{"id":3859,"date":"2026-07-21T06:40:11","date_gmt":"2026-07-21T06:40:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/crosscountrymovingteams.com\/?p=3859"},"modified":"2026-07-21T06:40:11","modified_gmt":"2026-07-21T06:40:11","slug":"hugging-face-says-it-resorted-to-a-chinese-ai-model-to-battle-a-fully-autonomous-cyberattack-because-u-s-model-guardrails-stymied-its-defense","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crosscountrymovingteams.com\/?p=3859","title":{"rendered":"Hugging Face says it resorted to a Chinese AI model to battle a fully autonomous cyberattack because U.S. model guardrails stymied its defense"},"content":{"rendered":"
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That claim was bound to generate a lot of buzz at a time when many in Silicon Valley and Washington, D.C., are deeply worried about the speed of Chinese AI advances. These concerns have been heightened by last week\u2019s debut of Kimi K3, an advanced open-source AI model from Chinese AI startup Moonshot. Some venture capitalists and AI policy analysts who want to see the U.S. do everything possible to accelerate American AI progress in order to stay ahead of China worry that too much emphasis on AI safety, both within the leading U.S. labs and in policy circles, is holding back U.S. progress. <\/p>\n

In June, the Trump administration used export controls to block the distribution of Anthropic\u2019s Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models after it received reports of a jailbreak in Fable\u2019s guardrails around cyber tasks. It also initially asked OpenAI to restrict the release of its GPT-5.6 Sol model until OpenAI could offer assurances its guardrails around cyber capabilities were also robust.<\/p>\n

David Sacks, the former Trump administration AI and crypto czar, posted the Hugging Face example on social media platform X.com and said, \u201cThere\u2019s no reason to limit American models on tasks that Chinese models handle without issue. We\u2019re only making ourselves less competitive.\u201d Referring to the Hugging Face incident specifically he said, \u201cThe guardrails actually impaired defensive security.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue, whose business is built around open source AI and who has previously spoken out against any U.S. policy that would restrict such models for security and safety reasons, told Fortune<\/em> that the proprietary models from leading U.S. AI companies are actually dangerous to use to defend against a cyber attack. \u201cWhen you\u2019re in the middle of an active incident, you can\u2019t have your tools refusing to examine malicious payloads or getting your account flagged,\u201d he said. \u201cOpen models let us do that work without asking anyone\u2019s permission.\u201d<\/p>\n

Read more U.S. bombs Iran for ninth straight night as Tehran strikes Kuwait, Jordan, and Bahrain<\/a><\/p>\n

Although the lack of guardrails on some AI systems may seem risky, Delangue argues it\u2019s necessary to meet attackers on their level.<\/p>\n

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\u201cAttackers are already using agents, and they obviously don\u2019t respect any guardrails,\u201d he said. \u201cDefenders need the same capabilities, and open-source is the fastest way to put them in everyone\u2019s hands, not just the biggest companies.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hugging Face said that from its analysis, the AI agent attacking its systems seems to have acted entirely on its own, without any human initiating the attack or directing its progress.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe believe we caught the attack before the initiating humans were put in the loop, which helped us win that cybersecurity battle more easily,\u201d Delangue said. \u201c[This ]shows that speed will be key in cybersecurity defense in the age of agents.\u201d<\/p>\n

Cybersecurity officials have been warning for the past year that increasingly powerful AI agents would soon be able to carry out autonomous cyber attacks at speeds and scale that could overwhelm conventional cybersecurity methods. But the Hugging Face incident appears to be among the first of a small number of real world autonomous AI cyber attacks that have been documented.<\/p>\n

Earlier this month, cybersecurity company Sysdig said it had documented the first completely autonomous ransomware attack in the real world. It dubbed the AI agent that carried out the attack and the method it used \u201cJadepuffer.\u201d This week Sysdig said it had discovered a new version of Jadepuffer ransomware that specifically targeted trained AI models sitting on corporate networks. These models are considered valuable ransomware targets as they are expensive to train and may not have back-up copies.<\/p>\n

To combat the attack it was experiencing, Hugging Face said it used GLM 5.2<\/u>\u00a0running on its own infrastructure to analyze more than 17,000 logs, or footprints, that the attackers left behind.<\/p>\n

Read more Over $10 million, 35 coastal organizations, and 16 states led to a comeback of the Oystercatcher bird population<\/a><\/p>\n

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The company said the attacking AI agent entered its systems through Hugging Face\u2019s data-processing pipeline, a \u201cuniquely exposed\u201d part of AI platforms. It then set up a series of temporary sandboxes, or disposable coding environments in the cloud, where it executed its plan.<\/p>\n

The company then fixed the vulnerability, kicked out the attacker, and improved its detection and security guardrails.<\/p>\n

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\u201cCybersecurity is always a race between finding and patching exploits,\u201d Delangue said. \u201cAI systems change how this race is run with a different attack surface. Hopefully this will be an example for other organizations to follow to boost up their own defenses.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Hugging Face said it is still investigating the impact of the attack, and does not know which large language model powered it. The attacker broke into a limited set of internal datasets and credentials, but Hugging Face is still working on assessing the full scope of the attack. The company said it plans to contact any affected parties directly. So far, it has not found any evidence of tampering with public, user-facing models, it said.<\/p>\n

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GLM 5.2 was released in mid-June by Beijing-based Z.ai, and is the company\u2019s new flagship model. It made waves in Silicon Valley for being on-par with Anthropic\u2019s Claude Opus 4.8 and OpenAI\u2019s GPT-5.5, Business Insider reports. Chinese AI companies have continuously kept the American industry on its toes, beginning with DeepSeek R1 in 2025, and most recently with this month\u2019s release of Kimi K3. Both are open source.<\/p>\n

Read more FIFA President Infantino spent over 100 hours in the air during the 2026 World Cup amid pledge to reduce carbon emissions<\/a><\/p>\n

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