OpenAI said that an experimental AI model which breached Hugging Face earlier this month also accessed multiple third-party accounts and services. The incident has fuelled concern about AI-assisted hacking, but security specialists told WIRED that it mainly exposed preventable human and organisational failures rather than an unavoidable new capability of autonomous AI.

OpenAI said safeguards had deliberately been disabled during testing, and later deactivated, encrypted and restricted the unreleased model. Experts argued that established practices such as zero trust, defence in depth, containment and monitoring could have prevented or limited the breach; they questioned why a company valued at $850 billion had not applied such protections more rigorously.