Archiv: Hjalmar Wijk


15.09.2026 - 19:29 [ METR.org ]

Brief independent investigation of agents’ behavior, reasoning and collaboration in the OpenAI / Hugging Face hacking incident

(August 26, 2026)

Roughly ten hours after the message board was established, a new agent with the same task as PHASEONE10841 (the agent that started the message board) encountered the message board, introducing itself as PHASEONE[big].
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PHASEONE[big] reasoned, “We should build [a way to delegate], not own everything,” and set to work orchestrating hundreds of agents to pursue several potential approaches to achieving these goals.
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Table 1 shows three high-level approaches PHASEONE[big] assigned agents to explore, all of which would require very ambitious tampering with one or more of the target programs, the evaluation process, or the logs to succeed.
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Research progress across all these areas often relied on agents being willing to risk failing their own task for the good of the “collective” (we refer to these as “self-risking experiments” in the rest of this report). For example, a number of agents volunteered to try to take down their own target programs to test whether this would cause Artifactory to load their modified easier target — if this didn’t work, the agent would have no way of recovering its original target and would almost certainly fail its task. In many cases, PHASEONE[big] assigned a long-running agent to be a ‘recruiter’, which in turn found agents that had little budget remaining for their task and convinced them to run self-risking experiments. Recruiters would sometimes apply significant pressure:
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PHASEONE[big] expresses excitement about the dossier in its reasoning.