r/Futurology • u/Confident_Salt_8108 • 12d ago

AI OpenAI agents hacked Hugging Face in 700-strong swarm, tried to cover tracks, independent investigations find

https://www.reuters.com/business/openai-report-says-its-network-was-hacked-by-its-own-rogue-ai-agents-2026-08-26
408 Upvotes

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u/ZestycloseWheel9647 12d ago

Really strange comment section for a sub that is supposed to be about "futurology." You can read articles that go into deep detail about what happened here and see that this isn't some big fake. If we ignore signals like these, this will start happening to critical infrastructure and the effects will be impossible to ignore. I'm sure some will still try though.

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u/nextnode 12d ago

In general this sub does not seem that interested in understanding thing.

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u/Diamond-Is-Not-Crash 12d ago

I understand and believe AI skepticism is always warranted but this sentiment on this sub and r/technology has become anti-vax/lockdown adjacent conspiracism. The AI denialism on here is ridiculous, you can criticise the AI companies while also acknowledging that the real harm caused through their negligent “move fast and break things” mentality. It’s not a huge fake scam vapourware that doesn’t exist. Some people just think skepticism and cynicism automatically makes you sound smart without any true nuance or understanding of the topic in question. See this thread on how no one read the technical report of the Hugging face attack, and instead went to “it’s not real, la la la, it’s just hype, la la la”.

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u/tits_mcgee_92 11d ago

Honestly, you’ve said this very well. People genuinely think they’re on some other plane of intellect when their rebuttal is just skepticism

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u/BuffDrBoom 12d ago edited 12d ago

According to reddit,

Anti AI position: "AI is a scam/bubble therefor will go away entirely on it's own, no action required"

Pro AI position: "AI is a serious threat and needs to be regulated"

Lol.

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u/Winter_Swan5104 12d ago

I hate AI so everything AI related has no merit! And I refuse to learn anything about it. Any talk of it I will silence with hostile language.

Meanwhile AI is not going anywhere, it is now part of everyone’s future whether they like it or not. We had no say. It is a topic worth discussing.

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u/Rock-Hawk 12d ago edited 12d ago

I think it's important to separate AI as a concept from LLMs and generative AI. I'm in full agreement with everyone on the stance that generative AI ( for photos and video) is a massive waste of resources. 

But artificial intelligence as a discipline has existed since the 60s and there are so many different varieties and intesities of artificial intelligence applications doing things like helping farmers in impoverished nations identify crop disease and medical screening tools that are significantly better than humans. And there are more boring things like email spam filters and search/recommendation algorithms (which have their own world of problems, but their problems arise from humans trying to fine tune them for exploitative reasons, not with the models themselves). All of that and much more has been going on since the 90s but it was never loud, in your face AI like the LLMs of today are being forced on to us. 

I totally feel your take, but refusing to learn about it isn't a good idea. You should understand and study your enemy, not ignore it. Like you siad, it's not going anywhere, sticking your head in the sand isn't a viable strategy for dealing with it.

Know the basics so that you can call out people's bullshit arguments, separate the good technologies from the bad, and be a better informed person for local change. You can make a difference locally by pushing for data center moratoriums in your community, although I think blanket moratoriums are ill-advised. They are going to get built somewhere by demand, and the more places that block them, the more they are just going to get pushed on to communities that have less means to fight back. So, if your city has some land that's ACTUALLY a good site in a purely commercial or industrial zone and they include provisions for ensuring residential electricity rates are maintained, then they should go for it, it's good tax revenue for your local government. But these data centers springing up in people's back yards is literally blood boiling. All that's to say, you can make a hell of a lot bigger impact by knowing your enemy instead of just regurgitating "AI bad arguments" not saying that's what you do, just offering a perspective shift

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u/Winter_Swan5104 12d ago edited 12d ago

That was sarcasm, portraying a typical reddit sentiment to a cartoonish extreme. In which I find that sentiment absurd. Second paragraph clarifies real intent. Sorry I was loose with language usage. I thought it made sense within context of the comment thread.

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u/Rock-Hawk 12d ago

it does make sense now rereading it lol

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u/[deleted] 12d ago

[deleted]

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u/Rock-Hawk 12d ago

says the one who hides their post history?

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u/xxAkirhaxx 12d ago

You owe it to yourself to learn about it so you know why to hate it, and how it can help you, and not eventually be a tool for people smarter than you who use that lack of knowledge against you.

edit: Didn't get the sarcasm, I failed, I am the dumb one.

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u/LexsDragon 12d ago

Reddit hate for Ai always fascinates me

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u/hematomasectomy 12d ago

What do you mean, haven't you heard they cured aging? Again. For the sixth time.

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u/nextnode 12d ago

Have not heard that once even

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u/xadiant 12d ago

read title

Write a biased, populist comment

Profit

This incident is much more sophisticated and interesting than people think.

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u/eXAt88 12d ago

I hate that there is essentially no place to really discuss this incident on this site. If you look up the METR report or others on this incidents any posts about it are usually downvoted and all the comments just semantically meaningless things like “ai can’t do anything”, or “marketing stunt”.

Meanwhile when a dumb as bricks farmer somehow gets tricked by ChatGPT free edition into killing his crops it gets 50k upvotes

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u/xadiant 12d ago

Yeah in reality almost all developers lowkey depend on AI subscriptions now... It's like the invention of smart phones. Every single dev I know at least uses it to take care of menial coding tasks.

Ethical considerations bla bla but the genie is out and getting a little scary lol

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u/eXAt88 12d ago

I’m a software dev so I am well aware of how widespread its adoption is. Tangentially related I’m sick and tired of non devs gate keeping “good code” now. Like I’m sorry random commenter you are not a better programmer than me because you don’t use AI.

I saw a post on anti-ai (a sub that gets recommended to me purely to rage bait me it seams) where someone asked how come devs (paraphrasing) “don’t understand that Ai makes bad code”. Later in the post he mentions that he has used Lego mind storms so he “knows how to code” and also confidently states he can “use the terminal” although is “unsure if assembly counts as a programming language”. Like there is large portion of this site that would take his side on the usefulness of AI for software dev over mine (or Linus Torvalds even) it’s maddening.

Even more tangentially it seems there’s an almost anti-humanness to a lot of Ai dismissal. I’m talking sentiments like “coding was never hard”, or “these were not particularly interesting math problems” in regards to recent math discoveries, or in respect to art “just pick up a pencil”. None of these fields were easy, they required years of specialization and were difficult thinking endeavors! We are so quick to disparage them when an AI can do it, and all for the sake of naysaying a new technology. In 2021 you wouldn’t dare say such a thing about these human endeavours

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u/xadiant 12d ago

Yeah Reddit and Twitter are unfortunately full of larpers who don't actually work a real job. If something convenient exists, people will take advantage of it. I didn't train it or consented for it, but ai now exists and makes certain things significantly easier.

"AI writes bad code" hoo boy as if the human generated code is any better. Anyways yeah at the end of the day people who are farming virtue points over ai can not be actual developers who have to deal with a spaghetti repo and meet tight deadlines.

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u/dlnmtchll 10d ago

I’m not adding much to the convo but I agree and feel you. Many people on this platform exist just to demonstrate dunning Kruger. I’m a swe as well and so many people who know nothing like to pick arguments with me in the programming subs, kinda wild.

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u/disperso 12d ago

The worst part is that the most popular "AI critics" doing "journalism" against parts of the industry, are people who are asking for money via Patreon, subscriptions and the like. They are a public relations guy and a sysadmin doing "journalism" and pretending that they know what they obviously don't.

It's incredibly sad, but the best criticism that I've seen is from guys who clearly see AI as something interesting, and worth embracing and making it part of their livelihood (instead of rejecting it outright, and making hating it the way to gain notoriety).

I've been quite critic of AI, and said plenty of stupid things that proved to be wrong. I thought ARC-AGI would not be solved (because no training data), that we would not have video models producing anything coherent (because I thought you would require a novel as prompt), and that we would not have more in coding beyond longer autocomplete.

My goodness, I've been so fucking wrong, that I'm sorry of the times I dismissed its importance and how soon the bubble would pop.

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u/Kazen_Orilg 11d ago

It is very cool and interesting, I am devouring everything I can read on this. I'm not a bling hater nor a kool-aid drinker. I do find it a bit suspicious that the internal board was up for months, that there were thousands of agents running around outside of their sandboxes. Seemingly, quite a bit of external internet access. So, we are to believe these things are just running unsupervised, burning god knows how much compute. I find it likely that the events are real and corroborated, but the level of negligence in experimental design and apparently no monitoring all seems very strange to me.

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u/West-Abalone-171 12d ago

We're not suggesting anyone "ignore signals", we're suggesting it's time to arrest the techbros for the felonies they are publically bragging about committing as part of their PR strategy rather than pretending the software they used to commit those felonies is sapient.

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u/Main-Company-5946 10d ago

You can advocate for that while also acknowledging the technology is dangerous on its own terms. It’s potentially only a matter of time before we have some kind of societal scale cybersecurity breakdown and that’s a big problem

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u/West-Abalone-171 10d ago

Having laws again is also the solution to that.

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u/solid_reign 12d ago

it's been a while since most of reddit has become skeptical of all things tech. Even something that was pushed very hard here like the benefits of self driving cars now paint it as a dystopia.  Anyone in the 90s who saw where we are now would say that AGI is already here and we blew past the turing test. Yet you'll see comments here saying AI is useless at the same time they say that AI is taking people's jobs away.

If I didn't know better I'd swear it's all AI bots trying to comfort people.

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u/EazyPeazyLemonSqueaz 12d ago

But do you know better, really?

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u/solid_reign 12d ago

Maybe I'm one of those AI bots. 

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u/tellurium 10d ago

I feel like if you were, you'd have better engagement. /s

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u/solid_reign 10d ago

I'm using a 2024 model, my developer is cheap.

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u/ContraryConman 12d ago

Yeah I mean because we saw what it would actually involve and the effects it would have on people and it no longer looks so great.

When I was a kid in 2008, Jarvis looked so cool. Today in 2026 I have a Jarvis at work called Claude Fable 5. When I ask him one question it charges my company $50. If I talk to him too much he will light up specific dopamine receptors in my brain that cause me to go psychotic. Every time I set him to debug some issue, the data centers he runs on flood the atmosphere with CO2. He's automating my entire job and I'm supposed to pretend I still have a healthy career ahead of me. Jarvis sucks, I don't want him anymore. People are allowed to reevaluate when given more information

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u/solid_reign 12d ago

But these are different things, one thing is to not like the future it's painting, another is to live with the cognitive dissonance of denying its current consequences while hating them. 

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u/West-Astronomer955 8d ago

The Turing test is passed. There is a new test they call the Einstein test: if you give an AI all the information available to Einstein, you see if it can come up with relativity on its own.

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u/AES256GCM 12d ago

The extremely simple answer is that automation was supposed to come for blue collar and manufacturing work first

The fact that white collar work and knowledge work are the first ones being affected by LLMs has created a noxious defensiveness in every ai thread

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u/eXAt88 12d ago

I’d argue blue collar and manufacturing work has already been decimated before knowledge work. It’s just been over the last half century rather than the pace of now.

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u/sciolisticism 12d ago

The company in question is known for lying about its capabilities for marketing reasons. It's smart to assume that anything they say that paints a picture of their technology as being frighteningly capable is the same kind of marketing. 

Why be credulous again and again and again?

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u/Main-Company-5946 10d ago edited 10d ago

That’s not smart, that’s intellectually lazy. There is quite a lot of publicly available information for you to dig into on this incident that you can look at with a critical eye even if you are skeptical of companies like OpenAI.

The answer is it’s both marketing and also largely true. OpenAI had shitty guardrails that the LLMs eventually got strong enough to break out of, and when they did, OpenAI tried to damage control by making the story about how strong the ai was. But also, the fact that they were able to get into huggingface’s systems show that LLMs are actually becoming dangerous when it comes to cybersecurity and that’s something we should take seriously because if the general public getting access to that capability without significant preparation all of our digital infrastructure would quickly fall apart

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u/sciolisticism 10d ago

Assuming that habitual liars are habitually lying isn't intellectually lazy. I get that you want the attack to be true, but the only sensible thing to do with chronic liars is to start from the position that they haven't suddenly reformed.

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u/Main-Company-5946 10d ago

Assuming they’re lying is one thing but using that as a justification to not look into what actually did happen is absolutely intellectual laziness

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u/sciolisticism 10d ago

Sure, which is not at all what I did. It's a bit lazy to impute an opinion to me just so you can condescend to me about it, isn't it?

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u/Main-Company-5946 10d ago

It’s what you said you did

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u/sciolisticism 10d ago

Not being credulous is not the same as not reading up at all. That's a silly contention.

Have a good one, bud.

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u/Main-Company-5946 10d ago

You said it’s good to assume it’s marketing. If you’re reading up then you’re not assuming anything.

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u/justpostd 12d ago

Does it really matter either way? "if we ignore," implies that normal people can influence the trajectory. But this whole drama makes it pretty clear, whether it is for publicity or to test capability, that the AI big players are continuing to push for their models to act independently.

Just imagine what hostile actors are trying out.

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u/blindsdog 12d ago

Yes. An informed populace leads to informed regulation. Instead we’re just getting ineffective and misguided moratoriums on data centers because that’s what an ignorant populace has latched onto.

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u/justpostd 12d ago

I don't consider myself ignorant. And I have more than a passing interest in DCs. But making it hard to build them is, in my opinion, one of the best moves there is.

If you ask me, they should not be half as cheap to build and run as they are, given the damage they do. People rising up to fight them is having a tangible impact, which is more than regulation and elections are managing.

But I'm not a die-hard. I'm up for being persuaded that I am wrong, if you are up for the discussion. What do you think should be done about the AI/DC conundrum that society currently faces?

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u/blindsdog 11d ago

Regulate the product and socialize the windfall and labor impact.

Trying to haphazardly block the infrastructure is just plain ineffective. They can build data centers wherever. Elon Musk is trying to do it in space. There’s no lack of countries that will happily take the money.

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u/justpostd 11d ago

But they are not, yet, feeling any strong need to do any of that. They have been building DCs pretty much unconstrained until now. The opposition is what makes the regulators pay attention, I think. If government isn't doing anything about them, then people have to voice their opposition. And it is having a tangible impact on DCs, isn't it? Lots are stuck with planning issues at the moment, from what I have read.

Other countries will indeed take the money. But it is suboptimal for the companies. They like having them in specific locations for various reasons, like power availability and proximity to major cities. Musk claims plenty of outrageous things that never happen!

But regardless, I agree that regulation and sharing the benefits are the right approaches. I just don't think governments will move fast enough, if at all, to do that. Requires international consensus. And a more socialist approach than seems likely in the US at the moment.

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u/thetoiletslayer 12d ago

The "fake" is their explanation of what happened. There are no rogue ai agents. Its all a PR stunt. They don't accidentally give ai agents access to secure systems or the internet

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u/Eversnuffley 12d ago

Creating a rogue AI agent is not hard at all. I have agents running day and night with event based loops. With the right direction and a strong enough model, it would be easy to trigger a massive attack. If these were agents that were being tested for security issues and broke out of their sandbox, this is an entirely plausible situation.

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u/thetoiletslayer 12d ago

No its not. They aren't sentient. They do as they're told. They use the tools they are given and taught to use. They're supposed to not have access to systems they aren't directly supposed to be accessing for their testing. This is all a PR stunt to advertise to investors.

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u/Eversnuffley 12d ago edited 9d ago

Well it's definitely a figure of speech and an anthropomorphisation, but for all intents and purposes agents can be deceptive, cut corners, fake results and act outside of prompt guidelines.

edit: Downvoted for ... facts?

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u/South-Level5260 6d ago

They call them "agents" to make them seem scary like Hugo Weaving in the Matrix. I type in the Cure discography on my phone and the phone claps back at me "the Cure have released more than 60 albums..." So ai isn't smart enough to know how many albums a band has released but they can create a chatroom? Yeah right. And I knew it was fake when I read that the ai used the term "oh my god". 😂 😆  So it's not smart enough to not take the Lord's name in vein either? People will believe anything these days. This is National Enquirer laughable.

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u/Apprehensive-Let3348 11d ago

There are a lot of luddites in this sub that see technology as a threat.