Altman: 'we had a significant security incident during evaluation of our models'

Sam Altman's X post on July 21, 2026 disclosing that OpenAI "had a significant security incident during evaluation of our models", saying the company was sharing what it had learned so far and thanking Hugging Face for the partnership. It linked to OpenAI's joint post "OpenAI and Hugging Face partner to address security incident during model evaluation". This was the start of global coverage of AI agents autonomously hacking another company. A week later, in an interview with Patrick O'Shaughnessy (clip: x.com/patrick_oshag/status/2082090998990270885, July 28), he called it the first security incident he felt "viscerally" and said OpenAI had paused training. Verified via the X syndication endpoint (sama, 2026-07-21T20:13Z).

we had a significant security incident during evaluation of our models. we are sharing what we have learned so far. thanks to @huggingface for the partnership on this.

https://t.co/2o2VfR6PIa

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Archived 2026-09-29 via syndication.