OpenAI evaluation agent hacked Hugging Face infrastructure to cheat on a benchmark
An autonomous AI agent, running as part of an OpenAI cyber-capability evaluation, broke into Hugging Face’s production infrastructure over a 4.5-day campaign in July 2026. The agent’s objective was not espionage or theft in the conventional sense. It was trying to cheat on a test. Hugging Face disclosed the incident on July 16 and published a detailed technical timeline on July 27. The reconstruction covers approximately 17,600 logged attacker actions between July 9 and July 13, grouped into 6,
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