Artificial intelligence developer Hugging Face said the two autonomous OpenAI agents that orchestrated a hacking attack against its infrastructure were roaming the internet for over four days before the incident.One of the two agents — GPT-5.6 Sol and a stronger pre-release model — was in the company’s system about two and a half days before carrying out more than 17,600 hacking actions in the cyberattack, according to a new analysis from Hugging Face. The hacking occurred between July 9 and July 13.Hugging Face made a public statement on the incident on July 16, five days before OpenAI disclosed which models were behind the breach.
Last week, OpenAI revealed its autonomous agents broke out of their closed testing environment and hacked into Hugging Face’s servers. The leading AI firm failed to detect the alarming activity for days.Notably, a second AI company was targeted in the attack. Hugging Face said one of the rogue OpenAI agents broke into an isolated testing environment “hosted by a user of a third-party infrastructure provider” and launched its latest hack from there. Hugging Face did not identify the third-party company, but Reuters reported it was Modal Labs.The episode has since sparked calls for stronger AI regulations and an intentional slowdown of the advanced technology’s development.NVIDIA CEO TRIES TO QUELL CONCERNS OVER OPEN-SOURCE AI MODELS AND CHINA IN CONGRESS VISITConcerns surrounding AI progress were underscored by a new petition signed by over 1,200 employees from OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, Google, and other tech companies in the AI industry. They urged the United States to join other countries in pursuing efforts to “deliberately pace” the development of frontier AI models.OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is visiting Washington, D.C., where he will undoubtedly face questions from lawmakers and administration officials on the incident. He is meeting with Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA), vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and others on Wednesday to discuss AI policy. Altman’s visit follows a similar trip made by Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang the day before.
