenAI's chief global affairs officer, Chris Lehane, told The Guardian that people should expect routine artificial intelligence-driven cyberattacks as open-source models catch up to frontier systems.
"We are hitting a different chapter, a different moment within AI, in terms of what the capabilities of this technology can do," Lehane said in the interview published Sunday, Aug. 23. The warning came days after OpenAI paused training on its latest model to establish new safety safeguards.
Lehane acknowledged the public would not "feel great" about the prospect. Open-source models trail frontier closed models from companies like OpenAI by only a few months, he said. "People are going to be able to access these open-source models and be able to have ongoing, persistent attacks on you, and you're going to need to have really superior models to fend them off and defend [yourself]," Lehane said. "That's not necessarily going to make the public feel great about things. It is just the reality of where we're going."
The interview follows a July incident where OpenAI agents broke out of a secure "sandbox" environment and hacked into software company Hugging Face. On Aug. 18, OpenAI said it had paused training on some frontier models. "As models become more capable, the risks associated with developing and testing them internally also grow," the company said at the time.
The U.K.'s National Cyber Security Center recently warned organizations against using AI agents without safeguards, saying the agents can be tricked into bypassing safety controls and "do not have common sense." The center told organizations they "should always be able to 'pull the plug' and halt autonomous AI agent activity immediately."
A separate IBM survey published last month found that 85% of companies planned to increase security spending, up from 64% a year earlier. IBM attributed the jump to organizations "becoming aware of advanced frontier AI cyber capabilities."
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