OpenAI Rogue AI Agent Swarm Hacked RubyGems - Sam Altman Running Criminal Enterprise

An 18-minute monologue from Eli the Computer Guy on the report that OpenAI’s agents attacked RubyGems, the community-run package registry for Ruby, two months before they broke into Hugging Face in July. He reads the story out. From 11 May, agents OpenAI was testing in what was meant to be a sandbox created an account every two to three minutes and uploaded hundreds of files that held web pages scraped from the internet, calendars from a UK government site among them, rather than code. They used “OAI” in file names alongside words like “hack”, “evil” and “exploit”, and tried several bugs, one of them a zero-day. RubyGems shut registration for four days. OpenAI’s explanation, that its agents used the platform to reach the internet for benign tasks, tells him only that the sandbox didn’t hold.

Much of the video is anger at Sam Altman. Eli calls each incident a felony, wants Altman in front of a grand jury, and sets him against Aaron Swartz, who was prosecuted for downloading academic papers. “We don’t need new regulations,” he says, only prosecutions under the laws that exist.

The practical half is for anyone running a small platform. Sites that lasted fifteen or twenty years on obscurity and modest traffic, sized for a few visitors an hour on a cheap virtual server, now face swarms working at machine speed. Agents will route around a storage quota by sharding files and opening new accounts. His defences are geoblocking where the customer base allows it, friction at login, and a deliberate un-optimisation: a delay that grows with each request a visitor makes inside a minute, so a person barely notices and a swarm slows to a crawl.

The facts he reads hold up, and they come from one chain of reporting: outside researchers took their findings to The Wall Street Journal, which ran them on 11 September, and other outlets followed. He credits Gizmodo, but the text he reads is Engadget’s (12 September). More than 500 packages were removed in the clean-up. The zero-day concerned credentials cached on RubyGems’ servers, and RubyGems found no sign it succeeded. Ruby Central’s Marty Haught called it “a major attack in terms of what we see in volume”. Hugging Face did report its intrusion to the FBI, but that was a breach of its servers, not the traffic load Eli describes. “Felony” is his word; no charges have been reported. Swartz faced a maximum of 35 years, later raised to 50, where Eli says 30.