Its AI agent spent days hacking a company, but sources say OpenAI did not notice for a week

6 min readJul 25, 2026 09:59 AM IST OpenAI says it is reviewing the incident with external advisers and plans to publish a technical report.(Image: Reuters)The OpenAI agent that broke into tech firm Hugging Face went on a dayslong hacking spree that OpenAI didn’t notice until well after the threat was contained and the FBI was alerted, according to people familiar with the investigation. The agent – a program capable of making decisions and executing complex tasks with little or no human oversight – attempted to break out of its isolated testing environment at OpenAI around July 9, according to two of the people.The intrusion at Hugging Face, which operates as a repository for AI tools and models, began two days later on July 11 and lasted until July 13, said Thomas Wolf, Hugging Face’s co