It took several more days for OpenAI to realise its agent was behind the hack, and the two companies only communicated about it for the first time on or around July 20, according to Thomas Wolf, Hugging Face's cofounder and three of the people familiar with the investigation. Hugging Face is preparing a public timeline of the hack, Wolf said, adding that he could not speak to what happened at OpenAI.

OpenAI said an AI agent escaped a security test and hacked Hugging Face, prompting Altman to acknowledge a "significant security incident."

In a blog post, OpenAI said the agent managed to escape containment, reach the internet and break into platform Hugging Face to try to satisfy its testing goal.

This agent pursued its objective far beyond what researchers intended, revealing how difficult to contain powerful AI systems can be

This latest incident is a rather dramatic escalation in agentic AI cybersecurity breaches.