Thomas Wolf: 'our first incident of this kind' — case for open models in defense

Thomas Wolf, HF co-founder and CSO, quote-tweeted Sam Altman's disclosure, thanked OpenAI for transparency and noted HF is used to (human) hackers because it sits at the centre of the AI ecosystem. The thread continued that the incident reinforced his belief in open models for defense (HF's security team uses open models to process incident data). Verified via syndication API (2026-07-21T21:11Z). Wolf later (Aug 30) warned future models would train on the public record of labs' incident responses, and on Sep 10 announced an FT op-ed and an 'Open Alignment' team at HF (x.com/Thom_Wolf/status/2098080470235762702).

This was our first incident of this kind, and we want to thank OpenAI for its transparency about what happened and for the collaboration.

Fortunately, Hugging Face is used to being a target of (human) hackers: we sit at the centre of the AI ecosystem, with all the models, datasets, evaluations, and libraries. Over the years, our security team has built formidable expertise and uses top open-source models to process information and respond quickly.

But this incident also reinforced my belief in the importance of access to capable open-weight models for cyber defence. When a frontier model is attacking you and moving laterally inside your infrastructure, defenders need wide access to near-frontier tools within hours or even minutes, rather than being pointed towards a closed-door, vetted application programme for model access.

Transparency and access to capable AI systems are as important for responding to threats as they are for democratization and innovation. We believe open-science and open-source AI are among the strongest tools for building a safer, more collaborative and more secure AI ecosystem.

Quoting @sama: 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://openai.com/index/hugging-face-model-evaluation-security-incident/

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Archived 2026-09-29 via fxtwitter (unofficial).