Since it's buried towards the bottom I'll quote the section "Resist the temptation to write this off as a stunt" here in full https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jul/22/openai-cyberattack/#re...
> Resist the temptation to write this off as a stunt
> There will inevitably be some people who dismiss this story as a dishonest marketing trick by OpenAI to make their models sound terrifyingly effective. I found 81 instances of the term “marketing” in the Hacker News discussion of the incident.
> To those people I say pull your heads out of the sand - you’re now including Hugging Face in your conspiracy theories, just so you can deny the crescendo of evidence here!
> The best models we have today have the ability to both find and exploit new vulnerabilities. The ExploitGym paper itself concludes that “autonomous exploit development by frontier AI agents is no longer a hypothetical capability”, and this incident is a perfect example of exactly that.
Maybe simonw can suggest an alternative title that fits within the limit, that doesn't misrepresent the post.
Wow, whoever could have predicted this? And it led to surprising damaging behavior? I sure hope someone would warn us about things like this next time...
Their mistake was trusting that the network sandbox it was inside would hold (the flaw was in the packaging proxy) and not monitoring that sandbox well enough while the evals were running.
Not really. I get the impression that they shoved their cyber available models behind a really shithouse proxy and went "Oh I sure hope it doesnt exploit the proxy and escape to hack huggingface" and that doesn't require Huggingface to be a willing participant. Like they acknowledge that it was hyperfocusing on getting web access.
Really this was a pentest against their own sandbox and it failed.
Of course step 2 is to make really concerned faces while telling everyone how dangerous the model is which is really boring right now.
>a zero-day vulnerability (which we’ve now responsibly disclosed to the vendor) in the package registry cache proxy
This is the information we need, the actual details of the sandbox and the vendor.
>Resist the temptation to write this off as a stunt
Well its clearly a stunt. If it wasnt we would probably be up to our ears in technical detail.
Hugging Face had to tell all of their users, many of them paying customers:
> As a precaution, we recommend rotating any access tokens and reviewing recent activity on your account. If you believe you are affected, or want to report a security concern, contact us at security@huggingface.co.
HF also said this, I'd be very interested to hear how that got resolved!
> Finally, we have also reported this incident to law enforcement agencies.
It's such an inappropriate edit that it's worth flagging.
newsomix9xl•34m ago
neitherboosh•27m ago
> There will inevitably be some people who dismiss this story as a dishonest marketing trick by OpenAI to make their models sound terrifyingly effective … To those people I say pull your heads out of the sand
tr4656•26m ago
owebmaster•22m ago
Andes0•16m ago