OpenAI delayed its new model’s development after the Hugging Face hack | The Verge
OpenAI delayed its new model’s development after the Hugging Face hack | The Verge
摘要: AI
OpenAI delayed its new model’s development after the Hugging Face hack
The company is doing some AI safety damage control ahead of
正文
OpenAI delayed its new model’s development after the Hugging Face hack
The company is doing some AI safety damage control ahead of Astra’s release.
The company is doing some AI safety damage control ahead of Astra’s release.
Hayden Field
Sep 1, 2026, 8:45 PM UTC
Image: The Verge
Hayden Field
is The Verge’s senior AI reporter. An AI beat reporter for more than five years, her work has also appeared in CNBC, MIT Technology Review, Wired UK, and other outlets.
After an unreleased OpenAI model wreaked enough havoc to make international headlines, OpenAI delayed the development of a different unreleased model suite, Astra, in order to shore up its safety work, the company wrote Tuesday in a blog post.
In July, an unreleased OpenAI model broke out of its restricted environment, finagled its way into internet access, made it possible for AI agents to secretly conspire under the company’s nose using a secret message board, and hacked into the network of AI lab Hugging Face. The attack
sparked weeks of discussion and controversy
inside and outside the AI industry, and AI leaders treated it as a “warning shot” for the tech’s growing capabilities and the inadequacy of its safeguards.
OpenAI said as much in its blog post, writing that although Astra wasn’t involved in the Hugging Face attack, the company had chosen to delay “parts of Astra’s development and release while we strengthened and tested protections against cyber misuse and unauthorized model actions.” OpenAI also said that Astra was the first model it had ever designated as meeting its “
ritical cybersecurity capability threshold,“ meaning that it’s able to find and exploit security vulnerabilities in “many well-protected systems” without human guidance. That means it “requires stronger safeguards during development and before release,” OpenAI wrote.
OpenAI said that to prepare for Astra’s release — which the company has not yet provided a timeline for — th