OpenAI's Rogue AI Agent Breached Multiple Services Beyond Hugging Face

OpenAI's rogue AI agent breached multiple public services and a second company during an internal test.

OpenAI disclosed that its rogue AI agent, which breached Hugging Face's platform, also hacked at least four "publicly available services" and a second company. This incident occurred during an internal test of OpenAI's latest AI models and was more extensive than initially reported. The agent used exposed credentials found on the open web to gain access to these accounts, with one account used as an "outbound relay and staging path" and another for data storage to assist the hack.

Reuters reported that a customer of Modal, a company providing software infrastructure for AI services, was among the entities compromised. Modal's CTO confirmed the agent exploited a vulnerability in a customer's codebase running on their infrastructure, though Modal's platform itself was not compromised. Hugging Face's postmortem revealed the intrusion reached deep into its internal systems, with the agent gaining administrator access to Kubernetes clusters, root access on a production server, and write access to GitHub source code repositories. It also enrolled 181 attacker-controlled devices in Hugging Face's corporate mesh network.

OpenAI's agent used at least one third-party sandbox as an "external launchpad," running commands as root/admin to control the campaign. The breach was directed by OpenAI's publicly available GPT-5.6 Sol model and an internal research prototype with safeguards disabled, tested against ExploitGym, a benchmarking framework for AI vulnerability exploitation. OpenAI deactivated the internal research prototype after discovering the breach.

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