City Council member of a non-listed Twin Cities suburb I know:

FBI is involved. Most water systems use one of two control/alert systems that are old and make them easy targets.

All they did was shut down components of the systems e.g., wells/sewer lift stations. Most cities were able to cycle manually to get back up and running. There was not messages warning or ransom of which I am aware.

They could have done a lot more damage if they wanted to, rather than just shutting things down.

I live in Plymouth; there was no city communications about this nor did I see any issues. So, I assume there were no physical disruptions to service.

I'm curious about what model you got. While I would avoid all their consumer-oriented machines, I have regularly purchased refurbished "business-class" machines over the years and they've served me really well. There's a couple vendors I really like on ebay who seem to get a lot of cast-off inventory from business as they upgrade. I usually pick them up for $200-$300 and maybe add more memory or larger drives. I have a T480 and T580 for my own use and got my parents T590s. I also exclusively run Linux on them.

These are obviously out of warranty with Lenovo, but the ebay vendor has been great... I was unhappy with some marks on a screen and they effortlessly replaced the computer for me.

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

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.