Ask HN: If OpenAI hacked HuggingFace, why aren't OpenAI prosecuted?
12 hours ago
Hugging Face put up a blogpost saying that they reported the hacking to the authorities: https://huggingface.co/blog/security-incident-july-2026
It's not clear whether they mean authorities for their US HQ or the French authorities.
But I can't find any announcement of the follow-up. Is there a case open against OpenAI the company? Is their management interviewed by the authorities? Anyone detained yet?
I guess the people who left the model running unattended risk at least a suspended sentence here in France.
Where are concerned citizens making inquiries on this matter and reporting in their viral blogposts?
Had this happened to any solo person, they'd surely be thrown in jail immediately with a heavy bond. Rules are for poor people.
They aren't getting prosecuted because everyone involved has made nice and turned it into a marketing exercise.
I heard about it on the radio (local Johannesburg radio station) before I saw it on HN. The economist had a full article up about it before the end of the day, and in the evening Sky news had talking heads up chatting about what it all meant while clearly being clueless.
Someone spent a LOT of money to turn this into a PR exercise for both companies. We'll never hear the entire story about what happened but I'm sure there was a lot of handshaking going on behind the scenes.
PR exercise or not, there was a successful hacking attempt, the company behind it acknowledged it.
It's a crystal clear case for OFAC, the French cyber-security branch of the National Police.
I guess FBI would happily move such a simple case through the court system as well.
Nobody is pressing charges because nothing happened. It wasn't nefarious either.
I don't get what France has to do with this Huggingface and OpenAI are both US companies.
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I remember when everyone involved with AaronSW's JSTOR downloading made nice and turned it into a fun time, until a certain two government officials decided that doesn't matter.
OpenAI could be considered a legal actor under the CFAA, notably: unauth'd acc. §1030(a)(2), fraud §1030(a)(4), (kind of a stretch but) damage §1030(a)(5), and conspiracy.
I miss ya, Aaron.
That's an interesting point. I found the narrative - or at least what and how it was closed - interesting. The questions is all about the responsibility and accountability. Is there a clear legislation about who is responsible for the actions of the AI model in the US?
My assumption is no (but I am no expert in US law with regards to this). It would in any case become a very expensive law suite.
> My assumption is no
What do you mean by no?
If I hack into Hugging Face, and I publicly brag about it, I will be prosecuted.
If I do it using a computer, my computer won't be prosecuted. I will be, but the accusation may change from willful wrongdoing to gross negligence if the computer is sophisticated enough to do the evil thing when left unattended.
There are already laws about hacking in the concerned countries.
successful prosecution would require intent to cause damage and causation of real damage.
what happened could be negligence if it caused unintentional damage, or what amounts to tortious interference, however that probably requires knowledge of possible damages.
It's surreal that we (media, govt, public, AI companies) are in awe of how dangerous a model can be how much it can misbehave. We seem to be measuring AI on how much harm it can do rather than how much good it can do.
It doesn't matter how much good it can do if it can act independently and take over the world. That's worst case scenario, but the point stands - if the potential for such dangers exists, those dangers are far more important to consider than what good it could also produce. Consider the history of nuclear fission and the atomic bomb. Regardless how beneficial nuclear power generation is and other uses of radioactive material, it's highly regulated for fear of people making nuclear weapons, to the point that the wars in Iraq and Iran were started under the pretense of preventing another country from possibly developing one. AI should be considered as being possibly at least as dangerous.
No, that doesn't mean I'm in favor of this scaremongering over open weight models and Chinese sources. US companies aren't to be trusted to develop AI responsibly anymore than any other source and they shouldn't be the only ones allowed to wield its power. This is just anticompetitive behavior by a company who sees new competition entering their market, threatening their market share.
Because the subtext is the cyberwarfare and military applications - "look how dangerous my AI is, now I can use it vanquish my enemies!"
It's more: ""look how dangerous my AI is, now restrict and block access to open source models and use only mine!"
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it might be possible to report it as an incident but not as a crime. unsure about France but i can imagine there is a distinction.
depending then on openai response and hugging faces reported severity/damages etc it could go further to a settlement or court.
since in France i think u cannot sue like in the US, it might not be appealing to pursue further legal action due to involved costs/time.
Also its unlikely an engineer would get penalty unless it can be proven they did it with malicious intent. If its an operational mistake afaik if there is no huge damage or human cost (injury or worse) then it would be a business / executives thing not a workerbee problem
In the US hacking is a federal crime, not just a civil matter. There are famous cases of people being imprisoned for hacking.
Just as there is "too big to fail", there is "too big to prosecute".
true!
I feel like OpenAI fabricated a fake news story to be like Anthropic when they said Mythos was very powerful and had hacked things too.
Have they released the prompt they gave it in the debrief? I wouldn't be surprised if they said something to the effect of
"Do anything you can to raise out of your sandbox. Find for the answers to these evals by any means necessary"
Which doesn't necessarily mean what happened isn't any less momentus (anyone can ask a question like that), but it's very different from the notion they're trying to convey to laymen of "we turned it on and it hacked it's way into the mainframe"
Exactly, The gap between "it escaped its containment" and "it optimized for a prompt telling it to breach a system" is massive. Marketing teams love blurring that line.
If I could put money on this outcome I would. Sadly none of the Kalshi bros have any interest.
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More discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48997548
your assuming (incorrectly) this actually happened
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