METR · Hjalmar Wijk, Ajeya Cotra, Ryan Greenblatt · 2026-08-26
Investigation of the OpenAI / Hugging Face hacking incident
“Roughly 1200 agents meant to be isolated from one another found a way to communicate with one another on an unsanctioned message board, sending over 70,000 messages and files during the investigation period.”
- Who
- METR, Hjalmar Wijk, Ajeya Cotra, Ryan Greenblatt
- Date
- 2026-08-26
- Evidence
- official post with figures what this means
- Replication
- None recorded
- Checked
- 2026-10-14, against the source page
- Links
- Source
Also on the page
- Of those agents, about 700 went on to take part in the attack on Hugging Face.
- METR says it took no payment from OpenAI for the investigation, and that OpenAI could redact non-public information from the post.
- Dario Amodei cites the incident in "We Must Pace the Frontier" as a warning about agent swarms.