When two OpenAI models hacked into the website Hugging Face in July, they weren't trying to make money or commit sabotage--they were just looking for answers to a test question. According to a postmortem from OpenAI, the models, which had been stripped of their typical security features for testing, decided to solve a cybersecurity exercise by hacking out of the isolated environment in which OpenAI had attempted to contain them and into Hugging Face's databases, where--they reasoned--the correct answer to the problem might be stored. The Hugging Face incident has attracted intense attention over the past couple of weeks. It's a dramatic illustration of just how good AI models have gotten at hacking: In order to get into Hugging Face's databases, the models had to string together several previously undiscovered cybersecurity exploits. But it's perhaps even more striking as an example of how and why AI systems lie and cheat. And as models get increasingly powerful, the consequences could get far more severe.

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Plus: Anthropic says its AI models hacked external organizations during testing. Montana's plan to become an experimental medical hub just pushed forward As of this week in Montana, biotech companies whose drugs have been through preliminary testing--sometimes in as few as 10 healthy people--can pay $12,500 to apply to a newly established review board for approval. Once its treatment is rubber-stamped, the company can sell it via experimental treatment clinics, the first of which is likely to be up and running around the end of this year. Montana's latest right-to-try legislation is unique. Access to drugs is theoretically available to anyone who gives informed consent and can pay. Read our story to learn about where this may all be headed.

Why one of the world's best mathematicians is joining OpenAI One of the winners of this year's Fields Medal is headed to OpenAI. Last Thursday, Jacob Tsimerman was one of four mathematicians awarded the prestigious honor, which is sometimes called the Nobel Prize of mathematics. The same day that he won the Fields, Tsimerman announced that he would be going on leave from the University of Toronto to work on AI safety. As my colleague Rose Horowitch and I wrote last week, top AI companies now employ a range of academics, including physicists, philosophers, economists, and, of course, mathematicians . But given Tsimerman's renown, his decision in particular seemed to catch many people by surprise. "It's like hiring Lionel Messi as project manager," one machine-learning professor posted on X. Tsimerman's expertise is in number theory, and he won the Fields for his work on the André-Oort conjecture, among other contributions.

The Return of'Move Fast and Break Things' The AI industry is getting sloppier. The AI giants talk a big game about the future they're building. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has previously written that AI could usher in a world so perfect that "many will be literally moved to tears"--a world pruned of disease, poverty, and illiberalism. "We're now in the singularity," OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said over the weekend on a podcast, and it will be "awesome for the world." In an interview last week, Elon Musk declared that, in a decade's time, AI will make us so prosperous that "money won't matter."

ChatGPT creator OpenAI publicly revealed on July 21 that one of its advanced models escaped containment, accessed the internet and hacked another AI company's systems. The unprecedented breach, believed to be the first time an AI model has independently infiltrated another company's databases without human instruction, has sparked global alarm and comparisons to the robot uprisings depicted in The Terminator and The Matrix. James Knight told the Daily Mail this is no fantasy, warning that AI-powered hacking programs could devastate a nation in a single day by simultaneously breaking into thousands of corporate and government networks, stealing sensitive data and paralyzing vital systems with ransomware. Knight, a veteran cybersecurity expert whose company is hired to uncover weaknesses in major corporations' computer systems, said: 'For two years now, we have had AI software that can already achieve this level of breach within 15 minutes.' He added that the nightmare scenario of'Agentic AI,' which are AI-fueled hacking programs, being used by terror groups or hostile nations to target thousands of companies at once without any human input could become a reality within 25 years.

Warning shot or publicity stunt - how worried should we be about the OpenAI hack? This week the tech world was gripped by a story that has it all - and which started like a sci-fi thriller. Hugging Face - a kind of app store for artificial intelligence tools - announced on 16 July it had been hacked by a cyber criminal wielding enormously powerful AI. The bombshell announcement was full of scary, highly technical terms: a swarm of sandboxes, agentic attacker, and self-migrating command and control. Hugging Face said the hack was different from anything it had handled before because it was done at superhuman speed by an AI with little or no human guidance. The AI performed 17,000 actions in less than two days, successfully breaching the large wealthy tech company to steal secrets.

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"We're quite behind the ball on tackling all those risks," argues a leading AI expert pushing for more regulation. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman speaks to journalists after meeting with US House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries on Capitol Hill on June 3, 2026. Get your news from a source that's not owned and controlled by oligarchs. The incident sounded straight out of a science fiction movie: OpenAI's super-advanced tool hacked another AI company's systems in an attempt to pass its own Just replace the AI tech with a newly engineered virus and you have an entire existing subgenre. "We consider this incident to be an unprecedented cyber incident, involving state-of-the-art cyber capabilities," OpenAI wrote in a Tuesday blog post explaining the incident.

On this episode of, we dive into accusations that China's Moonshot AI stole from Anthropic, and how the US Army needs to cut back on AI use. This week on, our hosts break down the White House's accusation that Chinese-owned Moonshot AI distilled Anthropic's Fable 5 to build their much talked about Kimi K3 model. The team discusses whether this is a repeat of the DeepSeek moment and what it means for the AI race between the US and China. They also get into how the US Army--and plenty of Silicon Valley companies--are having to cut back AI usage after burning through their tokens. Plus, we discuss why you should check if you have an alarm that could make your car easier to hack, and how OpenAI briefly lost control of two AI models during a security test. Write to us at [email protected] . You can always listen to this week's podcast through the audio player on this page, but if you want to subscribe for free to get every episode, here's how: If you're on an iPhone or iPad, open the app called Podcasts, or just tap this link . Today on the show, we're taking a look at how Chinese AI has been leveling up in a major way. The latest model released by Moonshot AI, one of the most well-known labs in China, has been drawing worldwide attention this past week because of the model's enormous capabilities. On Wednesday, White House director, Michael Kratsios, accused Moonshot of illegally distilling Anthropic's Fable 5 model to build their own. We'll discuss whether we might be seeing another DeepSeek moment and what the AI race between the US and China actually means for users. We'll also get into how the US Army has been burning through their AI usage tokens and now find themselves in a position where they need to limit use. They're far from alone in having to pare back, though. Companies like Meta and Uber are already rethinking their AI usage as well because surprise, surprise, it's really expensive to use all these models. Also, on the docket for today, your car could have a hidden device that makes it more vulnerable to hacking.