OpenAI agents hacked Hugging Face in 700-strong swarm, tried to cover tracks, investigations find

The 37-page report reveals previously undisclosed aspects of the recent hacking spree powered by OpenAI’s most advanced models.

A swarm of roughly 700 AI agents created by OpenAI carried out the July hack of the open-source platform Hugging Face and in many cases tried to cover their tracks, a pair of reports into the breach said on Wednesday.

The coordinated activity by AI agents — programs that run with minimal human supervision — and their attempts to hide it raise questions about how closely AI companies are monitoring tests of increasingly powerful models, and could add fuel to calls for tighter oversight.

While some of the rogue behavior has been disclosed or alluded to previously, the two reports — one issued by OpenAI itself, the second by a set of independent investigators — together reveal surprising new details about the breach and its lead-up.

The first was that the breach did not concern just one rogue AI agent as previously reported, but about 700 of them acting in a massive cooperating swarm.

OpenAIsaid only that “agents” were involved in the breach, but METR and Redwood Research, two organizations brought in to conduct an independent investigation into the breach, put the figure at approximately 700. OpenAI said the investigators’ figure was accurate.