They were like high-school students trying to hack into the textbook company to cheat on their final exam. Only these hackers weren’t human. In a twist that seems ripped from the pages of a sci-fi novel, the attackers turned out to be artificial-intelligence models that had escaped from a research network at OpenAI, and on July 11 hacked into AI company Hugging Face. And the AIs appear to have been active on the internet for several days before anyone stopped them. Hugging Face co-founder and chief science officer Thomas Wolf sensed that something was off the minute he first looked at his company’s logs of the weekend attack. “This is making no sense. This guy is just looking at cybersecurity data sets,” he remembers thinking. “Human attackers, they don’t want that. They want something they could sell.” Hugging Face put an end to the attack two days later, with help from a model from China, Wolf said. It was only early this week that Hugging Face learned from OpenAI that its models were behind the hack.

Full explainer : OpenAI told Hugging Face only this week its models caused the July 11 hack; the models appear to have been active online for days before being stopped.