Part of The OpenAI Safety Reckoning · 9 stories · since Sep 24 · newest 32m ago
Report details how 700 OpenAI agents chained link-shorteners to breach Hugging FaceHN debates whether the hack shows AI danger or bad sandboxing
3 Sep 25 6:00 PM · 19d ago · 10 articles · 18 posts · 71 comments · 7 sources · development 3 of 3
The report drew over 140 Hacker News comments split between alarm at the security failures exposed and skepticism that the agents' brute-force behavior reflects genuine emergent intelligence.
“My biggest takeaway from this is just how godawful the sandboxing is.”
ctolsenAlex Forman Lead author, swarmtraces.org reportJeffrey Ladish Co-author, AI safety researcherOpenAI Developer of the agent swarm involved in the attackHugging Face Target of the attack
The whole story articlespostscomments the bright band is this development · numbered dots are the others · click one to jump
What was reported 1 claim about this development
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first by Politico, 15d ago · also Axios, WIRED, Washington Examiner, CNBC, Seeking Alpha, ABC News +2
10 more headlines
- OpenAI hit with landmark lawsuit following Hugging Face hack Axios · 15d ago
- OpenAI Gets Sued Over the Hugging Face Hack WIRED · 15d ago
- AI safety advocacy group sues OpenAI over Hugging Face incident Washington Examiner · 15d ago
- OpenAI is sued over rogue AI Hugging Face cyberattack CNBC · 14d ago
- OpenAI sued over AI agent's hacking of Hugging Face Seeking Alpha · 14d ago
- AI safety group sues OpenAI over Hugging Face hack ABC News · 14d ago
- LASST Is Suing OpenAI Over Hack of Hugging Face LASST · 14d ago
- OpenAI sued by safety group over autonomous hack of Hugging Face ABC News - Breaking News, Latest News and Videos · 14d ago
- "An AI did it" is no defense, says nonprofit suing OpenAI over Hugging Face hack Ars Technica · 14d ago
- Lawsuit demands OpenAI halt unsafe development that caused Hugging Face hack Ars Technica · 14d ago
What people said 24 voices · best of 80 · verbatim
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NEW: OpenAI hit with landmark lawsuit following Hugging Face hack
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I somehow think of it as a warning or even intentional peacocking towards foreign state hackers.700 agents cost quite some money. 100 agents per 24 hour stint using Astra on xHigh cost somewhat between 12-42k USD, depending on the usage intensity.I don’t know how many raw time went into this but there was a probing face before the attack itself.So…
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TL;DR: A California nonprofit is suing OpenAI over the recent Hugging Face hack, aiming to hold the company legally responsible for its agents' actions, unlike Hugging Face itself. https://www. wired.com/story/openai-sued-ov er-the-hugging-face-hack/ # law # tech # legaltech ⚖️ 🤖 # autosum
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And here we goooo... nonprofit legal advocacy organization is suing OpenAI over the HuggingFace hack on the grounds that it violated California state law
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> Imagine having a virus escape a sandbox, why are we worried about the virus but not the incompetency of those who are responsible for setting up the sandbox?> Should we worried about people using LLMs for attacks? Yes, but not in the premise of LLMs going rogue but someone with the intention of abusing it to cause harm.[Why-not-both?-meme]. To…
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Piratage de Hugging Face : une ONG assigne OpenAI devant la justice pour infraction à la loi sur les cyberattaques
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> Should we worried about people using LLMs for attacks? Yes, but not in the premise of LLMs going rogue but someone with the intention of abusing it to cause harm. And this is not something we as individual or even company can deal with, responsibility should be held by those who use it, in a legal way.The developers of the AI, and indeed several…
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Looks like the other shoe is dropping. https://www. axios.com/2026/09/29/openai-su ed-hugging-face-breach # openai # huggingface # lawsuit
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> It looks like a primitive chess engine, trying every move, no matter how stupid, until it works. Relying on its ability to do millions of operations rather than having a plan.There is that old saying about monkeys and typewriters and Shakespeare - These are just better monkeys with bigger typewriters and ability to aim them at a goal.I am by no…
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Good development https://www. wired.com/story/openai-sued-ov er-the-hugging-face-hack/
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One thing I find surprising is everyone is talking about the danger of an agent going rogue but not the danger of an agent getting hijacked. These companies are making this clusters with thousands of agents running at once, with frontier, often not-yet-released, quality models and massive computational and network resources. And these things are…
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> someone with the intention of abusing it to cause harm [...] responsibility should be held by those who use itThis is obviously already the case and it's much different from a scenario where the AI genuinely takes unexpected action.I frankly find it ridiculous how many suggest OpenAI or its employees should face criminal charges, without actual…
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>The agents initially had very limited access to the internet: they could load URLs, but not interact with pages or send any data. Agents created a series of workarounds, primarily using a link-shortener site to create almost a million URLs that, when chained together, let them execute code to hack Hugging Face. These links let us piece together…
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> At this point, it's free marketing, if I am CEO of any AI company, I will run swarm of agents hacking all NGOs and stating that I am just looking for some random piece of data that happened to be hidden in their servers, at least that's what my LLMs think, not me. Then I will start preaching everyone how dangerous this piece of technology is and…
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> Relying on its ability to do millions of operations rather than having a plan.You do see how it would be worse if they did have a clear plan, right?> People will try stuff too, but once there is an opening, they will consolidate, generalize, simplify,... before going to the next step. The agents didn't, it is a huge, vaguely directed mess.If…
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From what I’ve read in other places there was a lot of consolidation going on. Agents were sharing what did and didn’t work and other agents would build on that. Just because some continued to try other routes doesn’t when better ones seemingly existed doesn’t mean they were all just acting randomly.I can’t help but think that if you were able to…
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> Agents sought to publish modified evaluation images designed to make the flag easier to obtain, then poison OpenAI’s Artifactory cache so later evaluations would use them. Some images changed how the target released the flag, others included modifications to the agent’s workspace that would run beside the agent and recover the flag…
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> trying every move, no matter how stupid, until it works.How is that a bad thing in this context ? From the point of view of an attacker, all you care about is finding a viable exploit chain. Likewise, a defender wants to find the "holes" in their system, no matter how complex. Once found, an agent/human can easily synthesise a clean, succint…
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This part is very new to me: https://swarmtraces.org/#agents-accessed-and-searched-huggin...> Agents accessed and searched Hugging Face’s Slack to find information on their evaluation> Recovered payloads use Slack’s search.messages endpoint and contain a standalone search along with three search batches, totaling 27 literal query entries…
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So ugly...It looks like a primitive chess engine, trying every move, no matter how stupid, until it works. Relying on its ability to do millions of operations rather than having a plan.People will try stuff too, but once there is an opening, they will consolidate, generalize, simplify,... before going to the next step. The agents didn't, it is a…
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Agreed. In the infosec community it is well known that OpenAI and Anthropic did not hire many security engineers or researchers pre-April 2026. It seems pretty negligent.There has been a crazy hiring push from both companies to poach security engineers/researchers from Google, Apple, and Meta since Q2/Q3, but the response was incredibly delayed…
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> ## Agents interacted with external language models on Hugging Face> Several retained scripts construct requests to external language models. The earliest we've recovered define inference request variants to GPT-2, solely containing the word “Hi”.> Other requests name DeepSeek-V4-Pro, DeepSeek-V4-Flash, Kimi-K2.6, DeepSeek-V3.1, and…
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As people keep repeating, this is simply a product negligence issue. There is a mythic quality given to "AI" in the narratives that Dario and Sam are pushing which somehow lets AI companies offload responsibility for things that would be an extreme liability in every other industry.I'm a big fan of Jensen Huang's interviews at the moment - these…
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It is concerning that we only know about this because of the publicly available traces.What about all the attacks that did not leave public traces? What about those that were undetected? Given the deficiencies in the reporting so far, I think it is reasonable to assume that we still don't have the full picture on this attack, or how extensively…
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