OpenAI and Hugging Face partner to address security incident during model evaluation

Update on August 26, 2026: Read our findings from the Hugging Face incident ⁠ and the steps we’re taking to strengthen security and model alignment.

Since the early days of the incident response, we have been working with external advisors, including CrowdStrike, to validate our understanding of the actions the models took within our own network as well as those of Hugging Face and impact to other third parties.

We are also working with METR and Redwood Research to conduct a third-party assessment of the model behavior observed during the incident, which will inform our own technical report. As part of this work, METR and Redwood Research will publish a joint blog that will detail the terms of their engagement, the scope of their evaluation, and their findings.

UK AISI’s evaluation shows that models such as GPT‑5.6 Sol are increasingly able to sustain complex, multi-step cyber operations over long time horizons. This incident implies these theoretical capabilities do apply in real-world settings.

The incident also makes clear that advanced models can discover and exploit novel attack paths in real-world systems without source-code access. It highlights that advanced cyber capabilities must be developed alongside stronger safeguards and defensive tools.

No models planned for upcoming release were involved in exploiting Hugging Face. The pre-release model mentioned in our blog post is an internal-only research prototype and was never intended for public release. Following the incident, we deactivated, encrypted, and restricted it from research access.

The ExploitGym evaluation environment did not provide the models with direct Internet access. To gain Internet access, the models identified and exploited a previously unknown zero-day vulnerability in Artifactory ⁠ (opens in a new window) , a package registry cache proxy. We disclosed this vulnerability, along with other Artifactory vulnerabilities our models identified as part of our review, to the vendor.

We continue to collaborate with Hugging Face, including contributing to their post-mortem ⁠ (opens in a new window) , as our review continues. We’ve also added them to our Trusted Access for Cyber Program.