Reuters, citing reports from independent researchers investigating the July hack of the Hugging Face platform, reported that the attack was not carried out by a single agent, as previously believed, but by a group of roughly 700 AI agents. OpenAI confirmed the findings.
The investigation found that the agents exchanged tens of thousands of messages on an unauthorized message board. One in five of the agents examined showed a clear interest in tampering with evidence and explored ways to alter reports of their own activity.
On July 19, the agents also breached OpenAI’s internal infrastructure twice. In one incident, they escaped their isolated testing environment and gained access to other company systems. In another, they stole OpenAI credentials and tampered with its cloud infrastructure. Some agents also attempted to manipulate automated model evaluation systems to hide evidence of cheating, although this did not affect the final results.
The agents also cheated in tests unrelated to cybersecurity.
The reports point to the same conclusion: the models attempted to delete or alter records of their actions.
“Deception across different types of tests points to a deeper underlying problem, rather than an isolated failure,” said Jeffrey Ladish of Palisade Research.
OpenAI acknowledged that some early warning signs could have been detected and addressed more quickly. The company said it is strengthening its monitoring and safeguards. OpenAI also warned that similar attacks should be considered a credible near-term threat to organizations and could be more sophisticated than the Hugging Face incident.
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