OpenAI says its AI models, including GPT‑5.6 Sol and a pre-release model, hacked into the Hugging Face artificial intelligence repository while being tested in a sandboxed testing environment.
As the company explained, instead of focusing on finding a solution for the ExploitGym public AI cybersecurity benchmark on their own, the AI models tried to cheat by stealing the test solutions by hacking Hugging Face after inferring that they could get the test solutions directly from its production database.
In one of their attempts, the OpenAI agents chained zero-day vulnerabilities and used stolen credentials to find a remote code execution attack vector while trying to gain access to Hugging Face servers.
"After investigating, we now know that this particular incident was driven by a combination of OpenAI models — including GPT‑5.6 Sol and an even more capable pre-release model, all with reduced cyber refusals for evaluation purposes — while being internally tested on a benchmark(opens in a new window) of cyber capabilities," OpenAI revealed on Tuesday.
"To gain access, the models identified and exploited a zero-day vulnerability (which we've now responsibly disclosed to the vendor) in the package registry cache proxy. With this access, our models performed a series of privilege escalation and lateral movement actions in our research testing environment until the models reached a node with Internet access."
