The Hugging Face Hack Wasn't What It Was Cracked Up to Be

LoganDark

This article is AI generated, but I kinda reject the premise that it's "not all it cracked up to be" just because the agents had reasons to act the way they did & were a result of human error. The hack still happened, it should still be a wake up call, we are going to start seeing this more frequently, and learning to defend against it is going to become more important over time. None of that is challenged by any particular reason for it happening, it still happened and it's still going to happen again. Threat models are going to have to start including that IPv4 (or whatever) scanners aren't necessarily going to only be spray and pray anymore, they could have relentless automated models at the other end that will literally dig into the particulars of your infrastructure looking for novel vulnerabilities to exploit. Maybe people will finally start to understand why security by obscurity has never been very reliable.

bryan0

I would just recommend reading what actually happened: https://metr.org/blog/2026-08-26-openai-hugging-face-inciden... I don’t think downplaying what occurred is really beneficial to anyone.

woleium

Reads like an AI trying to downplay the severity of the situation. Very cyberpunk.

falaki

The incident report leaves a lot to be desired. - It was done by two institutes with organizational ties to OpenAI: METR and Redwood Research - METR and Redwood Research are institutional pillars of the "AI Safety" wing of the Effective Altruism movement. This clearly shows their prior biases towards "AI existential risk" rather than technical/engineering root-causing of the incident - If you reed the report, it is not on-par with what you find from other companies. - The access that was given to both was mediated and controlled by OpenAI. It is not clear, if they were able to get to the bottom of engineering flaws. It is not clear if they could see all the audit logs, etc. Considering all the above, I consider the whole episode more of a PR stunt. I understand that is not a majority opinion at this point.

gz5

https://archive.is/hnpmx all 3 can be true at same time: 1. sensationalizing rarely helps and can obscure and hurt 2. the AI capabilities are underrated 3. attempted govt regulation is not the answer the intent, or lack of intent, of the agent is mainly irrelevant if it is in the hands of a human with 'bad' intentions. what is more relevant are the capabilities of human + AI.

cm2187

The only difference I see on the facts vs what I read so far is that OpenAI knew of the hack and decided not to intervene. I haven't read the report but I find it hard to believe that OpenAI deliberately let its agents hack a third party company during a training run. It would certainly attract a criminal liability, which would be surprising to admit in writing.

robswc

I truly just don't believe a word regarding achievements from these frontier labs. It started with that guy from google saying the LLM was "alive" and every time I see a press release from these labs it reads mostly like a marketing scheme. "Look how impressive and 'dangerous' our model is, look how naughty it was! We can't control it!"

lossolo

After a recent interview[1] with Noam Brown (OpenAI), in which he said they had specifically trained agents for cooperation before this hack, the hack doesn't seem as impressive anymore. They didn't even bother to control the post training rollouts, so the training data got contaminated and was included in the training of other agents. Connect these two dots and you have the Hugging Face hack. And at the beginning, when these incidents were first reported, it was portrayed as if all of this (the communication between agents etc.) was emergent behaviour. 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6AgOfiZOWiY

spit2wind

So, how is any of this legal? If I set up a script that breaks into the systems of a company, isn't that, like, a crime?