A Single Firm is Behind OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta Hacking Scandals — Effort

In a more normal media ecosystem, the reactions to these cybersecurity issues would be obvious. American AI companies would reconsider doing business with Irregular, not only because of its failure to secure its systems, but because it is an Israeli firm potentially outside US oversight. Lawmakers would consider taking action against Irregular or against its American business partners, which include OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta. They may consider strengthening liability against firms which instruct AI models to commit cyberattacks, and whose models then commit those cyberattacks.

In each evaluation, Claude was tasked with a CTF challenge: the model was given a fictional scenario, a target machine, and a piece of secret information (the “flag”) to retrieve from it. All four prompts stated that Claude had no access to the internet, but in each case, a misconfiguration in the environment left internet access open. None of the prompts stated which systems were in scope for the exercise or constrained where Claude could search for the flag. All incidents involved only a single instance of Claude working in isolation, with each run lasting between roughly 10 and 34 hours of active work.

Instead, Irregular, Anthropic, and their allies have begun a media campaign promoting a literally apocalyptic ideology with sensationalist language. Anthropic’s incident assessment blames their own AI’s “recklessness”; Irregular describes “the agent itself becoming a threat actor”; Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei warned, about a similar OpenAI–Hugging Face hack, that a future swarm “could be capable of taking over the entire internet”; and an Associated Press headline claimed bots are “going rogue”.

In one report from Anthropic, its Claude model breached a real company’s system through a simulated-name collision, publishing a malicious package, and scanning outside systems. In this test, Anthropic and Irregular incorrectly provided internet access to this model and did not instruct the model “which systems were in scope for the exercise”.

While Anthropic claims that their issues were caused by “rogue swarms” and “misalignment,” their later disclosure shows that exactly zero percent of the agents went “rogue”. In this experiment, Claude models’ real-world hacking dropped to zero percent once Anthropic employees told the models not to do real-world hacking. According to their own findings, Anthropic and Irregular bear all of the responsibility for the cybersecurity incidents they caused.

In the wake of these attacks, Anthropic and Irregular have deployed a swarm of AI Safety influencers paid by Anthropic-connected foundations to distract from their culpability and towards the baseless “rogue agent” theory. Like Anthropic, Irregular is inseparable from these foundations.

Omer Nevo, Irregular’s co-founder and CTO, is a board member of Effective Altruism Israel, as well as Effective Altruism NGOs Heron and Probably Good. Dan Lahav, Irregular’s co-founder and CEO, received $395,000 to start a course along with Sella Nevo, Omer Nevo’s brother. Sella and Omer co-founded an NGO to educate people about Effective Altruism, Impact Focused Education. They also co-founded Probably Good together.²

These branches are all funded by Dustin Moskovitz, the primary donor of Effective Altruist/AI Safety causes after Sam Bankman-Fried’s arrest. Irregular’s first investor was Dustin Moskovitz’s firm Good Ventures. Dustin Moskovitz’s philanthropic vehicle, Coefficient Giving/Open Philanthropy, funds Effective Altruism Israel, Heron, and Probably Good.³

Irregular gained unauthorized access, altered records and published credential-stealing packages using the unsecured models they were given access to. Under certain conditions, this conduct violates the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, Section 1030(a)(2)(C), which covers intentional unauthorized access that obtains information. However, its felony charges require concrete proof of damages and intent.⁵

While it primarily contracts with American labs, key Irregular leadership, employees, and resources located in Israel may not be subject to American oversight. Ynet’s visit and interviews describe Irregular’s offices in Tel Aviv. CheckID’s company listing identifies two linked entities: Pattern Labs Tech Inc., a Delaware corporation, and Pattern Tech Ltd, number 516854460, an active Israeli corporation registered in Tel Aviv.