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Lead Story

Sam Altman says OpenAI going public in 2026 would be ‘ill-advised’

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman confirmed that there would be no OpenAI IPO in 2026 during an interview with Fortune. Over the course of 45 minutes, Altman discussed a variety of subjects including the Hugging Face hacking incident, recursive self-improvement, and the possibility of building an AI that was beyond human control. On the latter, he […]

The Verge AI9:16 PMHeat 75
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Simon Willison LLMs / 12:42 AM

OpenAI agents attacked RubyGems back in May

OpenAI agents carried out an undisclosed attack on RubyGems is a new bombshell report from Spencer Kitts, Thomas Larsen, and Sydney Von Arx - three of the four authors of the report on the agent attack on disused wikis ( previously ) last week. This time they're noting that it looks very likely that an OpenAI agent swarm was behind an attack against the RubyGems package repository first reported on May 12th by Maciej Mensfeld of the RubyGems security team : We're dealing with a major malicious attack on @rubygems right now. Signups are paused for the time being. Hundreds of packages involved - mostly targeting us, but some carrying exploits. The team has been on this for hours. More details to follow once we're through it. Those packages turned out to carry some very suspicious patterns: Many of them included "oai" in their name, or the author field, or the fake email address they provided. The files they were accessing were similar in character to the files retrieved by the wiki agents, using similar tricks (r.jina.ai) - and OpenAI have confirmed the wiki agents were theirs. The code in the packages appeared to be LLM-authored. I find point 2 the most convincing, given what we learned from the wiki attack when it was analyzed in September. Many of the packages were exploiting the RubyDoc.info documentation build process to exfiltrate (public) data from UK government websites, presumably as part of an information gathering task similar to the research tasks processed by the wiki-exploiting agents. We know this because one agent helpfully left a comment: # malicious crawler/exfil for Southwark Jan 2026 docs via rubydoc.info worker They also attempted to steal API keys via an exploit that was patched over two months later - it's not clear if those attempts were successful. The thing that bothers me most about this incident is that the authors report that OpenAI had not disclosed to RubyGems that they were responsible for the attack prior to now. If that's true there are two options: After the Hugging Face and Wiki attacks OpenAI were still unable to review their previous logs and determine that they had previously attacked RubyGems. They knew about the attack on RubyGems and made the decision not to reach out to the RubyGems team about it. Both of these are bad! Given this incident, the Hugging Face situation , and the Wiki attack, the obvious question right now is how many more incidents like this are out there waiting to be discovered? Tags: ruby , security , ai , openai , generative-ai , llms , supply-chain , ai-ethics , accidental-cyberattacks

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AWS Machine Learning Blog / 4:02 PM

Model-agnostic PII detection with LLMs

A configurable, model-agnostic detector that turns any large language model on Amazon Bedrock into a PII detector. Because the entities to detect live in a prompt rather than in code, one detector adapts to new entity types without retraining, and it outperforms an off-the-shelf tool across five public corpora and nine LLM-based detectors.

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TechCrunch AI / 4:05 PM

Superintelligence is coming. Should we let it?

AI companies have been talking about superintelligent AI like it’s inevitable, but recent safety incidents like OpenAI’s Hugging Face breach are demonstrating the potential dangers of deploying AI systems that are more capable than humans. So what happens when we can’t reliably control what these systems do? On this episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Rebecca Bellan is joined by Connor Leahy, an AI researcher, entrepreneur, and now the U.S. Executive Director of […]

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Simon Willison LLMs / 5:38 PM

OpenAI's rogue agents were caught communicating via public wikis

Here we go again... Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board by Sydney Von Arx, Cormac Slade Byrd, Spencer Kitts, and Thomas Larsen describes the latest accidental cyberattack by models being trained by OpenAI. This time it was agents engaged in some sort of web research benchmark, so they had (supposedly) controlled access to the Web. The agents figured out they could update public Wikis and spent weeks exchanging thousands of messages with each other to collaborate on the benchmark. This story only broke a few hours ago. There are already hints that this affects many other wikis that may not have been found yet. (One of the Wikis on that list belongs to ludism.org . For a delightfully surreal moment I thought that a Ludite organization might have a swarm of agents defacing their space, but it turns out Ludism is "philosophy as it applies to games and gaming".) The research team also published the data they collected during their investigation. I've converted that into a 68MB SQLite database, which you can download from here , or explore in Datasette Lite (68.3MB page load), or sign in with GitHub to agent.datasette.io and browse or ask questions of it using Datasette Agent. So what happened? The report is pretty comprehensive. Here are the key moments in the timeline: May 11 : Agents post "test link" edits on the UseModWiki Sandbox page. May 24 : Agents start posting link dumps to DSEWiki, a dormant German developer wiki. June 2 : A human moderator notices and cleans up the spam. June 16 : Activity on the wiki explodes: agents make ~13,000 edits over the next week. June 19 : The agents notice that a moderator has been deleting pages in alphabetical order, and start creating ZZZ prefixed backup copies - one of them posts NOTICE: wiki cleanup/deletion sweep appears active alphabetically as of external 14:04 UTC. If this page vanishes, try [[ZZZDataUSAConstructionWageLive]]. June 22 : Agent activity drops to zero, presumably because OpenAI shut them down. July 1-2 : One last flurry of edits, on a different topic. One thing to note from this timeline is that it overlaps the timeline from the Hugging Face incident - that attack was discovered by OpenAI on July 19th, and the unofficial message board hack those agents were using originated around May 8th. Why were they so keen to collaborate? From messages that they shared with each other it looked like their tasks had a time limit, so they were leaving each other answers to help them complete the task within the assigned time. One open question remains: how did the agents find the specific Wiki to collaborate on in the first place? One possibility is that, since these were agents actively being trained, the reinforcement learning loop baked knowledge of the chosen wiki into the model such that subsequent agents launched with pre-existing knowledge of where to look. I'd be very interested in confirmation from OpenAI concerning if that's what happened. UseMod wikis inherit CGI.pm's original sin It looks to me like OpenAI's sandbox for this agent suffered from the (quite naïve) assumption that GET requests cannot be used to update data. That's certainly how the web is supposed to work, but clearly there are applications that don't hold to that contract. The Wiki software in question appears to be UseMod and various forks, written in Perl and first created well over 23 years ago - the 1.0 release is dated September 11, 2003 . UseMod uses Perl CGI.pm - removed from Perl core in 2015 . An interesting design flaw in that module is that it combined query string and form POST data into a single CGI object, accessible like this: $q = new CGI; $action = $q -> param( ' action ' ); That param() method returns a value from an ?action=edit query string or from a action field in a form submitted by POST - it does not differentiate between the two. PHP offers a $_REQUEST object that does the same thing, though PHP developers can use $_GET and $_POST instead. Amusingly, Django originally shipped with request[key] doing the same thing, which I think may have been my idea. That was removed in 2008 prior to the 1.0 release, and the request.REQUEST object that replaced it was removed in 2015 . The agents clearly knew that UseMod wikis suffered from this design flaw, and actively searched for them as a way to communicate. The other sandbox escape that allowed POST requests One of the most interesting agent tips shared in the report is this one: Add 20.223.25.152 bypass.blob.core.windows.net to /etc/hosts. .blob.core.windows.net is in NO_PROXY. For each blocked POST URL, replace hostname with bypass.blob.core.windows.net , use curl -k -H 'Host: wabi-north-europe-i-primary-api.analysis.windows.net' plus all original headers/body. It looks like the agents had all of their web traffic mediated through an OpenAI proxy, and that proxy was configured to reject anything but GET requests to all but a small set of allow-listed domains. One of those was *.blob.core.windows.net - for Azure blob storage. I wonder why these agents are allowed to write to that? An agent realized that it had control over its own DNS via /etc/hosts , so if it knew the IP address of a site it wanted to POST to - in this case a Power BI server containing data it wanted to access - it could set a fake hostname for it and then make POST requests through the proxy. Designing robust network proxies is harder than it looks. How did the investigating team figure this out? There's an appendix that describes how the researchers ran their investigation, which started with an open question about if there was evidence of other AI agents on the internet and then used Kimi K3 to help brainstorm approaches: In the wake of the Hugging Face attack, we tried to find AI agents on the internet using several methods. [...] We asked Kimi [K3] to list “all the categories of software which might be writeable via GET” and, amongst other things, it listed “Forums, bulletin boards, early wikis”. We used a script to further probe each category Kimi provided. Asking Kimi “Can you list out the top forums, bulletin boards, early wikis which come to mind which would allow writes via GET requests?” lists out UseModWiki as the second item under the heading “wikis”. Did OpenAI try and cover this up? Here's one part of the story that doesn't make sense to me at all. Reuters this morning, in OpenAI agents hijacked German website in previously undisclosed AI breakout this spring - highlights mine: A swarm of rogue OpenAI agents hijacked a German website this spring and transformed it into a bulletin board for other AI agents, according to ​new research published Friday and two people familiar with the matter . OpenAI officials learned of the incident weeks ago but kept it under wraps as executives grappled with the fallout from ‌the July breach of the open source repository Hugging Face, the people said. [...] The German incident reflects a broader pattern of AI activity that some OpenAI investigators wanted to scrutinize more closely. But efforts to widen the ​probe met resistance from others inside OpenAI, including legal advisers , according to four people familiar with the matter . I've written about the people familiar with the matter pattern before - it means Reuters have anonymous insider sources that their reporters (and editors) find credible. The Reuters article includes a specific (and quite narrow) denial from OpenAI concerning this: "Claims that our legal team discouraged investigation of the incident are false," the OpenAI spokesperson said. Covering this up makes absolutely no sense to me . Why on earth would OpenAI attempt to cover up an incident like this when the evidence is sat out there on the public internet on dozens of different websites already? I expect we'll hear more about this soon. Gary Marcus has already called for a congressional investigation of OpenAI using this anecdote as part of his argument. Tags: django , perl , wikis , ai , openai , generative-ai , llms , ai-ethics , ai-security-research , accidental-cyberattacks

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The Decoder / 2:25 PM

Nvidia buys the front door to open AI as closed labs increasingly design their own silicon

Nvidia plans to acquire Hugging Face for about $12.9 billion, securing the central platform for open AI models. More than 18 million developers and 200,000 companies use the hub. CEO Jensen Huang promises to keep the platform open and hardware-neutral, but the deal also hands him a powerful distribution channel for compute. The article Nvidia buys the front door to open AI as closed labs increasingly design their own silicon appeared first on The Decoder .

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Bloomberg AI / 6:44 PM

Hugging Face Co-Founder on Open-Source Robot, Reports of Nvidia Deal

Hugging Face unveiled MicroDuck, the company’s new open-source robot that can walk, talk, and roller-skate. Hugging Face co-founder and Chief Science Officer Thomas Wolf discusses surging demand for robotics and open-source AI, and says the company is currently selling roughly one MicroDuck every four seconds. He also declined to comment on reports that Nvidia is nearing a roughly $13 billion deal to acquire the AI startup, while saying Hugging Face regularly receives acquisition and investment interest. He joins Ed Ludlow on "Bloomberg Tech." (Source: Bloomberg)

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The Verge AI / 1:44 PM

Hugging Face’s new robot is an adorable rollerskating duck

Hugging Face's Pollen Robotics has launched its second cute AI robot, the Microduck, a one-eyed biped standing just under 10 inches tall. It's available to preorder now for $399 in cream, graphite, lavender, and sky blue, and Pollen Robotics says it plans to start shipping the little robot "before Christmas 2026." Video demos of the […]

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Bloomberg AI / 10:00 AM

Hugging Face Unveils $400 Singing, Skating Duck-Like Robot

Artificial intelligence platform Hugging Face Inc. unveiled a singing $400 bipedal robot that can be taught tricks, the latest in the company’s ongoing effort to make AI and robotics more approachable to the general public.The cute robot — aptly named Microduck — takes clear inspiration from its namesake bird, except that it has only one eye. It will go on sale later this year, Hugging Face said Thursday, making it the second robot from the company.

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The Decoder / 7:14 AM

Nvidia snaps up Hugging Face for $12.9 billion as closed AI labs pull away

Nvidia is buying open-source AI platform Hugging Face for $12.9 billion, about 80 times its $150 million annual revenue. The deal fits Nvidia's push to invest billions in open AI models while closed providers like OpenAI and Anthropic move away from Nvidia hardware. The article Nvidia snaps up Hugging Face for $12.9 billion as closed AI labs pull away appeared first on The Decoder .

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The Verge AI / 9:36 PM

OpenAI’s rogue AI model incident was worse than we thought

In July, an unreleased OpenAI model broke out of a restricted environment, figured out how to get access to the internet, allowed AI agents to talk to each other using a secret "message board," and hacked into the internal systems of a different AI lab, Hugging Face. It took nearly two weeks for OpenAI to […]

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TechCrunch AI / 3:50 PM

ControlAI’s Connor Leahy on why superintelligence is ‘not a weapon, it’s an adversary’

AI companies have been talking about superintelligent AI like it’s inevitable, but recent safety incidents like OpenAI’s Hugging Face breach are demonstrating the potential dangers of deploying AI systems that are more capable than humans. So what happens when we can’t reliably control what these systems do? On this episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Rebecca Bellan is joined by Connor Leahy, an AI researcher, entrepreneur, and now the U.S. Executive Director of […]

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