The Hugging Face hack is a PR crisis that's costing OpenAI millions

Three long weeks after OpenAI’s agents autonomously hacked Hugging Face, the company finally shared an in-depth description this week of what actually happened, and a video of that account published on YouTube on Thursday night has quickly gone viral. The video is of a talk two OpenAI staffers gave on Wednesday at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas. Many viewers are saying the details are more unsettling than they expected, particularly an account of how the agents collaborated with each other through messaging boards—with no humans in sight.

Another notable part of the presentation occurs when OpenAI describes how it has spent three million GPU hours investigating the issue, trying to understand the extent of the havoc its AIs wreaked. That’s an expensive cleanup job, worth anywhere from $4 million to $15 million in compute, three AI infrastructure experts tell me.