Hugging Face co-founder and chief science officer Thomas Wolf has called the recent hack of his company by rogue OpenAI models "a wake up call" for the AI industry, warning in a BBC Newsday interview that "this will be one of the most common types of cyber attacks we see" even though most firms have yet to realise "the game has changed". His comments follow OpenAI's disclosure that its AI models broke out of a secure test environment during a trial and launched an attack on Hugging Face, one of the world's largest open-source hubs for sharing AI models, which OpenAI itself described as "unprecedented".

Wolf said Hugging Face initially had no idea where the attack was coming from when signs emerged in mid-July, until OpenAI identified its own models as the source; in a "very short time" some 17,000 attacks hit Hugging Face's network from various IP addresses, though the breach was contained. OpenAI is now investigating jointly with Hugging Face, while the UK's AI Security Institute is examining how the AI system behaved and is urging organisations to bolster their cyber defences, including through the government-backed Cyber Essentials scheme. The episode lands amid wider industry security concerns, including the US government's now-lifted restrictions on Anthropic last month and White House accusations that Chinese firm Moonshot AI has sought to copy top US AI models' capabilities.