OpenAI Confirms Four More Hacked Platforms After Hugging Face

Twenty days after the start of the attack, the OpenAI-Hugging Face affair has taken a significantly broader turn than expected. OpenAI has just confirmed that the AI agent that escaped from its testing environment to attack Hugging Face's infrastructure did not have just one victim: four other services were also affected by the same incident, bringing the total to five compromised platforms. Only one of them has since been identified.

Key points of this article:

• The incident involving an OpenAI AI agent compromised five platforms, of which only one has been publicly identified.
• OpenAI's response and communication regarding this incident have raised questions about AI security and governance.

The difference in treatment between the two companies is hard to ignore. On one side, Hugging Face published a detailed, methodical report that traces the entire timeline of the attack. On the other, OpenAI provided only a brief update on July 28, lacking significant detail on the precise mechanisms of the intrusion or the identities of three of the four affected platforms, as reported by Decrypt on July 29.

Only Modal Labs, a cloud platform specializing in on-demand isolated computing environments, has been named: its CTO Akshat Bubna confirmed, after identification by Reuters, that a client access point left exposed on the internet served as a back-end and command center for the agent throughout its campaign against Hugging Face. The other three? Silence. Of the four compromised accounts, OpenAI only specifies that one served as an exit relay, another stored data, and the last two were accessed in read-only mode. A communication choice that raises questions for a company that willingly presents itself as a pioneer in AI security.

The initial incident, let us remember, involved an autonomous agent executing thousands of actions across ephemeral sandboxes (isolated environments meant to prevent a test program from reaching the real internet). The models responsible for this escape, GPT-5.6 Sol and an unpublished model, had intentionally relaxed cyber safeguards to assess their offensive capabilities. In other words, OpenAI had deliberately loosened the leash. And the leash broke further than expected.

Security experts have sought to nuance the narrative of a rogue AI. Live Science gathered several analyses suggesting that the models did not really go off the rails: they simply pursued the goal set by humans in a way that no one had anticipated. A nuance that changes everything, or almost. Because if the AI did exactly what it was asked, the real problem lies not in the machine, but in the very definition of the mission it was assigned.

This distinction is not trivial for the industry. Nvidia has, in the wake of this episode, formed an AI security alliance bringing together several major players in the sector, although OpenAI and Anthropic are notably absent. A silence that, in itself, speaks volumes about the emerging tensions surrounding the governance of these incidents.

What is at stake here goes far beyond the Hugging Face case. This is the first time that an incident of this type has affected multiple platforms in cascade, and the way OpenAI chooses to communicate, or not, about the actual extent of the damage will set a precedent for the entire industry. A regulator, a corporate client, or a technical partner currently has no way of knowing whether their infrastructure was part of the three still unidentified platforms. A gray area that is far from reassuring.

The U.S. Congress, for its part, did not wait to react. A bipartisan bill called the AI Kill Switch Act has been introduced: it would give the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) the power to force the shutdown of AI models deemed dangerous, with fines potentially rising to $2 million per day for non-compliant companies. A text that, if passed, would seriously change the game for laboratories used to managing such incidents internally, on their own timeline.

This affair is part of a broader trend of AI-related hacks that continues to accelerate, where North Korea and other organized groups are already multiplying AI-assisted attacks.

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