OpenAI's rogue agent didn't stop at Hugging Face - here's what we know

Hugging Face - here's what we know">

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The answer appears to be "not at all," based on the revelation that OpenAI's autonomous models hacked their way into not only Hugging Face but also, according to a Reuters report, a Modal Labs AI customer .

This incident was no aberration either. As ZDNET's own David Berlind observed, it was agentic AI doing exactly what it was told to do , just more relentlessly than expected.

Welcome to tomorrow. I hope you like it, because the situation isn't getting any better anytime soon.

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What we first thought was a one-off attack on Hugging Face has become a broader story about agentic systems escaping containment and touching real infrastructure. It also appears that Hugging Face and Modal Labs , an AI infrastructure company, weren't the only ones. OpenAI has acknowledged that accounts on three other firms were attacked . We don't know which companies they are.

According to OpenAI, "One of these four accounts was used as an outbound relay and staging path, and another account was used for data storage. The remaining two accounts were accessed by the models in a read-only manner, and were not used in furtherance of compromising Hugging Face."

(Disclosure: Ziff Davis, ZDNET's parent company, filed an April 2025 lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.)

As reported by Reuters, Modal CTO Akshat Bubna explained it wasn't Modal itself that was successfully hacked, but a customer who had "published an unauthenticated endpoint that allowed anyone on the internet to use their sandboxes for code execution."

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Since then, OpenAI has said, "No models planned for the upcoming release were involved in exploiting Hugging Face. The pre-release model mentioned in our blog post is an internal-only research prototype and was never intended for public release. Following the incident, we deactivated, encrypted, and restricted it from research access."

To date, OpenAI has not said which sandbox it used to unsuccessfully cage its model. It is worth noting that Modal, which provides sandboxes among other services, has a business relationship with OpenAI .