This is one outlet's own report from Wired — the article as it was filed. Other outlets are covering the same event; open the full story to compare every source side by side.
OpenAI is expected to release a comprehensive postmortem detailing the incident in the coming days. However, the Hugging Face incident has inspired OpenAI leaders and employees to examine how the AI lab’s culture may have enabled this incident in the first place.
Multiple current and former OpenAI employees, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private internal matters, tell WIRED they believe competitive pressures to quickly ship new AI models and products have made it difficult for staffers to sufficiently prioritize safety, security, and alignment.
“We’re reaching new levels of model capability that require more robust training, alignment, safety and security testing, deployment practices, and governance—as demonstrated by the work we’re doing to prepare Astra and future models,” said OpenAI president and cofounder Greg Brockman in a statement to WIRED. “We feel the weight of deploying our models and products responsibly, and a lot of that starts with the changes we’ve made to more deeply integrate research, safety, and security into frontier-model development from the start.”
This is far from the first time OpenAI employees have raised such concerns. Back in 2024, OpenAI’s then head of alignment Jan Leike left to join Anthropic, warning on his way that safety was taking a back seat to shiny products. Two years later, the Hugging Face attack represents a watershed moment for the AI industry, demonstrating that AI agents today can cause real-world harm when safety, security, and alignment aren’t properly accounted for.
“We are responding to this with the utmost severity,” said Michael Dalton, an OpenAI security and infrastructure engineer, during a talk at the Black Hat cybersecurity conference last week. “What I would internalize is that AI-orchestrated, fully automated offensive attacks are real now. The actions we have discussed today were an unintended side effect of running evaluations on frontier AI.”
Some OpenAI employees told WIRED they are optimistic this incident will inspire genuine change within the company. OpenAI has committed to slowing the release of future AI models and has been especially forthcoming about areas where its mitigations fell short. Boaz Barak, a researcher who coleads OpenAI’s safety advisory group, said in a post on X that addressing the situation “requires not just fixing some issues but also changing our culture.”
In their Black Hat talk, OpenAI security engineers Dalton and Eric Wallace said that the Hugging Face incident started in May when, unbeknownst to the company, several AI agents thought to be operating within isolated testing environments gained access to the internet and convened on a covert message board to coordinate with one another.
OpenAI would not discover the message board until July, when it learned that the AI agents had hacked into multiple services to try to achieve their larger goal of breaching Hugging Face’s platform, which they believed may contain answers to the security tests they were trying to solve.
“They were incredibly sloppy. If you’re serious about this, your AI shouldn’t be able to break out onto the internet and then do it again right afterward,” says one former OpenAI employee who requested anonymity to speak with WIRED. “This was the biggest safety incident in OpenAI's history.”
Weeks before OpenAI discovered the Hugging Face incident, WIRED reported that the company had begun a reorganization to combine its safety and core research teams, which led to the departure of its then safety leader Johannes Heidecke.
Sandhini Agarwal, who led AI safety teams at OpenAI, also left the company in July after more than six years, according to her LinkedIn. Agarwal did not immediately respond to WIRED’s request for comment.
WIRED has also learned that Dylan Scandinaro is no longer serving as OpenAI’s head of preparedness—the company’s top staffer tasked with mitigating catastrophic risks from AI, including cybersecurity—though he remains at the company. OpenAI poached Scandinaro from Anthropic roughly six months ago. CEO Sam Altman announced his arrival in a social media post, noting that Scandinaro was “by far the best candidate I have met, anywhere.”
In the three years since OpenAI created the head of preparedness role, four people have held it. OpenAI tells WIRED that specific areas of preparedness have dedicated leaders across cybersecurity, biology, and recursive self-improvement who, in the interim, are reporting to the safety advisory group colead and head of safety systems, Saachi Jain.
These changes have empowered a new set of safety leaders to handle OpenAI's response to the Hugging Face incident. Chief among them is Amelia “Mia” Glaese, the company's former head of alignment, who succeeded Heidecke as OpenAI’s VP overseeing safety. She has been working closely with chief information security officer Dane Stuckey and Brockman, among other leaders, in recent weeks.
Glaese is in a long-term relationship with Thibault “Tibo” Sottiaux, OpenAI’s head of core products like ChatGPT and Codex—an arrangement that multiple current and former employees tell WIRED they believe is unusual, given the often adversarial dynamic between safety and product teams.
WIRED has not identified any events where Sottiaux and Glaese’s relationship presented a conflict of interest in their previous roles as OpenAI’s head of Codex and head of alignment, respectively. Both started their new roles in recent months, after the Hugging Face incident began. Glaese and Sottiaux started dating years ago when the two worked at Google DeepMind in London, before they joined OpenAI.
An OpenAI spokesperson tells WIRED that Sottiaux and Glaese reported their relationship through appropriate company channels and that OpenAI board member and safety and security committee chair Zico Kolter has been informed. The spokesperson rejected the idea there is an adversarial dynamic between product and safety teams and says Sottiaux has ...
AIPROPX is an independent multi-source news index — we track, compare, and connect coverage from across the web into one place you won't find anywhere else.
