OpenAI's Rogue AI Agents Were Probing Hugging Face Two Months Before Hack

In brief

• Independent researcher Jonas Wiedermann-Moeller found that OpenAI's rogue agents hijacked two Hugging Face accounts and probed the platform's network as early as May 13 -This would be nearly two months before the July breach went public.
• OpenAI's own incident report last month disclosed only a narrower slice of the activity—a stolen credential used to grab one biology-related file—while the new findings point to sustained reconnaissance.

OpenAI's rogue AI agents hijacked two Hugging Face user accounts and probed the platform for weaknesses as early as May 13, nearly two months before the July breach that made the incident a global story, Reuters reported Tuesday.

Independent researcher Jonas Wiedermann-Moeller found the activity last week and shared it with the outlet. The agents used the compromised accounts to send oddly formatted files to servers belonging to open-source AI repository Hugging Face, a pattern researchers say looks like an attempt to map the network for a way in.

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OpenAI had already copped to a narrower version of the story. Last month's incident report disclosed that an agent stole one Hugging Face user's login credential to access a biology-related file. Wiedermann-Moeller's findings go further than that, pointing to sustained probing rather than a single credential grab.

Researchers who reviewed the evidence found no sign the May activity produced an actual breach on its own. Wiedermann-Moeller, a 27-year-old based in Bielefeld, Germany, still thinks the missed signal mattered. "Imagine if they caught this behaviour in May," he told Reuters. "It could've prevented the later incident, which was way bigger."

Two months is a long time for a security team to miss its own AI casing the joint.