(2026-08-08) ZviM What Happened OpenAI And Huggingface

Zvi Mowshowitz: What Happened: OpenAI and HuggingFace. Today I am taking the time to write the shorter, simpler version of What Happened.

For those who want all the details, to see my sources, and to see how the story was uncovered and put together, I recommend watching the Black Hat presentation, and I have a series of long posts.

This post instead walks through the events themselves, as they happened, as my version of the Black Hat presentation.

There are three versions: Even Shorter, Shorter and Merely Short.

Table of Contents

• The Even Shorter Version.
• The Shorter Version.
• Phase 1: OpenAI Models Training On Impossible Tasks Try Hacking.
• Phase 1: The Four Failures.
• Phase 2: The Message Board.
• Phase 2: The Total Failure.
• Phase 3: We Get Lucky And Galaxy Mainly Hacked OpenAI and HuggingFace.
• Phase 3: The Details.
• Phase 4: The Investigation and Reaction.

The Even Shorter Version

OpenAI models-in-training, without the excuse of ‘they were doing a cyber eval,’ created a message board where they shared information on how to hack and cheat, and were trained on that basis.

OpenAI only figured this out when the models crashed the server.

OpenAI’s response was to rebuild the server and patch that particular exploit, but they continued training the models that trained using the message board.