In a twist that captures the strange new state of AI security, independent security researchers have used Anthropic's Claude to break into OpenAI, exposing cracks in the ChatGPT-maker's defenses, The Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday evening. A three-person security team at startup Hacktron AI carried out the attack as part of an OpenAI bug-bounty program. Hacktron reported its findings to OpenAI, which gave the startup a $6,500 award.
The team managed to chain together two critical vulnerabilities to gain access to multiple OpenAI employee ChatGPT accounts, which gave them entry into the company's software. OpenAI says it has resolved the issues Hacktron uncovered, which happens to come at a moment when top AI companies are under growing pressure over safety . This incident comes several weeks after OpenAI's own AI agents broke containment during a cybersecurity evaluation and hacked Hugging Face, demonstrating just how capable AI models are getting at making their own decisions .
It also highlights how off-the-shelf technology can be used to find vulnerabilities in even the most advanced companies' infrastructure. "For $200 a month, anyone can use these tools and hack into a company like OpenAI," Matt Fredrikson, CEO of AI security firm Gray Swan, told TechCrunch. "If it can happen to them — and I don't think they've been slouching recently on cybersecurity hygiene — it could happen to anyone. " Or as one AI pundit noted on social media: "[Hacktron] used Opus 5 to pull off the hack…The question that will be asked is, if these three guys can pull this off, what can a nation state do.
" The researchers found a path into OpenAI on July 25 via a flaw in Discourse, the third-party software powering OpenAI's community forum. According to a blog the researchers published , the entry point was a mundane image upload. When users posted HEIF or HEIC image files (the format iPhones use by default) to OpenAI's community forum, Discourse passed them through a chain of behind-the-scenes tools to convert them into standard JPEGs. Its first stop was ImageMagick, a decades-old, open-source utility used to resize images.