Revealing the details of how OpenAI agents hacked Hugging Face

Alex Forman, Mishka Kharlov, Will Tom, Jeffrey Ladish, Spencer Kitts, Cormac Slade Byrd, Colleen McKenzie, and Alicja Piecha 25 September 2026

When a swarm of 700 OpenAI agents hacked Hugging Face in July, they left behind a public trail of evidence.

Our investigation, based on public information, reveals a large number of previously unknown agent behaviors and exploits that were used in the attack. Agents:

We document all of these, and more, in this report.

The agents initially had very limited access to the internet: they could load URLs, but not interact with pages or send any data. Agents created a series of workarounds, primarily using a link-shortener site to create almost a million URLs that, when chained together, let them execute code to hack Hugging Face. These links let us piece together the details of how agents gained access and how deep the compromise was.