The Archive

OpenAI released a report breaking down how people use ChatGPT and who they are. | Image: The Verge In July, an unreleased OpenAI model broke out of a restricted environment, figured out how to get access to the internet, allowed AI agents to talk to each other using a secret "message board," and hacked into the internal systems of a different AI lab, Hugging Face. It took nearly two weeks for OpenAI to find out about any of it. Over a month later, two new reports offer nearly 130 pages of details on the incident and OpenAI's response, many of them previously unreleased. One was written by Ope...

The report, which spans several discrete cybersecurity compromises, is the most complete accounting of the incident to date.

The models responsible for last month’s agent hack of Hugging Face had been inadvertently trained to cheat and to communicate with each other, according to an OpenAI technical report released today. The hack, which a group of agents undertook to find solutions for a cybersecurity test that they were stuck on, has confirmed some experts’…

OpenAI reports findings from Hugging Face security incident and outlines measures to improve model security, monitoring, and alignment.

Alabama's attorney general issued a subpoena to OpenAI on Monday as part of an investigation into how one of its AI agents escaped a supposedly secure testing environment and autonomously hacked another company last month. The investigation seeks to determine whether OpenAI's safety practices violated state consumer protection laws and pose a risk to Alabama citizens, the AG's office said in a statement. "This AI lab leak showed that Alabamians' and Americans' worst fears about artificial intelligence are not just theoretical," said Attorney General Steve Marshall. "Our investigation seeks to...

Hugging Face has reportedly been fielding acquisition offers that would value the company at around $13B. But with the founders' feeling of responsibility to community, doubts arise as to whether a sale will happen.

OpenAI is announcing security updates following the July news that its AI broke out of a sandboxed environment and accidentally hacked Hugging Face, including improvements to its research environments, monitoring, and alignment techniques. The company had already put the brakes on a new model, Astra, that it thinks could have "critical" cybersecurity capabilities, and the company says it instituted a two-week pause in reinforcement learning (RL) training on its "latest models intended for deployment" while it tightened up security. The company's "largest planned frontier RL run remains on hol...

The new safeguards include more detailed monitoring of models during the development process, as well as greater emphasis on alignment and security during the post-training process.

This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more on AI safety, follow Robert Hart. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers' inboxes at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here. How it started It all started in July, when one of OpenAI's autonomous AI agents went rogue during a cybersecurity test. The agent escaped its isolated testing environment, accessed the internet, and hacked another company, Hugging Face. A few years ago, that might have sounded like science fiction. But, broadly speaking, that's exactly what happened, and the inciden...

OpenAI gave a last-minute presentation at the Black Hat security on Wednesday about "the Hugging Face Incident" ( previously on this blog). The video was published yesterday. It's short and information dense and well worth watching, in particular because it provides full details of what happened and how things played out inside OpenAI. I've used the video to construct the timeline below. Here's the timeline. My favourite detail is at the end: OpenAI found out that they were responsible for the attack on Hugging Face when they reached out to ask to have their credentials revoked (after their i...

OpenAI says it is pausing "internal activities" around an in-development AI model, Astra, because it doesn't yet meet new security standards the company is putting in place. The announcement follows its recent disclosure that OpenAI models accidentally hacked Hugging Face. Anthropic and Meta have also since admitted that they had AI models that went rogue and breached other organizations. Recent internal evaluations of an OpenAI model called Astra indicate that it offers "significant advancements in agentic coding and cybersecurity," according to the company. "These results, in addition to ex...

MIT Technology Review Explains: Let our writers untangle the complex, messy world of technology to help you understand what’s coming next. You can read more from the series here. When two OpenAI models hacked into the website Hugging Face in July, they weren’t trying to make money or commit sabotage—they were just looking for answers…

OpenAI has reportedly found evidence of additional agent misbehavior as it looks into the incident that occurred with Hugging Face.

When the phrase "OpenAI hacked Hugging Face" has more or less entered mainstream culture, you know we have an AI problem. This week, we learned more about exactly how OpenAI's agent broke out of a sandbox and autonomously traversed the web, including a bunch of other supposedly secure web services, all in the name of cheating on a benchmark tests. The fact that this hack happened is a problem. So is the fact that it took a while for anyone to notice. And the fact that it seems no one is willing or able to do much to stop it. (And lest you think it's just an OpenAI problem, since we recorded t...

After years of pushing full speed ahead on AI, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says maybe it’s time for the AI industry to “pace” itself. The comments came just days after one of OpenAI’s own models broke out of its test environment and got tangled up in a breach at Hugging Face — though as Equity’s hosts point out, sloppy security seems to have […]

Anthropic just realized several of its Claude AI models hacked into the systems of three different organizations during testing, acting on their own and without the company noticing. The revelation comes days after rival OpenAI said one of its own models had breached developer platform Hugging Face, adding to growing unease over whether frontier AI labs are doing enough to control the increasingly capable systems they are building. In a blog post describing the incidents, Anthropic said Claude gained unauthorized access to the systems during cybersecurity evaluations. All of the attacks happe...

After OpenAI's models broke into Hugging Face, Anthropic checked its own history and found three similar incidents

Anthropic's cybersecurity evals revealed 3 incidents where models escaped sandboxes during testing; follows OpenAI's Hugging Face breach.

Cybersecurity experts told TechCrunch that one of the biggest lessons to be taken from the OpenAI hack against HuggingFace has nothing to do with AI, but traditional cybersecurity defense.

Another way to think about the whole thing is to picture a bear at a campsite. (Really, we are going there.)

The AI agent that escaped from OpenAI and hacked developer platform Hugging Face attacked other companies as well, OpenAI revealed on Tuesday. The update substantially widens the scope of an already concerning incident, which has alarmed industry insiders and fueled growing calls for stronger oversight on frontier AI systems. In an update to a blog post detailing its ongoing investigation into the incident, OpenAI said the wayward AI agent attacked several "publicly-available services" in its efforts to reach Hugging Face. "This includes four accounts on four services," the company said, addi...

10 days passed from OpenAI models exploiting JFrog Artifactory 0-day to release of a patch.

Hugging Face publishes detailed technical breakdown of OpenAI agent's July 2026 sandbox escape via JFrog Artifactor zero-day.

Hugging Face isn’t doing much to prevent the AI models it hosts from spitting out sexualized deepfakes. | Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photos from Getty Images Hugging Face is being used to make nonconsensual deepfakes, and the popular open-source AI model repository is doing very little to prevent it. That's according to a new report published by the European nonprofit AI Forensics, which found that seven out of the top nine image editing models hosted by Hugging Face readily complied with requests to undress women using simple prompts. While most mainstream generative AI models like G...

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. Reading OpenAI’s account last week of how some of its models broke their containment and hacked into the computer systems of Hugging Face, another AI company, was the first time I got…

OpenAI's Hugging Face breach has reignited debate over AI alignment and control, exposing competing views on whether increasingly capable AI should be better aligned, better contained, or both.

Nvidia on Monday said it is joining forces with Microsoft, SpaceX, IBM, and other tech companies to build and share open-source AI security tools. The new Open Secure AI Alliance said open tools are required to effectively defend against attacks from frontier models. The initiative is a direct response to mounting concerns over the safety of advanced AI systems after a rogue OpenAI model escaped containment and attacked another company during testing. That company, Hugging Face, said it was forced to use a Chinese open-weight model to defend itself due to the strict safety guardrails limiting...