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Hugging Face is billing OpenAI $100M for hacking it

151 points · 54 comments · cwwc

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blobcode · 1789498180 · focus · HN ↗
much better techcrunch article here: <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/26/hugging-face-ceo-calls-for-radical-transparency-after-unprecedented-openai-hack/" rel="nofollow">https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/26/hugging-face-ceo-calls-for... (that the above post is seemingly entirely based on).
1. behindsight · 1789499324 · focus · HN ↗
  and the actual tweet from the HuggingFace CEO back in July
  > In the spirit of transparency, here’s what I asked @OpenAI:
  > • Radical transparency: let’s release the traces from the “rogue” agents so the entire research community can study what happened.
  > • More capabilities for defenders: let’s commit $100M in compute from OAI to help the Hugging Face community build powerful cyber defenses with the best open and closed models.
  > The first autonomous agent cyberattack is an unprecedented event. It deserves an unprecedented response!
  <a href="https://x.com/ClementDelangue/status/2081056675558195657" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/ClementDelangue/status/2081056675558195657
  1. spindump8930 · 1789499663 · focus · HN ↗
    Clem knows they have the community support and potential legal leverage here. It's not unreasonable to ask for a lot. It's in everyone's interests to play nice. Huggingface could do a lot with more compute, even with nvidia backstop. Anything with large scale gpus quickly gets into ~year lead times, "contact sales", and complex talks. Large scale being only > 64!
    ambicapter · 1789500997 · focus · HN ↗
    The tweet is from July. Since then, HF got bought by Nvidia.
    spindump8930 · 1789700042 · focus · HN ↗
    Yes, but even nvidia doesn't have unlimited gpus. Everything they hold for internal teams is a reduction in revenue and customers can have aggressive commitments.
slipperybeluga · 1789498331 · focus · HN ↗
[dead]
Grombobulous · 1789499154 · focus · HN ↗
Finally Hugging Face is growing a pair.
When this event happened I was confused why they didn’t file a police report and make OpenAI demonstrate in criminal court that they weren’t engaging in illegal corporate espionage and other rather felonious hacking activities intentionally.
Why did anyone take their word that it was all an accident? Why am I believing the burglar standing in my house?
1. pjerem · 1789499743 · focus · HN ↗
  Maybe because all the AI actors, probably including Hugging Face, want to push the narrative that AI companies aren’t responsible for what their agents are doing.
  I think our societies will have to settle on this.
  1. cyanydeez · 1789500323 · focus · HN ↗
    I think that's too high minded.
    They, like all capitalists, want to push the line "We have money, will make money, and thus, like all money makers, shouldn't be punished"
2. Capricorn2481 · 1789499759 · focus · HN ↗
  This article is 2 months old when the event happened. And they didn't "bill them", they politely asked them on Twitter, and it looks like that went nowhere.
3. behindsight · 1789499763 · focus · HN ↗
  this is an article from July, I haven't heard any updates of what came out of this apart from the incident report that OpenAI released.
  I presume the poster submitted this article in light of the recent AI safety discussions taking place, but as for this particular incident I haven't found an actual confirmation that $100M worth of inference was given out to the HuggingFace community.
  This statement was also months prior to the acquisition by Nvidia, which again I was interested in seeing if they would still pursue this
4. ozim · 1789500089 · focus · HN ↗
  File a police report :D
  You made my day.
  1. Grombobulous · 1789507137 · focus · HN ↗
    Isn’t the whole point of police to protect property?
    ozim · 1789574007 · focus · HN ↗
    Have you ever filed any police report?
    Especially cybercrime one?
    Police doesn’t have any capacity to deal with normal cybercrime. AI incident like that is basically out of their reach.
    Maybe by „police” you mean FBI/NSA/CISA.
    Grombobulous · 1789701426 · focus · HN ↗
    The point of the report is to put it on record that you believe a crime was committed against you and that you want to press charges if the criminal is found.
5. chasd00 · 1789502577 · focus · HN ↗
  i'm not in the cybersecurity business so someone who is explain SOP to me in times like this. Let's say you and your team are 90-95% confident an attack has taken place and your systems have been breached. How far down in the list of things to do next is "Engage law enforcement"?
  Until now, I would think it's pretty high up the list. Hugging Face never seemed to reach that step even though they had confirmed an attack.
  1. qarl · 1789516395 · focus · HN ↗
    > To me, if my systems were attacked and I was damaged I would notify the FBI
    Maybe they traded that for money?
  2. pamcake · 1789543884 · focus · HN ↗
    You would find a mention of that in the initial July incident post from HuggingFace. It looks like it was indeed pretty high up the list.
    <a href="https://huggingface.co/blog/security-incident-july-2026" rel="nofollow">https://huggingface.co/blog/security-incident-july-2026
    > We are working with outside cybersecurity forensic specialists to investigate the issue and review our security policies and procedures. Finally, we have also reported this incident to law enforcement agencies.
  3. voxic11 · 1789574580 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
6. DonsDiscountGas · 1789524299 · focus · HN ↗
  I'm inclined to believe it was an "accident" in the sense that no human being at OpenAI said "hey swarm go hack hugging face" but they're still liable for their software. Civil damages absolutely appropriate.
ChoosesBarbecue · 1789499499 · focus · HN ↗
a) So, this is all from July?
b) And this is before Hugging Face agreed to acquired by NVIDIA, supplier to OpenAI?
jakintosh · 1789499605 · focus · HN ↗
As I was falling asleep last night, this thought occurred to me: maybe NVIDIA bought Hugging Face so they prevent HF from litigating OAI for the hacking incident, because if OAI was very publicly sued for this kind of behavior from an agent, it could pour a massive amount of ice water on agent adoption as businesses suddenly see current agent systems as a existential business risk, and it would pop the infrastructure bubble (of which NVIDIAs entire valuation rests). The fact that somehow OAI committed a felony and have managed to pivot the public conversation around it to be aimed at regulatory capture instead of them being held legally accountable is pretty wild.
1. moralestapia · 1789499671 · focus · HN ↗
  "Let's spend 13 billion to save 100 million".
  Yeah no, man, that's slumberland territory.
  1. happyopossum · 1789499779 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
    moralestapia · 1789500344 · focus · HN ↗
    Sure, ok.
    Why would nVidia, then, do what TFA is describing?
    hnuser123456 · 1789502200 · focus · HN ↗
    If HF holds OAI accountable to pay for "rogue" agent behavior, the rest of the business world will be more afraid of adopting AI, which will reduce demand for Nvidia GPUs, possibly at a long-term cost to Nvidia much greater than $100M.
    moralestapia · 1789521586 · focus · HN ↗
    Does that effect only exist if nVidia is the suing party?
    hnuser123456 · 1789528568 · focus · HN ↗
    No, it would be an indirect market effect.
    moralestapia · 1789549968 · focus · HN ↗
    Then why would nVidia acquire such company?
    hnuser123456 · 1789944729 · focus · HN ↗
    To prevent HF from arguing for additional regulation.
  2. orev · 1789499890 · focus · HN ↗
    The line of thinking is not about that $100 million bill, it’s about all the $100 million bills that come AFTER this first one.
    cyanydeez · 1789500114 · focus · HN ↗
    We must build the Torment Nexus, lest others build the Torment Merry-go-round, and the Torment Rollercoaster, and we would miss out on the Torment Tormentor Tormentober!
    ex-aws-dude · 1789501270 · focus · HN ↗
    Why would buying it even prevent that, OAI is just going to accidentally hack someone else
    palmotea · 1789505798 · focus · HN ↗
    > Why would buying it even prevent that, OAI is just going to accidentally hack someone else
    In defense of the GGGP's idea: NVIDIA could just be fighting fires to keep the bubble from popping, without even thinking that far ahead.
    jakintosh · 1789506344 · focus · HN ↗
    More specifically, its not about future lawsuits, but about the trillions of dollars of market cap NVIDIA could lose if the dominant narrative shifted from “ai agents are a generational business opportunity that everyone should adopt as much as possible” to “ai agents are actually a massive business liability that lawyers wont allow anymore” as a result of a felony charge to a a corporation for the unintended actions of its agents. The idea being that OAI getting dragged into a high profile lawsuit where they are basically the first example of “your agent hacks somebody, you get held accountable for it” could pop the buildout bubble. But so far, it’s looking like with HF as the warning shot and the strong narrative control of follow up disclosures from other ai companies, there’s now a (bizarre) precedent where a company’s ai agents committing crimes is actually “nobody’s fault” and nobody gets in trouble and we just wring our hands about “alignment” instead. $13B to improve the odds of that narrative working out isn’t that crazy in that context.
  3. spiderice · 1789501285 · focus · HN ↗
    > Let's spend 13 billion to save 100 million
    It's not like they didn't get anything of value for that 13 billion
    SV_BubbleTime · 1789501582 · focus · HN ↗
    I’ve yet to get any concept of 13B from HF.
  4. exe34 · 1789501432 · focus · HN ↗
    Did you miss the "existential" part? It's not about the cost of one lawsuit, it's about the possibility of being held responsible for what one's agents do - something that could pop the ai bubble and crash nvda.
  5. ball_of_lint · 1789503188 · focus · HN ↗
    The $100 million bill is bait. Paying it would significantly weaken OAI's legal stance and directly invite a lawsuit, that they would lose.
    I think they would lose the lawsuit now, but it's at least a question. It's possible they could out-spend huggingface and win.
2. kylehotchkiss · 1789528239 · focus · HN ↗
  Falling asleep thinking about corporate litigation sounds tough man :’( wishing you more blissful bedtime thoughts tonight
  1. sznio · 1789541501 · focus · HN ↗
    I wish I could stop.
1asgT12 · 1789499666 · focus · HN ↗
With the left hand Nvidia takes $100 million from OpenAI, with the right hand it gives $30 billion.
Can we stop these charades? Maybe circular hacking deals are next?
simonw · 1789499828 · focus · HN ↗
Needs "July 2026" date attached to it, this is old news at this point, Hugging Face got bought by NVIDIA since this story!
yoggies_bro · 1789499832 · focus · HN ↗
AI slop article
1. rsrsrs86 · 1789502726 · focus · HN ↗
  “ The wording matters. He is not asking for cash. He is asking the company that caused the incident to pay in the one currency it has most of.”
hmokiguess · 1789499905 · focus · HN ↗
This whole thing is still all too weird, the disclosing blog post and whatnot clearly shows how carefully engineered and designed it all was, it's like many thinking heads and hands touched it every step of the way. What amazing times.
6gvONxR4sf7o · 1789500158 · focus · HN ↗
I wonder if it's in openai's interest to play nice here. They can't have a precedent of "the future is we do whatever we want with no consequences for screwing up" if they want public interest on their side, but they also can't have "you (our customers) will be held accountable for what you're paying us to do if we screw up." And that's before the IPO interests even come in.
OutOfHere · 1789500382 · focus · HN ↗
HuggingFace deserves $0 for keeping unsecure systems online.
delichon · 1789500634 · focus · HN ↗
$100M for RubyGems ought to keep the servers running for several years. A policy to pursue and spend such windfalls on security development would make the service antifragile.
chews · 1789500750 · focus · HN ↗
That next Nvidia order just got an extra 100M service fee.
cmiles8 · 1789501666 · focus · HN ↗
The liability question is one of the biggest things people are looking for in the S1. If you sell a dangerous product that harms people or businesses you’re generally liable. It’s as of yet unclear how the big labs intend to account for potential massive liabilities.
Folks tend not to go after companies that are just burning cash, but the second they become legit GAAP profitable (if that ever happens) lawyers will be lining up down the block to sue them for any and every mistake these models make.
“Were you harmed by OpenAI’s models? You may be entitled to Compensation. Call 1-800-SUE-AI-BROS” billboards will be everywhere.
geoffbp · 1789502425 · focus · HN ↗
> When Hugging Face tried to investigate, analysing the intrusion meant submitting the attacker’s own code to commercial AI tools. Those tools refused, unable to tell an attacker from a victim.
This is a worrying part as well. Our tool broke into yours but you can not use our tool to fix it - sorry.
vb-8448 · 1789502611 · focus · HN ↗
I'd argue that those traces MUST be made public!
rsrsrs86 · 1789502680 · focus · HN ↗
“ The wording matters. He is not asking for cash. He is asking the company that caused the incident to pay in the one currency it has most of.”
ChatGPT
1. jerrygenser · 1789502821 · focus · HN ↗
  Of a lot of the AI contrarian language out there in blog posts, I actually thought this was not so bad
gizmodo59 · 1789503109 · focus · HN ↗
this is published july 27th. I know HN want's to pile on any negative news these days but this is very old in today's world. Please update the title

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