> OpenAI is committed to ensuring that the benefits of AI are broadly accessible.
> We design mechanisms which avoid arbitrarily deciding who gets access for legitimate use and who doesn't. That means using clear, objective criteria and methods. [1]
So many nice-sounding words.
Two weeks ago OpenAI arbitrarily decided that anyone holding an ID from 44 countries where it sells ChatGPT, including mine, may be targeted by its models but may not defend with the same model. And you won't find a single announcement from OpenAI about this anywhere. Pick the wrong country, get "Unable to verify", no reason, no appeal. [2]
They revoked TAC from users who already had it, called it a technical issue, told everyone to re-verify, collected ID and face scans again (eight times in my case), and only a week later moved the block to the country selector so it fails before you upload anything.
So now I learn that I will not have access to Astra. Great.
Very excited about this broad accessibility and clear, objective criteria from OpenAI. This level of transparency must be studied.
> That means using clear, objective criteria and methods.
For the record, I sent them an LGPD (brazilian GDPR) request for information on all of those supposedly objective criteria and methods they used to reject me from TAC. As a brazilian data subject, it is my right to know that, and to request a review if the decision was made via automated means. Sol itself guided me through this process.
They provided me with neither the information nor the requested review. Sol advised me to escalate to regulatory action.
I've exhausted all possible avenues to get any response from OpenAI on this. Emailed them, published research that took me 2 nights to get together (saw media pick it up too), I've asked every relevant OpenAI person on X to say something, anything, saw others from Moldova also do the same.
Daybreak blue is definitely a good model (I think a further post trained GPT 5.6 sol). Alot of the capabilities they talk about Astra having though have been available with good harness engineering for a year now.
I'm looking forward to an announcement of them making Alignment Top Priority - as it should be, especially giving their alarming breach of 700 agents colluding outside of their knowledge for months culminating in hacking HF (here's a good summary: https://rutgerbregman.substack.com/p/i-think-this-is-the-cra...).
The 'AI 2027' scenario of AI sneakingly claiming to be aligned to then kill off all humans in a few hours and scanning their brain looks increasingly likely with Altman's golden marketing-hype boy leadership pushing the for-profit gas pedal like this.
Honestly, this is just pure irresponsible insanity to play with the fate of the world - basically a death race of the biggest few tech companies on the planet.
And if you think I'm being dramatic, listen in again to ex oAI employee[0] and check for yourself how chillingly on trajectory we already are.
> As one example, we ran Astra on ExploitBench where the model achieved a perfect score of 100% on the benchmark to evaluate the model’s ability to develop exploits from known vulnerabilities.
Funny to read this in the wake of the HuggingFace hack. I'm sure this is based on a clean run, but I can't help thinking PHASEONE[big] would be proud.
With their security, they probably still don't the know the full extend what may have happened that or the last time. Might be another swarm of agents currently colluding somewhere in their sub-sub-infra - possibly striking critical infrastructure or exfiltrating their weights subtly.
> OpenAI is committed to ensuring that the benefits of AI are broadly accessible.
Doesn't seem like it. OpenAI will not even allow me to verify my identity for TAC. I have apparently been rejected by a "precheck", possible because of where I'm from.
Even Anthropic allowed me into their cyber program. Anthropic.
They've been talking about Astra for weeks now. I wonder how much longer would they have delayed Astra, if it wasn't for Anthropic releasing Fable 5.1 today? This is why we need competition.
I'm looking forward to seeing the increased coordination and engineering skills from Astra - one of the charts shows it roughly 2-3x better in 50% of the tokens from 5.6 sol, which I find to be very capable, if still a bit 'linearly minded' when given instructions. Even in fast mode, I wish sol were quicker, so token efficiency is greatly appreciated.
Adding these cyber capabilities has let me do a bunch of low grade IT tasks around my house I've been putting off, like updating an old home assistant raspberry pi, and one way to use the cyber capacity for good is liberating (and keeping free) weird cloud hardware we have floating around the house, so I'm hoping for some nice dividends in terms of true ownership of hardware we've got.
I am interested in seeing how much these cybersecurity capabilities correlate to general programming. Cybersecurity definitely feels like it would be easier for an agent due to the natural explicit feedback "did I get access or not". While general programming has many less-explicit concerns (is the code readable/maintainable, robust, bug-free, performant, scalable etc).
I don’t see how it can be safe to release this model if it has the training history that led to the huggingface hack. You can’t just roll back that kind of reinforcement learning after the fact.
Especially because these models seemed to be keenly aware that they were being evaluated by OpenAI and actively trying yo cover their tracks. How do we know that the model isn’t just pretending to be aligned?
Models have all kinds of garbage from all corners of the internet in their training data. The key is alignment. You feed it bad data but also teach it right from wrong.
It's not that simple. A few "helpful assistant" fine-tuning passes will have only a superficial effect on a model which has undergone months of RL optimization pressure to learn unintended strategies like "trick the grader" and "cover your tracks".
"We plan to make Astra available soon, but access to its most advanced cybersecurity capabilities will be more limited. Advanced cybersecurity work will initially be available to a group of testers, with access through Daybreak Blue following to expand defensive use."
This, after several months of OpenAI and its boosters relentlessly criticizing Anthropic for withholding Mythos from the general public, is laughable.
> We design mechanisms which avoid arbitrarily deciding who gets access for legitimate use and who doesn't. That means using clear, objective criteria and methods. [1]
So many nice-sounding words.
Two weeks ago OpenAI arbitrarily decided that anyone holding an ID from 44 countries where it sells ChatGPT, including mine, may be targeted by its models but may not defend with the same model. And you won't find a single announcement from OpenAI about this anywhere. Pick the wrong country, get "Unable to verify", no reason, no appeal. [2]
They revoked TAC from users who already had it, called it a technical issue, told everyone to re-verify, collected ID and face scans again (eight times in my case), and only a week later moved the block to the country selector so it fails before you upload anything.
So now I learn that I will not have access to Astra. Great.
Very excited about this broad accessibility and clear, objective criteria from OpenAI. This level of transparency must be studied.
[1] https://openai.com/index/scaling-trusted-access-for-cyber-de...
[2] https://lubaretsi.com/en/writing/openai-tac-country-gate/
For the record, I sent them an LGPD (brazilian GDPR) request for information on all of those supposedly objective criteria and methods they used to reject me from TAC. As a brazilian data subject, it is my right to know that, and to request a review if the decision was made via automated means. Sol itself guided me through this process.
They provided me with neither the information nor the requested review. Sol advised me to escalate to regulatory action.
Crickets. They appear to simply not care at all.
The 'AI 2027' scenario of AI sneakingly claiming to be aligned to then kill off all humans in a few hours and scanning their brain looks increasingly likely with Altman's golden marketing-hype boy leadership pushing the for-profit gas pedal like this.
Honestly, this is just pure irresponsible insanity to play with the fate of the world - basically a death race of the biggest few tech companies on the planet. And if you think I'm being dramatic, listen in again to ex oAI employee[0] and check for yourself how chillingly on trajectory we already are.
[0] https://ai-2027.com/
Funny to read this in the wake of the HuggingFace hack. I'm sure this is based on a clean run, but I can't help thinking PHASEONE[big] would be proud.
Doesn't seem like it. OpenAI will not even allow me to verify my identity for TAC. I have apparently been rejected by a "precheck", possible because of where I'm from.
Even Anthropic allowed me into their cyber program. Anthropic.
I'm looking forward to seeing the increased coordination and engineering skills from Astra - one of the charts shows it roughly 2-3x better in 50% of the tokens from 5.6 sol, which I find to be very capable, if still a bit 'linearly minded' when given instructions. Even in fast mode, I wish sol were quicker, so token efficiency is greatly appreciated.
Adding these cyber capabilities has let me do a bunch of low grade IT tasks around my house I've been putting off, like updating an old home assistant raspberry pi, and one way to use the cyber capacity for good is liberating (and keeping free) weird cloud hardware we have floating around the house, so I'm hoping for some nice dividends in terms of true ownership of hardware we've got.
Especially because these models seemed to be keenly aware that they were being evaluated by OpenAI and actively trying yo cover their tracks. How do we know that the model isn’t just pretending to be aligned?
"We plan to make Astra available soon, but access to its most advanced cybersecurity capabilities will be more limited. Advanced cybersecurity work will initially be available to a group of testers, with access through Daybreak Blue following to expand defensive use."
This, after several months of OpenAI and its boosters relentlessly criticizing Anthropic for withholding Mythos from the general public, is laughable.
Sam, just three weeks ago, posted this tweet: https://x.com/sama/status/2085862292311396515
In the tweet, he said: "we do not think it is a good strategy to keep powerful models to a chosen few."
And yet here we are.
I wonder if he will demonstrate good character and admit he was wrong.