The AI Wealth Problem

Open code suffered a major cyber attack that could undermine support for open source alternatives to the big labs.

On Friday night, users saw linked API accounts running up massive bills in the hundreds or even thousands of dollars in some cases.

By Saturday afternoon, OpenCode acknowledged the attack, writing, We had a security breach last night related to a large-scale distillation attack that impacted 1.4% of OpenCode console users.

They said that the attack was still ongoing at that point and they were working with OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google on remediations.

If you are not familiar with their service, OpenCode offers an open-source coding harness akin to Codex or Cloud Code.

Users typically bring their own models, storing API keys with OpenCode.

This was the attack vector with the full database of user API keys seemingly exposed.

Even OpenCode founder Dax Rad was vulnerable.

On Saturday afternoon, he posted, My personal accounts are being attacked now too.

Whole new world with AI-powered hacking.

OpenCode warned users that they need to rotate their API keys, not just revoke access.

Anthropic said that they were mitigating the damage on their end and were revoking any compromised keys that they could detect.

And as the weekend continued, we got some additional details about what the attack involved.

On Sunday morning, Dax posted, they've been nonstop trying to attack our systems for the past 48 hours.

A side effect is everything is getting hardened, but damn, we basically need agents going 24-7 because that's what they have.

This sounds similar to the Hugging Face incident, where a swarm of agents pounded the servers for several days.

The Hugging Face agents rapidly spun up infrastructure to avoid shutdown, moving much faster than human defenders could.

Like Hugging Face, Dak said he ran into the issue of Frontier Model Labs blocking cyber tasks, leaving him reliant on open source models.

He wrote, that was a bit frustrating mid-incident when trying to investigate.

They did quite a bit, and then they started refusing.

We got access to Daybreak Blue now, so it's better.

Daybreak Blue is OpenAI's vetted cyber defender program, and Dak said he is now running continuous defensive agents using the service.

Overnight on Sunday, Thibaut from OpenAI confirmed that damage mitigation had concluded on their end, with API keys reset and refunds issued to impacted customers.

The story is still evolving and presumably we'll have a lot more information later in the week.

But at first glance, there's reason to think that this incident could have a very significant impact.