Warning shot or publicity stunt - how worried should we be about the OpenAI hack?

Image source, Getty ImagesByJoe TidyCyber correspondent, BBC World ServicePublished25 July 2026This week the tech world was gripped by a story that has it all - and which started like a sci-fi thriller.

Hugging Face - a kind of app store for artificial intelligence tools - announced on 16 July it had been hacked by a cyber criminal wielding enormously powerful AI.

The bombshell announcement was full of scary, highly technical terms: "a swarm of sandboxes", "agentic attacker", and "self-migrating command and control".

Hugging Face said the hack was different from anything it had handled before because it was done at superhuman speed by an AI with little or no human guidance.

The AI performed 17,000 actions in less than two days, successfully breaching the large wealthy tech company to steal secrets.

Hugging Face researchers guessed the mysterious attackers had used one of the big AI models but they had no idea who or where the criminals were.

Commentators and analysts took to their podcasts and social media accounts to guess which cyber crime group or nation state hacker might be behind it.

Then on Wednesday, nearly a week after Hugging Face raised the alarm, the true culprit was unmasked.

The Scooby-Doo-style reveal was made even more bizarre - and worrying - because OpenAI said its bot did the whole thing on its own, without permission.

Two new versions of ChatGPT, designed to be master hackers, broke out of a supposedly secure test environment and gained access to the internet.

They then attacked Hugging Face to get access to the information to help them ace their exam.

OpenAI issued a press release explaining what had happened and said it was "partnering with Hugging Face" to address the security incident and share lessons learned.