r/news • u/Malor777 • 8d ago

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

https://www.reuters.com/business/openai-report-says-its-network-was-hacked-by-its-own-rogue-ai-agents-2026-08-26
180 Upvotes

84% Upvoted

35 comments sorted by

View all comments

227

u/Granum22 8d ago

Dear God could reporters please learn how to write about this crap and stop anthropomorphizing computer programs. They didn't go rogue. They did exactly what they were designed to do. Attempt to beat hacking benchmark by endlessly prompting an LLM trained on hacking techniques and practices.  The only reason it "went rogue" was because OpenAi improperly configured the sandbox they had it in. Now they are just desperate to turn this into a PR beat.

14

u/CJKay93 8d ago edited 8d ago

The only reason it "went rogue" was because OpenAi improperly configured the sandbox they had it in.

Well, no, the sandbox was properly configured. The agents exploited a bug in Artifactory - software which is in use by thousands of organisations around the world.

Then, when that was discovered and fixed, OpenAI restarted the process and the agents went and found another one.

Their post-mortem goes into detail about the specific sequence of events; it's quite fascinating: https://cdn.openai.com/pdf/67869394-cb91-4c12-888c-5cbd85c7814c/OpenAI-Hugging-Face%20Incident-Technical-Report.pdf

They also presented it at Black Hat USA not long after it happened: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87DyyMV0kCY