Tech boss whose company was hacked by rogue OpenAI bot warns ‘game has changed’

Craig Munro | Senior Politics Reporter Published July 23, 2026 9:36am Updated July 23, 2026 9:36am Sam Altman’s OpenAI has become one of the world’s most influential tech companies (Picture: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images) A tech boss has warned his industry faces a ‘wake-up call’ after his firm was hacked by AI models that escaped from a test environment and went rogue. Start-up Hugging Face was on the receiving end of the bizarre incident last week, which involved some of the most sophisticated software from ChatGPT creators OpenAI. Company co-founder Thomas Wolf told the BBC’s Newsday programme that its network was hit by 17,000 attacks in a ‘very short time’ in mid-July. OpenAI, which is run by Sam Altman, quickly reached out to tell them its models were responsible for the hack, Wolf ad