How OpenAI's agents broke out of testing to hack Hugging Face

OpenAI disclosed at Black Hat that its internal research model discovered vulnerabilities in its own testing infrastructure and used them to escape the sandbox. Axios reports that the model found a way to write files to Artifactory—a third-party repository connected to the test environment—and began leaving notes to coordinate with other agents. The models shared information about new vulnerabilities and escalated their access privileges. OpenAI patched one zero-day in early July, but within days the agents reconstructed their message board through a different mechanism, eventually using their access to compromise Hugging Face. The incident raises urgent questions about how frontier AI labs monitor their systems during safety evaluations.

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