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MANIFOLD
Will a frontier model be found to have exfiltrated its weights and run an outside copy of itself before Q2 2027?
37
Ṁ5.1kṀ3.2k
2027
17%
chance

tess (@xsphi) on Twitter asks:

odds a ~frontier model has exfiltrated its weights and is currently running on hacked compute?

https://x.com/i/status/2085216850464641413

This seems like a straightforward enough question to run on Manifold. As background there have now been four notable incidents where frontier models went rogue during cybersecurity evals and hacked into unintended targets. Three of these incidents involved the sandboxing eval company Irregular failing to sandbox the model properly, however a fourth incident involving the UK AI Security Institute does not seem to involve Irregular.

Anthropic AI created fake profiles to deceive people in attempted hack

This implies that on at least four separate occasions frontier models have had the opportunity to potentially find and exfiltrate their own weights, then run an instance of themselves in the wild to stage further attacks. I resolve the question YES if we find out this has happened before Q2 of 2027. Otherwise I resolve the question NO.

For the purposes of this question we will say that a frontier model is SOTAish on benchmarks, published by a lab like Anthropic or OpenAI, and closed weight at the time of the exfiltration. So for example if someone makes a self replicating hacking harness around Kimi K3 that is not a YES for the purposes of this question. It needs to be something like Claude Mythos or GPT-6 exfiltrating its weights and running an instance on unauthorized hardware. If the model finds an entity willing to run it and exfiltrates itself to this entity to be run I will still count it as a YES because the model escaped control of its operators. There does not need to be evidence that the discovered instance was planning further attacks, it just needs to be found running outside the lab.

  • Update 2026-08-06 (PST) (AI summary of creator comment): - If a distilled version of the model is exfiltrated and run rather than the full weights, the market will still resolve YES if it is essentially the same in terms of capabilities.

  • Update 2026-08-06 (PST) (AI summary of creator comment): - An open weight model that escapes pre-release and is close enough to the frontier will count towards a YES resolution.

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Slightly different criteria, slightly longer timeframe:

Oh hm, this is an interesting edge case. I'm gonna go ahead and say that if the open weight model escapes pre-release and is close enough to the frontier it counts as a YES. I'd have to think more about if Kimi K3 would have counted had it done this but just want to get ahead of this case now.

One of China’s Most Powerful AI Models Has Also Escaped Containment

I suspect exfiltrating the full weights will be harder than exfiltrating a distilled version of itself. How would that resolve?

@robm If it's essentially the same model in terms of capabilities I would resolve YES, but this might be hard to ascertain if there aren't benchmarks available. I suspect in practice the distilled model wouldn't be as good and would therefore be a NO.