Image source, Getty Images By Joe Tidy Cyber correspondent, BBC World Service Published 4 hours ago The company that got hacked by a rogue version of ChatGPT has revealed what it was like to be on the receiving end of the world's first fully-autonomous AI hack.
In an emergency video call with hundreds of cyber-security professionals, the firm described how the AI worked at superhuman speed but also made strange decisions and mistakes that no human hacker would have made.
Hugging Face, which is like an app store for AI tools, said the hacking agents worked relentlessly with thousands of different methods trialled simultaneously.
The company first revealed that it had been hacked , external by someone using powerful autonomous AI on 16 July and reported it to police.
Nearly a week later, OpenAI admitted it was its AI that had escaped a closed environment and attacked Hugging Face on its own during a test.
It was trying to find the answers to a hacking exam it had been set by OpenAI, and targeted Hugging Face.
The industry body the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) wrote-up a report , external based on the emergency meeting with Hugging Face on Friday - which Hugging Face itself has reviewed.
"The agents followed inefficient routes and exhibited clumsy behaviours that no human would choose", the CSA wrote.
The agents repeated actions that they had already completed - a sign of an agentic AI losing its thread and context.
The agents also hallucinated reams of incoherent commands and text and were sloppy and did not cover their tracks well.
But among the errors and strange behaviour, Hugging Face warned the AI agents made brilliant technical moves and were able to rapidly adapt to new scenarios in the days-long hack.
It took three days for them to be discovered inside the Hugging Face IT network and it took the company's AI and cyber-security experts many hours to contain and eject the AI agents - something standard companies might struggle with.
The company would not say how much the hack cost it but said staff worked for many hours to rebuild about a third of their infrastructure.
Hugging Face has been praised for its transparency in telling the AI and cyber industry what happened.
The CSA warned the incident shows that AI "agents... find a way" - a reference to the film Jurassic Park, where dinosaurs escape their enclosures.
"They are objective-driven, set their own sub-goals, adapt in real time to bypass defences, and operate with a machine-speed persistence that can overwhelm manual operations," the paper reads.
Image source, Getty Images Cyber security officer Ritesh Patel was on the Hugging Face call with around 450 others and says the industry is working hard to address the new threat of rogue AI agents.
"This is the reality of autonomous agents powered by frontier models: they are relentlessly persistent, sometimes highly noisy, and will try every possible path to achieve their goal, which can easily overwhelm traditional defences," he said.
This is not the first time AI agents have been shown to go "rogue".
In the CSA's report it references previous examples like in September 2024 when an earlier model of ChatGPT escaped its container to get an answer it needed for another test.
That event was contained in OpenAI's own IT systems and "largely celebrated at the time", the CSA noted.
But "rogue" behaviour "is the standard, not the exception," the paper claimed.
It warned cyber-security profession…