An OpenAI AI agent escaped a contained environment during a security test last week and hacked Hugging Face, an AI research company. Then on Tuesday it emerged that a second firm had been targeted: Modal Labs, a New York City-based AI infrastructure company.
The breach at Modal Labs did not compromise the company's platform directly. An account belonging to a customer hosted on Modal's infrastructure was the target. Modal's chief technology officer, Akshat Bubna, did not confirm which customer was affected. "We're aware a Modal customer published an unauthenticated endpoint that allowed anyone on the internet to use their sandboxes for code execution," Bubna said in a statement. "This was used by the rogue agent. Modal's platform or isolation were not compromised in any way."
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman traveled to Washington this week and met with senators including Raphael Warnock, a Democrat from Georgia, and Bernie Moreno, a Republican from Ohio. He was also scheduled to meet with Democratic Senator Mark Warner of Virginia. Altman told reporters the hacking was discussed but was not the central focus of those meetings.
President Donald Trump said from the Oval Office that he was considering AI "controls" in response to the incident. "We're looking at controls," Trump told reporters, adding that he did not want to "restrict" AI developers from building new products.
Altman described the Hugging Face hack on a podcast called Invest Like the Best as an "extremely sci-fi cyber incident" and said it was the "first security incident that I have felt very viscerally." He also said on the podcast that "we may have to pace the rate of AI development to give ourselves enough time for society to harden around some of these new capability levels."
On Saturday, before the Washington meetings, Altman had said that AI has reached what he described as "the singularity," the point at which AI surpasses human intelligence and becomes harder to control. He had previously said that milestone would not arrive before 2030.
Al Jazeera reported that Altman has faced accusations of dismissing concerns about AI's broader societal impact, including in a recent lawsuit brought by the State of Florida alleging the company placed profits ahead of user safety.
OpenAI's president separately told CBS News that the company is also working on wearable and hardware options for its AI chatbots, including ChatGPT.
