A security nonprofit that helps evaluate risks in frontier AI models disclosed two cybersecurity incidents this week, including a breach that exposed an API key and a separate vulnerability that could have exposed nonpublic evaluation data.
METR (Model Evaluation and Threat Research) disclosed two security incidents on Aug. 31 in which it was targeted by cyberattackers. In March of this year, attackers stole an API key used for inference on public models and consumed what METR described in a blog post as a "substantial" number of credits. In May, the company saw attackers probe publicly accessible infrastructure, including "an unsuccessful attempt to access internal data via an inadvertently exposed endpoint."
Although METR described both incidents as "near misses," the March event involved a successful compromise in which an attacker used the API key to establish persistence on a system, and used the stolen credentials for weeks. In any case, METR said it increased its security investment in response.
Some of these broader investments include hiring a security lead (with further security expansion to come), shutting down legacy infrastructure that expanded its attack surface, conducting regular threat modeling reviews, increasing logging coverage, and monitoring for unusual API key usage. It also deployed additional endpoint and server security software, increased credential rotation, and reduced "various permission scopes."