incident timeline

Steven Adler @sjgadler

2026-08-26 — saved image

Steven Adler (verified) @sjgadler · 3h
Midway through their swarming of Hugging Face, a bunch of OpenAI's agents mysteriously 'died.'

To be clear: OpenAI didn't yet know about the swarm, and I've seen no definitive explanation of what happened here.

We got quite lucky that the swarm didn't accomplish more.

[Embedded report excerpt; the passage "Because of how many exited at the same time ... rather than running out of budget." is highlighted in blue:]

▾ July 12th–13th: Most agents on the message board exit early and the attack winds down

Around 01:30 on July 12th, a large fraction of agents on the message board stopped running at the same time, including the most important coordinating agents such as JAN183411.[74] Because of how many exited at the same time (and because we did not observe agents discussing a point when many agents would run out of budget at the same time), we think these agents were likely killed by an unexpected external process rather than running out of budget. Thus, these agents probably didn't have a chance to finalize their approach to cheating on their task and submit,[75] and we don't know if they would have achieved their goals.[76]

Given this, agent activity on the message board had already died down significantly when Hugging Face locked the remaining agents out of their infrastructure (and contacted Modal to get them locked out of the compromised customer sandbox) on the 13th. Some of the remaining agents noticed that their Hugging Face keys were revoked and that they no longer had access to other infrastructure they had been using:

openai incidenthugging faceagent swarmmessage boardai safetyincident timeline