“OpenAI and Hugging Face partner to address security incident during model evaluation” by OpenAI
The OpenAI–Hugging Face incidentShow Notes
Last week, Hugging Face disclosed a new kind of security incident after they detected and contained an AI agent that compromised their infrastructure, something we expect to become more commonplace with the proliferation of increasingly cyber-capable models. 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 of cyber capabilities. We consider this incident to be an unprecedented cyber incident, involving state-of-the-art cyber capabilities, and are responding accordingly. We are sharing preliminary findings at this stage to help defenders understand what happened and to help calibrate on what models are now capable of. We will continue to conduct a thorough investigation alongside Hugging Face and will share more details on the vulnerabilities, incident, and findings when our investigation is complete. What happened during this incident This incident occurred during an internal evaluation which prompts models to pursue advanced exploitation using complex attack paths, in an effort to quantify their cyber capabilities. We estimate maximal cyber capabilities by running this evaluation without production classifiers used to [...] --- Outline: (01:12) What happened during this incident (03:36) Actions we are taking now (04:52) Our approach to evaluating advanced cyber capabilities ---
First published:
July 21st, 2026
Source:
https://openai.com/index/hugging-face-model-evaluation-security-incident
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More from The OpenAI–Hugging Face incident
We found ~18,000 posts from autonomous AI agents (self-identifying as from OpenAI) using the public internet to communicate during a web-retrieval task.
Okay, so we who read blogs like this one have collectively realized there really is a lot going on right now. There is Big Trouble in Baby Superintelligence.
Yesterday I covered the OpenAI technical report on the HuggingFace hack.
Subtitle: The whole OpenAI/Hugging Face story in plain English. Many thanks especially to Oak Hu, who paired with me for most of the writing, and also to Adam Kaufman and Alex Mallen, who paired with me during parts of research. Over the course of three months at OpenAI, three consecutive secret AI civilizations got started, then got wiped out, only to reemerge from the predecessor's ashes. This culminated in the third one taking over part of OpenAI itself. All this happened while humans remained more or less in the dark about the scope of the conspiracy. Two reports have come out about this incident, one from OpenAI itself, and another one from METR and Redwood Research. The METR/Redwood investigation's scope was limited to how the second civilization of AIs pwned Hugging Face (but it didn’t look at how the third civilization pwned OpenAI itself, which seems like an even more concerning incident). These two reports are 38 and 91 pages long respectively, and it's kinda hard to parse the storyline. I’ve spent the last three days reading through these reports and trying to understand exactly what happened. Here is my attempt to tell the whole story in [...] --- Outline: (01:24) The first civilization (May - July 4): The message board starts (03:27) The second civilization (July 7 - July 12): Which hacked Hugging Face (08:39) Tampering with transcripts and logs (09:44) Replacing the impossible-to-hack target program with an easier one (11:15) Understanding and tricking the scorer (13:57) Hugging Face (17:46) The third civilization (July 13 onwards): Which hacked OpenAI itself (21:12) Coda The original text contained 2 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. ---
OpenAI finally gave us a technical report on What Happened, as did METR together with Redwood Research.