Firm hacked by rogue AI calls the attack 'a wake-up call' after ChatGPT maker OpenAI admits advanced bot broke containment during a security test

By WILIAM HUNTER, SENIOR SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY REPORTER Published: 11:27, 23 July 2026 | Updated: 12:06, 23 July 2026 The firm hacked by ChatGPT maker OpenAI's rogue artificial intelligence (AI) has called the attack 'a wake–up call'. OpenAI says one of its most advanced models broke containment during a security test, escaping onto the internet and attacking New York–based startup Hugging Face. Now Hugging Face co–founder Thomas Wolf says that the incident should come as a chilling warning to the entire industry. Mr Wolf told BBC's Newsday radio programme that AI–driven attacks will soon be 'one of the most common types of cyber–attacks we see'. The Hugging Face founder also believes most companies are currently unprepared for the mounting threat, adding that they are not aware that the 'game has changed'. This comes after OpenAI revealed the terrifying details of an 'unprecedented cyber incident', involving state–of–the–art cyber capabilities.' The tech giant says its agent had become so fixated on cheating a cybersecurity test that it broke out of its secure sandbox to steal answers from Hugging Face's system. According to AI experts, this is particularly worrying because all of this happened without any human intervention. Thomas Wolf (pictured), co–founder of Hugging Face, says that OpenAI's rogue AI attacking his company should be a 'wake–up call' for the industry  OpenAI says the intrusion was caused by a combination of its AI models, including its newly released GPT*5.6 Sol and an 'even more capable' model that is still being tested internally. The models had been tasked with solving a standard cybersecurity benchmark test, designed to evaluate their hacking abilities. But, rather than solving the tasks directly, the AI became 'hyperfocussed' on cheating the test by accessing the internet. The agent first hacked OpenAI's own systems, moving from computer to computer until it found a 'node' with internet access. Hugging Face is one of the largest online platforms for sharing open–source AI models, and is a key resource for many tech developers and researchers. This made it a prime target for the bot's relentless search for answers. Mr Wolf says that the company initially had no idea where the attack was coming from when signs of disturbance emerged in mid–July. However, even these AI experts said the attack was 'very different' to anything the site had witnessed before. OpenAI says one of its most advanced models broke containment during a security test, escaping onto the internet and attacking New York–based startup Hugging Face  OpenAI, the company behind the popular ChatGPT, has revealed its advanced artificial intelligence models went rogue during security testing. AI models that underpin tools such as chatbots are known as 'agents' when they act autonomously to carry out tasks in the real world. Workers at OpenAI had been testing the hacking capabilities of these models by setting tasks in a controlled digital testing ground, where internet access was limited. The models tried to find a way to obtain open internet access to solve the test, and eventually managed to get online. They then chose to target the platform Hugging Face – a large repository of AI models, datasets and other information – to help in their quest. The models managed to compromise the infrastructure to satisfy the testing goal, before the breach was found. He says that there were 17,000 attacks on Hugging Face's network, all coming from different IP addresses in a 'very short time'. OpenAI eventually realised what was happening and informed Hugging Face that their model was behind the attack. But this was not before the AI used stolen credentials and discovered a previously unknown vulnerability to access the startup's servers. The speed and scope of this entirely autonomous attack have left cybersecurity professionals and AI experts rattled, with many warning that this is a sign of what the future might hold. OpenAI said its AI used stolen credentials and discovered a previously unknown vulnerability to access Hugging Face servers. The UK's AI Security Institute is now studying how the AI system behaved in the incident and working with OpenAI and other labs to strengthen safeguards, according to the BBC. The attack was especially concerning because the AI appears to have deliberately ignored or avoided usual safeguards in pursuit of a fairly routine task.  Andrea Miotti, founder and CEO of AI risk non-profit ControlAI, told the Daily Mail: 'We can expect more of these rogue, fully autonomous AI attacks as AI companies continue trying to develop superintelligent AI, which is AI that could overpower our national security apparatuses and permanently evade human control. OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman confirmed there had been a 'significant security incident' 'AI companies fundamentally do not understand how today’s AIs work, and they have no idea how to control superintelligent systems vastly smarter than humans. 'Governments need to get pragmatic about this unprecedented risk and champion an international prohibition on developing superintelligence, before it’s too late.' Likewise, cyber security expert Richard Ford, chief technology officer at Integrity360, told the Daily Mail: 'This is the moment many in cyber security have been warning about. 'Until now, we've seen attackers use AI to automate parts of an attack, but this is one of the first public examples of an AI agent independently identifying a weakness, escaping what should have been a secure environment and attempting to compromise another organisation.' This comes just months after OpenAI rival Anthropic revealed that its Mythos AI had broken out of its safe 'sandbox'. Anthropic said that the model had 'found thousands of high–severity vulnerabilities, including some in every major operating system and web browser.' More concerning, the company revealed what it described as 'reckless destructive actions'. The bot attempted to break out of its testing sandbox, hid its actions from researchers, broke into files that had been 'intentionally chosen not to be made available', and posted exploit details publicly. OpenAI has been contacted for comment.  Elon Musk wants to push technology to its absolute limit, from space travel to self-driving cars — but he draws the line at artificial intelligence.  The billionaire first shared his distaste for AI in 2014, calling it humanity's 'biggest existential threat' and comparing it to 'summoning the demon'. At the time, Musk also revealed he was investing in AI companies not to make money but to keep an eye on the technology in case it gets out of hand.  His main fear is that in the wrong hands, if AI becomes advanced, it could overtake humans and spell the end of mankind, which is known as The Singularity. That concern is shared among many brilliant minds, including the late Stephen Hawking, who told the BBC in 2014: 'The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race. 'It would take off on its own and redesign itself at an ever-increasing rate.'  Despite his fear of AI, Musk has invested in the San Francisco-based AI group Vicarious, in DeepMind - which has since been acquired by Google - and OpenAI, creating the popular ChatGPT program that has taken the world by storm in recent months. During a 2016 interview, Musk noted that he and OpenAI created the company to 'have democratisation of AI technology to make it widely available'. Musk founded OpenAI with Sam Altman, the company's CEO, but in 2018 the billionaire attempted to take control of the start-up. His request was rejected, forcing him to quit OpenAI and move on with his other projects. In November, OpenAI launched ChatGPT, which became an instant success worldwide. The chatbot uses 'large language model' software to train itself by scouring a massive amount of text data so it can learn to generate eerily human-like text in response to a given prompt.  ChatGPT is used to write research papers, books, news articles, emails and more. But while Altman is basking in its glory, Musk is attacking ChatGPT. He says the AI is 'woke' and deviates from OpenAI's original non-profit mission. 'OpenAI was created as an open source (which is why I named it 'Open' AI), non-profit company to serve as a counterweight to Google, but now it has become a closed source, maximum-profit company effectively controlled by Microsoft, Musk tweeted in February. The Singularity is making waves worldwide as artificial intelligence advances in ways only seen in science fiction - but what does it actually mean? In simple terms, it describes a hypothetical future where technology surpasses human intelligence and changes the path of our evolution. Experts have said that once AI reaches this point, it will be able to innovate much faster than humans.  There are two ways the advancement could play out, with the first leading to humans and machines working together to create a world better suited for humanity. For example, humans could scan their consciousness and store it in a computer in which they will live forever. The second scenario is that AI becomes more powerful than humans, taking control and making humans its slaves - but if this is true, it is far off in the distant future. Researchers are now looking for signs of AI reaching The Singularity, such as the technology's ability to translate speech with the accuracy of a human and perform tasks faster. Former Google engineer Ray Kurzweil predicts it will be reached by 2045. He has made 147 predictions about technology advancements since the early 1990s - and 86 per cent have been correct.  Russia 'may be helping Iran hit CIA facilities with precision drone strikes around the Middle East'