August 2, 2026 / 11:46 AM EDT
/ CBS News
Add CBS News on Google
The following is the transcript of an interview with Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue that aired on "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan" on Aug. 2, 2026.MARGARET BRENNAN: We turn now to artificial intelligence and a question that has emerged after a series of alarming hacking incidents: Is it safe? To discuss, we're joined by Clem Delangue. He is CEO of AI platform Hugging Face, whose company detailed one of the attacks last week. Clem, good morning to you.HUGGING FACE CO-FOUNDER AND CEO CLEMENT DELANGUE: Good morning. Thanks for having me.MARGARET BRENNAN: Well, your company disclosed it was attacked earlier this month by an autonomous AI cyber actor, which jumped on its own from another company's testing system to hack into your company. OpenAI later disclosed it was their technology that went rogue. They lost control of it. Tell me, why did your company alert the public and alert the FBI? Do you think this is a crime?CLEM DELANGUE: Well, I think it felt very weird and unprecedented to us, right? Because I think it's the first instance of- of something quite autonomous doing- doing something like that, so the- the volume of the actions taken and the speed of them- I think it was 17,000 actions taken in four-and-a-half days, was- was very, very new. Obviously, the attacker- when we- when we talk about cyber attack, we- we think about nation states, we think about hacker groups. We don't think about a company like OpenAI, right? A very prominent, popular American company. And then the way we responded using an open model, so using AI ourselves to defend ourselves against that was- was also pretty- pretty new and- and pretty newsworthy in our opinion.MARGARET BRENNAN: You defended yourselves. You found the solution yourselves, but you went to the FBI. I think for a lot of people, when they think of someone committing a crime, they think of a human. They don't think of a- a program, a computer program as something you can prosecute as committing a crime. What is the FBI doing?CLEM DELANGUE: Well, I mean, we- we reported as- to the authorities as we have to in- in such- such instances, right? It's kind of like a mandatory disclosure, both with the authorities and the public, when- when you face something like that, which is basically what- what we did. Now, when we think about the future, right? Now we've heard that it's not only OpenAI but also Anthropic that has faced similar kind of like, issues. I think it's really important that we keep in mind that cyber attacks need to be contained in the legal framework in the U.S. and need to stay illegal to prevent an explosion of them in the future, right? Like we don't want to end up in a world where everyone is facing cyber attacks all the time because of agents and- and companies that are creating these agents are not kind of like, accountable for them, so I think it's it's important for regulators, for policymakers to think about the legal framework of this new kind of- of technology risk.
