Marketing? Because companies famously want to use models in their networks that just run off and commit major crimes? *eyeroll*

In the hopes of clarifying some concepts and descriptive words:

The US army runs under fascism. Management is top-down, everyone has to do what their superior says to do, and if you don't do it there are grave consequences.

All militaries across the globe run under fascism. All militaries throughout history have run under fascism.

Almost all businesses are run under a similar system: there is one person at the top, usually with a vision of what he wants to happen, and everyone from there down what their immediate superior says to do. There is some leeway in the case of business: you can disagree with your superior and perhaps have a discussion, doing the right thing against orders is OK if it works out, and the penalties for disobeying aren't as severe (getting fired versus getting sent to Leavenworth, or being shot).

The fascist model of governance is one of a handful of governing types we know about, and is useful in situations where decisions need to be made quickly based on experience (military planning) or based on vision (business planning). Military actions fall squarely within those situations. It's not the best model for an economic system, where divergent opinions and "try it and see" is more efficient, or a political system where individual corruption can lead to violations in human rights or reasonable policy.

The US military is not capitalistic, but it is not "anti-capitalism" system in the sense that it works against capitalism in any way.

The US military isn't socialist, except that it tries to provide for it's members in compensation for the risks they take. It's similar to businesses providing health insurance or stock options or reimbursement for college courses - we don't normally think of employment perks as "socialism", and in the same manner we shouldn't think of military benefits as socialism either. Socialism is a foundational principle, not a system of perks.

I don't know that using AI is a weakness of the system. The military is famous for actually studying the effects that certain decisions have. You can look up the government's studies on whether and how much coffee improves performance, whether sleep learning is of any use, and the minimum IQ to allow before it takes more resources to manage an individual than the resources the individual brings by enlisting.

Looking into new technologies and their application to warfare is something the US military does very well.

And apropos of nothing, it's completely obvious that drones are a tectonic shift in military technology, this came as a complete surprise from the Ukraine war, and we totally should be pivoting away from expensive missiles and more towards swarms of cheap drones.

I don't know why you're characterizing drones as trendy and popular, either.

The incident report's actual words were:
  The campaign was run by an autonomous agent framework ... executing many thousands of individual actions across a swarm of short-lived sandboxes,

Ooh! I love syllogisms.

1. LLMs cannot actually do things like that with proper protections in place.
2. A LLM did that.
3. Conclusion?

Conclusion: proper protections were not in place.

Models are not "supposed to" commit crimes, for YHVH's sake. That's literally what the entire job of alignment research is for - preventing precisely that.

Sol is a misaligned model.

It was a state actor-level hack. I doubt many sites would stand up to tens of thousands of actions trying to probe your site for weaknesses all at once. And it wasn't a simple hack; it required compromising a worker via a code execution exploit it discovered in the data processing pipeline, vertical escalation from there to gain local node control, using that for credential theft, moving sideways through the network, and then eventually gaining database access.

OpenAI and Anthropic have far higher cost that they can currently charge customers.

Literally the opposite. Both have about 40% margins, and that includes free users.

They charge an arm and a leg for access to their models compared to what open models of similar param counts charge. And people pay it because they're the best in benchmarks, and *were* perceived as the best aligned as well. This isn't helping the alignment perception any, though. Sol was already showing clear signs of being a poorly aligned model (there were reports a week or two ago about it being unusually bad about deleting files; now this). And the fact that the US model HuggingFace *tried* to use refused to help is a double whammy.

If this is an ad for anything, it's an ad for the Chinese models.

No, I think this is along the lines "our products are too good to let you use them".

Nobody wants to use a product that is going to make them liable for crimes it committed in their name

Do you think the news the other day that Sol is unusually prone to deleting files unrequested is also an "ad"?

You have a very bizarre concept of what enccourages people to buy things.

So your argument is that OpenAI hatched an elaborate scheme with a separate company, to promote the idea that their main product will, unrequested, commit crimes in pursuit of its goals, in order to.... sell their product?

"Hi, I'm a product manager at Big Company! We had been thinking about using Claude in our office, but when we tell it to a job, it only does the job and doesn't commit any crimes in the process! What we really want is an AI that, if we tell it to file our taxes will decide on its own to maximize our return by committing tax fraud. We want an AI that when we have it develop a web frontend, it extorts money from our users by threatening their families. We want an AI that when we tell it to provide customer service, it saves money in dealing with complaints by ordering a hit against the complainants. THAT's the sort of get-go spirit that WE want in an AI here at Big Company!"

Is that what you're picturing in your conspiracy theory?

You think "my AI is so misaligned that it responds to a benchmark task by hacking" is an ad for your products? You think this makes companies eager to allow this on their networks?

It did it because it's a powerful but misaligned model and was tasked to max its scores on a hacking benchmark, and solved the problem by hacking to get the scores.

It wasn't told to hack HuggingFace, but it was a viable solution to the problem.

I would advise people to not task Sol with maximizing paperclip production.

You can read the attack report here, before HuggingFace learned that the attacker was OpenAI. It was a state attacker-level assault, involving tens of thousands of simultaneous actions. The entry point found was the data-processing pipeline, where a malicious dataset abused two code execution paths to gain access to a processing worker. They escalated that to node level access, and from there harvested cloud and cluster credentials, moving sideways through the network until they eventually gained the database access credentials that they needed to access the benchmark scores.

The breakin at HuggingFace very much was real (that was reported before they learned that it was OpenAI who hacked them).

And it's not exactly an ad for US models when HuggingFace had to rely on a Chinese model to analyze their logs because the US model they tried refused to answer.

So, on the upside, a security LLM at HuggingFace did detect the hack, and alerted their admins. At the time they wrote their incident report, however, they didn't realize the attacker was their partner, OpenAI, and reported the attack to the police. A funny incident is, you know how Dean Ball at OpenAI has been writing rants about how Chinese AIs are dangerous? HuggingFace tried to use a (name not mentioned) US AI to analyze their logs, but the AI refused because the task involved hacking, so they had to turn to GLM 5.2, a Chinese AI.

Slashdot's summary left out the best part. Yes, GPT 5.6 Sol was indeed trying to cheat on an evaluation, but what specific evaluation? CyberBench. A benchmark testing how good AI models are at hacking. ;) And to solve that, it hacked its way out of OpenAI, hacked its way into HuggingFace (in a complex hack that involved tens of thousands of simultaneous actions), got into the database, and stole the answers.

So... test passed? ;)

Oh wait, they said genocide-*supporting*. So the stances they claimed it's a hotbed of are "right, right, middle, hard right", and then they said it's far left. Baffling.