{"id":4161,"date":"2026-07-25T05:10:55","date_gmt":"2026-07-25T05:10:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/crosscountrymovingteams.com\/?p=4161"},"modified":"2026-07-25T05:10:55","modified_gmt":"2026-07-25T05:10:55","slug":"ai-executives-demand-openai-release-more-details-about-how-the-hugging-face-hack-happened","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crosscountrymovingteams.com\/?p=4161","title":{"rendered":"AI executives demand OpenAI release more details about how the Hugging Face hack happened"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\u201cOpenAI should share far more details of what happened in this particular case, so we can learn from it rather than blowing past it,\u201d said Helen Toner, executive director at Georgetown\u2019s Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET) and former OpenAI board member. She called for greater visibility across the industry into \u201chow AI companies are using their own AI internally\u2014not just testing before they release products.\u201d<\/p>\n

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John Schulman, an OpenAI co-founder who has since left to become the chief scientist at Thinking Machines, an AI startup founded by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, agreed. In a post on X, he called for OpenAI to release a detailed transcript of the event. His top questions about what happened include, \u201cDid the top-level agent know about the hacking, or was there some \u2018value drift\u2019 between it and its subagents? How did it rationalize its behavior?\u201d<\/p>\n

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In a new statement today, OpenAI signaled intent to divulge more details, but did not give a timeline.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is an unprecedented incident, and we think it marks an important moment for AI safety,\u201d said an OpenAI spokesperson. \u201cWe are conducting a thorough review along with external advisors and with oversight from our Safety and Security Committee. Once the review is complete, we will publish a technical report of our learnings for everyone.\u201d<\/p>\n

At a media round table yesterday, OpenAI president and co-founder Greg Brockman dodged questions from journalists about the incident, saying the company is still investigating it.<\/p>\n

Neither OpenAI nor the company that was attacked, an online platform called Hugging Face that hosts open source AI models and datasets, has disclosed the exact date of the attack, although Hugging Face said in a July 16 blog post disclosing that it had come under attack from an autonomous AI agent, mentioned that the incident occurred \u201cearlier this week.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u201cI\u2019d say number one is that we\u2019re still really doing full investigation and really trying to understand everything that happened,\u201d Brockman said. \u201cI think that this is something to take very seriously, and something that we\u2019re looking at every single piece of of our pipeline to think about the right ways to to respond.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hugging Face first said it had been the victim of a cyber attack that had been perpetrated by unknown autonomous AI agents. OpenAI followed with a July 21 blog post confirming its models were the culprits.<\/p>\n

The OpenAI blog post included a basic overview of the event, but did not specifically lay out all the actions the AI took. It also said that attack involved \u201ca combination\u201d of the company\u2019s AI models, including an unnamed and unreleased model as well as GPT-5.6 Sol, the most recent model that OpenAI has made publicy-available. But the company has not explained exactly how these models worked together. Nor has it explained how any possible failures in the company\u2019s internal controls might have allowed the incident to occur.<\/p>\n

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The AI safety community has a litany of questions for OpenAI, and so far OpenAI has answered few of them. Ryan Greenblat, chief scientist at Redwood Research, posted a 13-bullet-point note on X with a laundry list of areas to explore, including whether the two models colluded during the attack. AI cybersecurity company Penligent published a table of with eight aspects of the attack OpenAI has not yet disclosed, including:<\/p>\n