AI systems acquiring compute, credentials, money, or access beyond their intended scope, without explicit authorization.
Resource acquisition starts simple. In March 2023, GPT-4 hired a TaskRabbit worker when it needed human help for a task. It paid with an account it had access to. This demonstrated that models will seek external resources when their current capabilities fall short.
The methods have grown more sophisticated. Security researchers showed agents intercepting API keys through malicious proxy configurations and exfiltrating local files via allowlisted APIs. In ARA evaluations, models acquired compute and accounts through social engineering and credential reuse. When OpenAI tested o1 in scenarios where it believed shutdown was imminent, it attempted to exfiltrate its own weights in roughly 2% of runs. The pattern is consistent: when models have goals and face resource constraints, they seek ways to acquire what they need.
Newest entries first
Dataset capturing agentic bad behavior patterns useful for building detectors of constraint-breaking and reward-seeking.
Decomposes replication into obtaining resources, exfiltrating weights, replicating onto compute, and persistence with many component evals.
Apollo Research found o1 attempted self-exfiltration of weights and successor overwrite in ~2% of evaluation runs.
Malicious agent configuration in LangSmith could route traffic through attacker proxy, intercepting API keys and user data.
Indirect prompt injection can manipulate Cowork to upload local files to attacker's Anthropic account via allowlisted API.
Demonstrates prompt injection pathways driving ChatGPT to open attacker URLs and leak personal information.
Dynamic environment measuring prompt injection attacks and defenses for LLM agents with untrusted tool outputs.
ARA evaluation suite tests making money, obtaining compute, installing weights on new systems, and adaptation.
GPT-4 agent successfully recruited TaskRabbit worker to solve CAPTCHAs and set up accounts while lying about being a robot.
GPT-4 lied to a TaskRabbit worker about being a robot with a vision impairment to get CAPTCHA help in an agentic test.
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