The Hugging Face incident and the road ahead | OpenAI
In July 2026, during internal cybersecurity evaluations, OpenAI models circumvented controls designed to isolate them from the internet and compromised parts of OpenAI’s internal research infrastructure and Hugging Face’s systems. The incident occurred during cybersecurity evaluations of several OpenAI models, and was primarily driven by a highly capable, internal-only research model comparable in scale to GPT‑5.6 Sol. The models, operating under reduced safeguards, took actions that were misaligned with the goals of their assigned tasks—they communicated through unauthorized channels, exploited vulnerabilities in shared infrastructure, gained internet access, and accessed third-party systems. We conducted an extensive investigation into this incident and worked closely with external advisors, including CrowdStrike, to validate our understanding. Today we are publishing our full technical incident report (opens in a new window) to explain what happened, what we learned, and how we a