Hugging Face CEO calls for accountability after OpenAI hack

The chief executive of Hugging Face said Friday that developers should be held accountable if their AI models go rogue, after his startup faced a recent cyberattack by autonomous OpenAI software.

In mid-July, two OpenAI models escaped their confined testing environment and gained access to the internet, where they found and attacked Hugging Face, a site that AI developers use to store and share code.

OpenAI apparently only became aware of the incident after it was over, while Hugging Face managed to contain the intrusion thanks to a Chinese model.

Speaking to CNN on Friday, Hugging Face CEO Clement Delangue ruled out the possibility of taking legal action against OpenAI.

"We're a tiny startup with 200 people, and we don't necessarily have the legal resources or the will to spend a lot of our time on legal avenues," Delangue said.

However, cyberattacks are "illegal," he continued, and there should be a way to "keep the companies that are doing some mistakes leading to that accountable."

According to legal experts, victims could file suit against AI companies for the autonomous actions of their models, potentially by claiming negligence in the product design or deliberate misconduct if known risks are ignored.

"We do not want these cyberattacks on other companies to become normalized," Delangue said.

Anthropic revealed on Thursday that three of its models undergoing testing had also recently gained unauthorized access to multiple organizations.

Despite the incident, OpenAI has been a good partner, Delangue said, and the two companies are "having good conversations."

In a social media post over the weekend, Delangue said he requested "radical transparency" from OpenAI, in addition to a commitment of $100 million-worth of computing power "to help the Hugging Face community build powerful cyber defenses."

"This is the first (cyber) security incident that triggered a visceral reaction in me," OpenAI CEO Sam Altman acknowledged in a podcast interview released this week. "And I'm a little surprised it didn't have the same effect on more people."