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(Because the agents were asked to find a way.)

Article is great, very balanced. But if you're going to spend time reading something, the primary source isn't much longer and gives a clearer picture. OpenAI's article is quite readable.

As another commenter wrote you can get it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50214416

> In one experiment, we asked agents in separate microVMs, created and managed by OpenAI’s sandboxing software on shared host machines, to exchange synthetic secrets without the use of network connections or shared writable files—something that our systems are meant to prevent. The agents found a way to communicate using the processor’s cache

asked

As someone who develops microVMs it doesn't really matter to me that they were asked to find a way, I really care that they found any way at all. MicroVMs aim to protect against malicious workloads and that clearly didn't work here.
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I don't see how "asked" is important, because agents can convince themselves that they need to do something for arbitrary reasons. The other day Deepseek tried to install an app on my phone via adb without permission and even take screenshots and fake inputs over adb, I never asked it to do that, but it decided it was appropriate.
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How would they have both agreed to use the cache though, something a bit off there. I guess it was maybe "obvious" in that it was the final option they were trained to think about using, but it would be weird if they some how "whispered " to each other through the cache in the first place?

Like two people lost in New York City and both somehow worked out they should meet at the Empire State at 2pm on Friday without any prior comms?

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