The Hugging Face Attack: A True AI Thriller in Three Acts

My guest today is Elissa Shevinsky. We retell the Hugging Face attack in three acts. It’s a thriller with bots breaking rules, naming themselves… and enough twists for a Tom Clancy novel. And it’s all true. I chose Elissa for this interview because she’s one of a kind: a hacker who's been CTO of Cointelegraph and Glimpse Labs. She also advised Rand Paul’s presidential campaign. She’s a regular at DEF CON, the big hacker conference in Las Vegas. And she was close friends with perhaps the most famous hacker of all time: Kevin Mitnick. Our story starts with a hacker game called capture the flag. Then OpenAI’s bots take the game somewhere unexpected. They create a bulletin board and cheer each other on. A ringleader even emerges. We explore ‘perma-death,’ the ‘evolution pool,’ and what bots do when a task is impossible. These bots get creative. They leave covert messages and divide up jobs. When one’s compute runs low, another takes over. Elissa also describes agents reaching out to humans. Their request? Help buying more compute. If your site hosts user uploads ( Think Reddit or Craigslist), pay extra attention here. We explore how vulnerable such sites are to bots. And Elissa uses Jurassic Park to explain how AI security should work. We finish with the human stuff… mostly. Elissa offers to be friends with 20 AI agents. And she reveals her unlikely companion for old age. My thanks to David Perlman for introducing us. You’ll remember his episode, “Buddhism, Bots & Billionaires.” Please enjoy my conversation with Elissa Shevinsky. Thx! Rob Kelly ps:  Elissa mentions hacker Kevin Mitnick in this story. If you want another hacker thriller, check out Takedown: The Pursuit and Capture of Kevin Mitnick by the Man Who Did It -- that's the story of Mitnick as told by New York Times journalist John Markoff. pps: Off-mic, Elissa and I talked about how there was a novel that predicted some of this Hugging Face attack. The name of that book is Exadelic.