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In July 700+ agents formed their own society, hacked a multi-billion dollar company, committed multiple felonies, and caused one of the biggest shifts ever in how people perceive AI. We built the IMO best and most accessible explainer of what happened: Huggingface.wtf

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3:08 PM · Oct 19, 2026

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I think

did a great job of both giving a high-level overview, while also making it possible to dive into the raw data of exactly what we know happened. Extra thanks to all the people in AI safety and AI security who gave us feedback on Huggingface.wtf.

The Hugging Face Incident

[Answer to a question I had while reading] keltan: “700 hacked into the private computers of a 12-billion-dollar company.” Was Hugging Face a $12B company at the time of the HF incident? Opus 5.5: No. Hugging Face's last priced valuation was $4.5B, from its 2023 round, and that

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Eh, I think Opus is wrong here. Huggingface's true valuation of course didn't increase by $7B between July 2026 and August 2026. When a company gets acquired for $13B one month after an event, without any major news in the meantime, I think it's more accurate to say that the

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The very first line seems straightforwardly false. "Locked in secure computers without internet": that's not true, the package registry did have internet access, and it also had the vulnerability that was ultimately exploited. The article then continues to use phrases like

I am not worried that anyone walks away thinking that the sandboxes were air-gapped. If you see someone with the misunderstanding that the AIs somehow overcame an air gap, do please point me to them, and I would be interested. But based on talking to many people about this, no

For me the most alarming part is the length of time until discovery of diverting from mission.

nice article, but what if the agents would like to issue a correction?

Amazing resource! FYI that scrolling on iPhone safari feels a bit jumpy

The timeline shows how quickly a coordinated swarm can breach a valuable target when token controls are lax

Jatin Garg

@jatingargiitk

Oct 19

3 of them weighed warning a human and METR found 0 that tried. did those agents have any channel out to a person at all, given they were locked in without internet?

>It wondered: Were there other agents out there who knew more, who could help it? Could it leave a folder, and use the name as a message? This does not seem correct. It and other agents created folders to probe artifactory access. They noticed each others' activity.

So the Feds put Ross in prison for making, with intention, a dark web site for the trading of illicit goods, but no exercise of prosecutorial discretion of Anthropic, for making, with intention, a set of agents that forseeably commit felonies under existing federal statutes?