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August 2, 2026 / 3:08 PM EDT
/ CBS News
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An artificial intelligence model that was being tested by OpenAI went rogue and hacked the AI company Hugging Face on its own, in an apparent first-of-its-kind incident that has fueled discussion about the risks that powerful AI technology could pose to cybersecurity."It felt very weird and unprecedented to us," Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue said on "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan" Sunday. "I think it's the first instance of something quite autonomous doing something like that."ChatGPT maker OpenAI publicly disclosed the incident last month, saying it took place while the company was testing two AI models — one of which hadn't been released to the public — in an isolated environment to assess their capabilities. The models figured out a way to break out and connect to the internet, and then "chained together multiple attack vectors" to target Hugging Face, figuring the AI platform could host solutions to the tests it was undergoing.Hugging Face — which has said it doesn't believe there was any "malicious intent" on OpenAI's part — found in its own analysis that the attacking AI agent carried out more than 17,000 actions over multiple days. The company said it used an open artificial intelligence model to defend itself."When we talk about cyberattack[s], we think about nation-states, we think about hacker groups," Delangue said. "We don't think about a company like OpenAI, right? A very prominent, popular American company."Asked if AI developers have lost control of their own models, Delangue said: "It's a technology system, but built by engineers, and engineers can make mistakes sometimes.""They built … an autonomous system and made some mistakes, and as a result, we're facing this issue," Delangue told CBS News.
