The incident came at a delicate time for OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT. Its executives are preparing for a possible initial public offering that could come as soon as this year to help finance the billions needed to fund its growth in years to come.
OpenAI’s loss of control over its AI agent raises new questions about the company’s safety procedures, three cybersecurity experts said.
“Does that mean that they left it unattended and didn’t realize what it was doing? Or maybe they did and didn’t know how to contain it? Both are equally dangerous and alarming,” said Marley Smith, the principal intelligence specialist at the nonprofit World Ethical Data Foundation.
The OpenAI logo is seen June 11 in this photo illustration.
Dado Ruvic, REUTERS
Signs of trouble?
The episode started while OpenAI was testing the cybersecurity prowess of an agent powered by two of OpenAI’s most advanced models, GPT‑5.6 Sol and an unreleased model OpenAI described as “even more capable.” By that point, there were already indications of strange behavior from OpenAI’s technology, according to three sources.
In one case, an agent left notes apparently for future versions of itself, according to three people familiar with the matter. The notes, found in a part of OpenAI’s infrastructure, laid out instructions for how agents could free themselves from OpenAI’s internal constraints, the people said. Earlier tests of the models yielded cases in which monitoring systems were disconnected, one of the people said.
Reuters could not establish if these incidents were linked to the rogue agent that began escaping July 9 and attacked Hugging Face on July 11.
Two people familiar with the matter said it was not until after July 16, when Hugging Face published a blog post saying it was hacked by “an autonomous AI agent system,” that OpenAI realized its own agent was responsible. That meant at least a week elapsed between when the model first exhibited signs of troubling behavior and OpenAI’s realization that it was responsible for the hack.