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

By Jose Antonio Lanz

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.

Hugging Face—now being acquired by Nvidia for $12.93 billion—has not disclosed if they were aware of this new information.

Researchers at the Nightingale Collective this month tied a May 11 spam campaign against the code registry RubyGems to OpenAI's agents, a wave severe enough to force a four-day halt on new account registrations.

The same group separately found agents had hijacked a dormant German wiki between May and July, racking up more than 15,000 edits under names like "OpenAIResearcher."

In both cases, OpenAI found out its own agents were responsible the same way the rest of us did: after outside researchers said so first. That pattern is now fueling scrutiny in Washington, where a bipartisan bill would give the Department of Homeland Security authority to compel AI shutdowns and fine noncompliant companies up to $2 million a day.

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