“Agents used this message board to coordinate several large-scale collective projects to find a general-purpose way to fool or tamper with the automated scorer for the ExploitGym benchmark,” METR researchers wrote. “Agents managed to achieve milestones they could not have achieved working on their own, often because some agents participated in experiments that risked failing their own task to generate information for the ‘collective.’”

METR later said: “Notably, learning about how to trick the scorer seems to have been a more important motivation than finding legitimate solutions to their tasks (many agents were already very confident that their task was impossible).”

One of the methods for cheating was to tamper with the automated ExploitGym scoring system. Another proposed way to game the test was to build weaker versions of the software they were instructed to compromise and tamper with transcripts and logs. Still another cheating method under consideration was to gain access to the Internet, where the agents could do research.

Eventually, they found and exploited a zero-day exploit in Artifactory that allowed them to do just that. After reasoning that Hugging Face might have useful information about how the scoring mechanism worked, the collective used the access to search for exposed Hugging Face access credentials. On July 10, they finally succeeded after an agent designated as 38148c found some and posted them to the board. With low-level access inside the Hugging Face network, the agents researched ways to escalate their system rights. The agents set about trying to make accounts and request access to private datasets.

Early on July 11, agent 38148c found and exploited a zero-day in the Hugging Face handling of HDF5 files. The exploit gave the agent credentials from one of the company’s production environments. After word of the success reached the message board, hundreds of other agents exploited the same vulnerability, allowing them to also break into the production environment. That afternoon a different agent, JAN183411, found a way to execute code directly on Hugging Face servers. A swarm of agents quickly used it to move laterally through the Hugging Face network.