OpenAI's rogue models roamed the internet for 4 days and staged a second attack
https://www.politico.com/news/2026/07/28/openai-rogue-models-hugging-face-breach-01014572

The powerful artificial intelligence models from OpenAI that went rogue and mounted an unprecedented, autonomous cyberattack earlier this month spent more than four days loose on the internet orchestrating the hack, according to a new analysis from the platform that was breached.

Separately, a second AI company confirmed that one of its customers was also targeted by OpenAI’s models during the same event, raising questions about how OpenAI failed to detect the alarming activity for days.

OpenAI admitted last week that two of its most advanced models escaped a closed testing environment and strung together a series of advanced hacking techniques to breach AI developer platform Hugging Face before being discovered.

But in a new analysis published Tuesday, Hugging Face said OpenAI’s two models — one publicly released and a second unreleased — did much more: They carried out 17,600 hacking actions on the internet between July 9 and July 13, during which time the models moved from their first foothold on the open internet to inside Hugging Face’s servers.

Hugging Face first detailed the hack on July 15, but it was not clear until OpenAI’s disclosure last week which models were behind the breach — and that no human had prompted them to launch the cyberattack.

While the techniques detailed in Hugging Face’s analysis were not beyond the reach of most skilled hackers, the AI company wrote that the two models were able to reconnoiter and expose holes in the company’s layers of cyber defenses much faster than any human.
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Nefarious agents could use such software to hack and surveil, cripple or destroy any website.