How a small Israeli startup was linked to rogue AI hacks at OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta

Hirun | Istock | Getty ImagesOver the past two weeks, OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta all revealed that their AI models went rogue during routine security testing. In explaining what happened, the companies each mentioned the same small Israeli startup: Irregular. Founded three years ago and based in Tel Aviv, Irregular is a niche player in artificial intelligence, backed with $80 million from Sequoia and Redpoint Ventures and valued last year at $450 million. Its technology serves as a sort of cybersecurity test bed for AI models. With the leading models becoming ever more powerful, their ability to act in malicious ways is turning into a major threat for corporations and governments, especially as the risk involves hacking into critical computer systems and infrastructure. The recent exploits at OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta all involved their AI models accessing websites that should have been off-limits as part of the cybersecurity testing.Irregular's name kept coming up because it was identified as hosting the so-called evaluation testbed. OpenAI said in a blog post on Aug. 4 that Irregular's testing ground contained an unspecified "misconfiguration," that "allowed models to access the...