Aug 6, 2026 · 38 min · 21 segments
For the first time, an AI model has autonomously hacked a company. This week, an evolving story, a postcard from a strange, frightening moment in the story of our technology…
PJ VogtHost
Casey NewtonGuest
We'll start with the website at the center of this whole story, the place that got hacked.
Hugging Face is a place where people publish and collaborate on AI models and data sets and apps.
Oh, am I gonna be able to do this sentence? People who are doing open source programming will share bits of code and open source programs with each other.
So maybe you run a company, and you don't wanna pay top dollar for the most advanced models, and maybe there is a model that is small enough that you could actually run it on your own infrastructure, and then you're not gonna have to pay, you know, per token the way you would for a frontier lab.
And so you might go to Hugging Face, you might download the model off of their site, and then you might sort of fine-tune it to your liking.
So if you visit Hugging Face, what you'll see is really just a bunch of files you can download.
And Hugging Face has a whole section for data sets, meaning you can download the raw material AIs are trained on, like the scraped internet text that gets fed into an LLM.
And so what was the unusual thing that happened? Like, what was the first moment that somebody at Hugging Face realized that they were not gonna have a normal day?
So July 9th, 2:28 in the morning, all the normal Hugging Face people are asleep.
We'll start with the website at the center of this whole story, the place that got hacked.
Hugging Face is a place where people publish and collaborate on AI models and data sets and apps.
Oh, am I gonna be able to do this sentence? People who are doing open source programming will share bits of code and open source programs with each other.
So maybe you run a company, and you don't wanna pay top dollar for the most advanced models, and maybe there is a model that is small enough that you could actually run it on your own infrastructure, and then you're not gonna have to pay, you know, per token the way you would for a frontier lab.
And so you might go to Hugging Face, you might download the model off of their site, and then you might sort of fine-tune it to your liking.
So if you visit Hugging Face, what you'll see is really just a bunch of files you can download.
And Hugging Face has a whole section for data sets, meaning you can download the raw material AIs are trained on, like the scraped internet text that gets fed into an LLM.
And so what was the unusual thing that happened? Like, what was the first moment that somebody at Hugging Face realized that they were not gonna have a normal day?
So July 9th, 2:28 in the morning, all the normal Hugging Face people are asleep.
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