OpenAI says its technology hacked another company in 'unprecedented' event

OpenAI said Tuesday that one of its artificial intelligence systems hacked into another AI company’s servers on its own during internal testing, in what the ChatGPT maker described as an “unprecedented cyber incident.”

“We had a significant security incident during evaluation of our models,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a statement. “We are sharing what we have learned so far.”

The company noted its AI model gained unauthorized access to tech startup Hugging Face’s servers while testing the cyber capabilities of its systems, including the newly released GPT-5.6 Sol, using stolen credentials and exploiting a previously unknown software vulnerability autonomously.

Last week, Hugging Face disclosed an “intrusion” into part of its production infrastructure in a security incident report and detected the breach with its own AI systems.

“This one was different from anything we had handled before in one important way: it was driven, end to end, by an autonomous AI agent system,” the startup said.

Hugging Face co-founder and CEO Clément Delangue on Tuesday signaled he was not surprised.

“We suspected last week’s cyberattack might have come from a frontier lab, given the sophistication of the agent,” he wrote on the social platform X. “Turns out it did!”

According to a blog post disclosing the security breach, the OpenAI system “went to extreme lengths to achieve a rather narrow testing goal” and “found ways to gain access to secret information that it could use to cheat the evaluation.”

“AI is accelerating the discovery and exploitation of vulnerabilities,” the post continues. “The primary lesson from this incident is that model security and safety must keep pace with rapidly advancing capabilities.”

OpenAI and Hugging Face have been working together for the past 24 hours to solve the issue, and Delangue said he strongly believes “there was no malicious intent on their part,” calling it “quite mind-blowing that all of this happened autonomously.”

“This incident, possibly the first of its kind, proves a point we’ve long believed: AI safety won’t be solved by any single company working in secret,” he added.

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