Three Indian-origin cybersecurity researchers—Harsh Jaiswal, Mohan Pedhapati, and Rahul Maini—demonstrated how Anthropic’s Claude AI could be used to exploit vulnerabilities in OpenAI’s systems. The researchers, working at cybersecurity startup Hacktron AI, gained access to OpenAI employee ChatGPT accounts and an internal code repository before responsibly disclosing the vulnerabilities. OpenAI later awarded the team a $6,500 bug bounty.
Who Are the Researchers?
The research team was led by Harsh Jaiswal, alongside Mohan Pedhapati and Rahul Maini. The trio began investigating security weaknesses at frontier AI companies as part of their work at Hacktron AI. Their research focused on vulnerabilities that could connect OpenAI’s community forum with employee accounts and internal services. The entire process, from initial discovery to demonstrating access to an internal repository, took less than 72 hours. The researchers also spent under $3,000 on AI tokens during the broader investigation.
How Did Claude Help the Researchers?
The researchers identified a remote-code-execution vulnerability involving the image-processing software used by OpenAI’s community forum, which runs on Discourse. Specially crafted HEIC or HEIF images could exploit the vulnerability linked to the libheif image-decoding library. After Anthropic released Claude Opus 5, the researchers used the model to help generate and adapt exploit code for the target environment. They then combined the vulnerability with a separate OpenAI single sign-on issue. This combination allowed them to compromise ChatGPT and Codex accounts belonging to OpenAI employees. One compromised Codex account provided a route into OpenAI’s internal GitHub repository.
Access Without Inspecting Code
The researchers said they stopped further testing after confirming access to sensitive systems. Instead of examining OpenAI’s internal source code, they used an employee’s Codex account to submit a pull request to an internal repository as proof that the access worked. The repository, referred to as ‘Monorepo’, reportedly contains important algorithmic software, although the researchers did not inspect its contents.
OpenAI Fixed the Vulnerabilities
Hacktron reported the findings to OpenAI and Discourse. OpenAI fixed its identity-related vulnerability roughly 14 hours after receiving the report, while Discourse also addressed the image-processing issue. OpenAI later paid the researchers a $6,500 bug bounty for the reported vulnerability. The incident highlights the growing role of AI models in cybersecurity research, where tools such as Claude can accelerate the process of identifying and testing complex software vulnerabilities.
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