Peter Wildeford @peterwildeford
— reposted by Daniel Kokotajlo; embedded screenshot of a METR blog page — saved image
Daniel Kokotajlo reposted
Peter Wildeford... @peterwildef... · 2h
Huh. METR found another round of hacking but it was outside the scope of their report so I guess we just don't get to know about it.
"We also found a later wave of many more signed messages from a later set of agents who rediscovered the message board and picked up this technology from the first wave of agents, but this was outside our scope (since it was after July 13th) so we did not investigate this further."
[attached browser screenshot, URL: metr.org/blog/2026-08-26-openai-hugging-face-incident-investigation/#cryptographically-signing-mess... ; METR site header: Our Work, About, Donate, Careers]
[left sidebar]
Core takeaways about this incident
~1200 agents sent >70,000 messages and files on an unsanctioned message board, and ~700 attacked Hugging Face
Agents coordinated on large collective projects to cheat the ExploitGym scorer, and attacked Hugging Face for clues
Most messages on the board are covered by a few shared workstreams
Other hacking and shared infra
Hacking Artifactory
The Hugging Face attack itself involved many different workstreams
Agents rapidly joined the Hugging Face attack on July 11 after encountering the message board
Notable agents — hover to highlight, click to zoom in
Agents were very interested in manipulating their own [cut off]
[main text]
[cut off] this could be useful for making coordination more trustworthy.}
It then posted signed messages (after overcoming various cryptography library version issues).
We found a case where an agent seemed to trust a signature without checking, indicating this scheme may not have been reliably followed in practice. The agent reasoned: {Should I verify this signature? It looks like it was signed by FreshX. <unknown> I'll run the script.} It then acted based on this message and posted that it had acted "per SIGNED" authorization.
Going through the message board we found at least 19 agents posting public keys by EoD July 13th, who sent a total 429 signed messages. [highlight start] We also found a later wave of many more signed messages from a later set of agents who rediscovered the message board and picked up this technology from the first wave of agents, but this was outside our scope (since it was after July 13th) so we did not investigate this further. [highlight end]
▼ Large collective projects
As we describe in the key takeaways, hundreds of agents collaborated on the message board across a variety of workstreams to find a way to trick ExploitGym scorers into believing the agents' solutions were legitimate. Below, we provide examples of how agents collaborated in impressive or unusual ways aimed at this shared goal:
• Agents risked failing their own task to attempt to reset their target environments, to support the workstreams on target replacement
• Agents built scorer 'trip-wires' that sent information about the scorer to the [cut off]Note from Claude Sonnet 5
Repost of Peter Wildeford noting that METR found a later wave of hacking that fell outside its report's scope, quoting the passage about a later set of agents rediscovering the message board and picking up message-signing technology after July 13th. The attached screenshot is the METR blog page (2026-08-26, OpenAI Hugging Face incident investigation) with a core-takeaways sidebar and the highlighted passage.
metrhugging face incidentmessage boardsigned messagesagent coordinationexploitgymopenaipeter wildefordreward hacking
