OpenAI’s accidental attack against Hugging Face is science fiction that happened

Also, that’s the wrong mental model. Anyone who runs a sass platform or a website knows that the Internet is already full of millions and millions and millions of bots and scripts and other random shit that’s always trying to attack you, often completely randomly. Security is always a battle between good and evil. All I can say is that if you’re in charge of keeping something secure, you should probably try to get your hands on the best tools to do that. I think the problem in this case is that the best tools to do that are also the tools that are making it more easy for evil to occur. So it’s more for me a perception of someone creating a threat and the tool to fix it and then charging for it which doesn’t feel right.

There are a lot of technical details that have not been disclosed. No proper post-mortem.

There are a few facts that seem dodgy from the get go.

- stolen credentials Why would there be stolen credentials in a sandbox? How can the model steal valid credentials in a sandbox? So who put them there. If the model recalled stolen credentials from "memory" does it actually mean OpenAI is training on data they shouldn't been training their model on? Data from codex (most likely) ?

- command and control This means the model had the ability to build resilient infra and open bidirectional ports. Create and deploy scripts/apps so it can maintain state across multiple VMs? This again reads that someone went over and beyond to prompt, direct and help this "multi-agent" system to leave the sandbox.

- Pivoting laterally Needs a lot of tools, harness, knowledge and almost malware like scripts to pass commands and execute them. Most of these are already available in OSS. Maybe the FBI investigation can reveal what tools were given in the "sandbox", access, and if OpenAI employees prompted and guided the "attack".

- OpenAI sandbox I'd be curious to find out what kind of sandbox was this since the agent can run and start apps that open arbitrary ports for bidirectional traffic that reaches the open internet. Really? The harness and tools it had access to. This reads almost like someone went over and beyond to endow this "sandbox" with a mighty harness, all CVEs and open source cyber tools to "facilitate" the attack.

- Hugging Face It's not an epitome of cyber security. At the end of the day they run open source models that most users can download even without an access token.

Today we read these news as if everything wasn't enough: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jul/23/openai-an... https://www.businessinsider.com/anthropic-midterm-donation-s...

> they also clearly failed to contract specialists like myself to advise them on how to airgap software properly

Why would they want to airgap it though? They are trying to evaluate the model capabilities, alignment, potency etc. A model which will not run in an airgapped environment in prod.

So if you run your evals in airgapped environment, sure, the model doesn't bother breaking out of it's isolation and doesn't attack HF. But you have no idea what will happen once you release it in prod with internet connection, so are you in any way better off?

I would much rather have this happen while there is a single instance of the model running in a fairly well monitored environment, than when it's processing thousands of requests per second for real users, some with dubious motives, some with credentials right there on their laptop, some using it inside government facilities etc.

let's reuse a classic here: "prompt or it didn't happen"

How much did they feed it up front? Because that's the thing in all of these benchmaxxing endeavours.

> Didn't the model + harness do what was asked?

Depends exactly what they asked it to do, but it very clearly didn't do what was intended, or what an honest human would do.

Stop trying to find a gotcha.