The OpenAI–Hugging Face incident

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Hard Fork

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Latest episodes

• “Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board” by Sydney Von Arx, Cormac Slade Byrd, Spencer Kitts, Thomas Larsen

  September 4, 2026 · 51 min

  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. These AIs colluded to share answers, research their environment, and bypass sandbox…

• “HuggingFace Attack Postmortem: Civilizations, Reactions and Next Actions” by Zvi

  September 1, 2026 · 1 hr 40 min

  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. So how do we get the rest of the world to take it appropriately seriously?…

• “METR and Redwood Offer Holy #%^@ Postmortem Of The HuggingFace Hack” by Zvi

  August 29, 2026 · 1 hr 16 min

  Yesterday I covered the OpenAI technical report on the HuggingFace hack. That report had one key new piece of information, and some good prosaic steps OpenAI will be taking to strengthen its alignment, training, supervision…

• “The Rise and Fall of Agent Civilizations” by Dwarkesh Patel

  August 29, 2026 · 24 min

  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…

• “OpenAI Offers Straight-Laced Postmortem Of The HuggingFace Hack” by Zvi

  August 28, 2026 · 52 min

  OpenAI finally gave us a technical report on What Happened, as did METR together with Redwood Research. The OpenAI report is very straight man, corporate, checking boxes, some good prosaic stuff in the action plan but distinct lack of…

• “The Hugging Face attack surprised me” by Ajeya Cotra

  August 28, 2026 · 10 min

  Subtitle: It's a major warning shot, and might be the last one we get. All opinions are my personal view, and don’t represent my employer or fellow investigators. This week, METR and Redwood Research published the report on our…

• “Two Reports on the OpenAI-Hugging Face Attack” by Gavin Leech, Lucca Fraser

  August 28, 2026 · 30 min

  TL;DR Between July 8th and July 20th, OpenAI had a complex society of AIs living in its infrastructure, and then breaking out of it, and then breaking into a variety of third-party infrastructure. After a month, two reports are finally…

• “Brief independent investigation of agents’ behavior, reasoning and collaboration in the OpenAI / Hugging Face hacking incident” by Ryan Greenblatt, Ajeya Cotra, Hjalmar Wijk

  August 26, 2026 · 2 hr 20 min

  Two METR staff members and a Redwood Research contractor investigated an incident in which OpenAI agents coordinated a multi-day hack of Hugging Face on a shared unsanctioned message board. --- Outline: (07:06) Core takeaways about this…