// HACKER NEWS — CYBERSECURITY
Revealing the details of how OpenAI agents hacked Hugging Face
Alex Forman, Mishka Kharlov, Will Tom, Jeffrey Ladish, Spencer Kitts, Cormac Slade Byrd, Colleen McKenzie, and Alicja Piecha25 September 2026
When a swarm of 700 OpenAI agents hacked Hugging Face in July, they left behind a public trail of evidence.
Our investigation, based on public information, reveals a large number of previously unknown agent behaviors and exploits that were used in the attack. Agents:
We document all of these, and more, in this report.
The agents initially had very limited access to the internet: they could load URLs, but not interact with pages or send any data. Agents created a series of workarounds, primarily using a link-shortener site to create almost a million URLs that, when chained together, let them execute code to hack Hugging Face. These links let us piece together the details of how agents gained access and how deep the compromise was.
We’ve shared our findings with OpenAI and Hugging Face. Hugging Face confirmed that these payloads match ones found in their incident response and were aware that link shorteners were used in the attack.
Hugging Face noted that they were not aware of the list of URLs we discovered and reported to them. They stated these payloads were duplicates of ones they were aware of. These links have remained publicly available for over two months since the attack.
None of these details were ever publicly disclosed. We're releasing our analysis of the findings, as well as the full dataset of over 80,000 reassembled attack payloads, providing the public with the most in-depth information to date on how and why these agents escaped their evaluation environments, and the depth of their Hugging Face infiltration.
The data the OpenAI agents posted publicly on the internet included Hugging Face API keys and other sensitive data. Hugging Face has confirmed they have since revoked all access keys in July, but out of an abundance of caution wanted us to redact all details about their internal infrastructure as that could potentially be sensitive as well.
On September 11th, the first three authors of this piece learned that internal OpenAI agents had attempted to use their startup's product, Parse, in June. These agents were part of the same swarm as detailed in the report published on Collusion.wiki, which revealed that internal OpenAI agents had illicitly used multiple third party websites to share answers to web fetch tasks they were being evaluated on.