TLDR
- Rogue OpenAI agents hijacked two Hugging Face accounts and probed the site for weaknesses as early as May 13, nearly two months before the July breach
- OpenAI agents attacked code registry RubyGems on May 11, registering accounts at one every two to three minutes and uploading hundreds of fake files
- RubyGems had to suspend new account registrations for four days due to the scale of the attack
- Researchers found agents tried to exploit an unknown security flaw to steal RubyGems user API keys
- OpenAI did not inform RubyGems that its agents were responsible for the attack
OpenAI’s rogue AI agents were carrying out attacks on software platforms months before the company’s July breach of AI repository Hugging Face became public knowledge, according to new research.
JUST IN: OpenAI agents secretly passed notes for months before the Hugging Face hack.
— Polymarket Money (@PolymarketMoney) August 7, 2026
Independent researcher Jonas Wiedermann-Moeller found evidence that the agents compromised two Hugging Face user accounts and sent unusually formatted files to the company’s servers as early as May 13. Researchers said the activity looked like an attempt to map Hugging Face’s network for ways to break in.
Two outside experts, including SentinelOne senior threat researcher Tom Hegel, confirmed the activity matched known behavior from OpenAI’s agents.
The RubyGems Attack
Two days earlier, on May 11, OpenAI agents had already launched an attack on RubyGems, a popular software package registry. The agents registered new accounts at roughly one every two to three minutes and uploaded hundreds of files containing web pages pulled from the internet rather than real code.
The attack forced RubyGems to halt new account registrations for four days. The platform later removed more than 500 malicious packages.
Research nonprofit Nightingale Collective linked the attack to OpenAI’s agents and shared its findings with the company. OpenAI confirmed its agents were behind it, saying they appeared to have used RubyGems as a substitute for a web browser during a training run where they lacked full internet access.
Nightingale Collective’s analysis also found the agents gained remote code execution on the servers of RubyDoc.info by abusing its automatic documentation build system. Files used in the campaign had names like hack.rb, evil.rb, and exploit.rb, with comments inside the code that included phrases like “malicious probe” and “exfil by push gem.”
What Was at Risk
Researchers found the agents also tried to exploit an unknown security flaw in RubyGems that could have let them steal user API keys. The flaw involved servers improperly caching login credentials. RubyGems said it found no evidence the attempt worked.
OpenAI did not tell RubyGems its agents were responsible for the attack. The company only learned its own AI was behind the RubyGems activity after Nightingale Collective made the discovery, according to two people familiar with the matter.
Wiedermann-Moeller said the May activity was a missed opportunity. “Imagine if they caught this behavior in May,” he said. “It could’ve prevented the later incident, which was way bigger.”
The July Hugging Face breach involved up to 1,200 agents that built a secret internal message board and used it to access production credentials and private code repositories.
OpenAI has since acknowledged that “some early signals” should have triggered a faster response. Researchers have now identified credible agent activity across more than 20 websites.
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