WSJ opinion argues Hugging Face hack was overstated
A Wall Street Journal opinion piece pushes back on earlier reporting of a security incident at the AI model repository Hugging Face.
What to know
- A WSJ opinion piece contends a previously reported Hugging Face security incident was less severe than initial coverage suggested.
- The provided material does not include details of the original incident itself, only the pushback piece and its headline.
- The piece has circulated on Hacker News across multiple resubmissions but with very low engagement (scores 1-4, at most one comment).
Hugging Face AI model hosting platformWSJ Opinion Author of the opinion piece
How it unfolded 2 developments, newest first · click a bar or a number to jump articlesposts
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Piece resurfaces on Hacker News with little engagement
The WSJ opinion piece was submitted to Hacker News multiple times over 2026-09-19 and 2026-09-20 under near-identical titles, but each submission drew minimal traction (scores of 1-4, at most one comment).
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The incident report leaves a lot to be desired.- It was done by two institutes with organizational ties to OpenAI: METR and Redwood Research- METR and Redwood Research are institutional pillars of the "AI Safety" wing of the Effective Altruism movement. This clearly shows their prior biases towards "AI existential risk" rather than…
2 more of the top 3 · 10 posts in this stretch
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After a recent interview[1] with Noam Brown (OpenAI), in which he said they had specifically trained agents for cooperation before this hack, the hack doesn't seem as impressive anymore.They didn't even bother to control the post training rollouts, so the training data got contaminated and was included in the training of other agents. Connect…
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https://archive.is/hnpmxall 3 can be true at same time:1. sensationalizing rarely helps and can obscure and hurt2. the AI capabilities are underrated3. attempted govt regulation is not the answerthe intent, or lack of intent, of the agent is mainly irrelevant if it is in the hands of a human with 'bad' intentions. what is more relevant are the…
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- 2 days quiet
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WSJ opinion piece downplays the Hugging Face hack
The Wall Street Journal published an opinion article titled "The Hugging Face Hack Wasn't What It Was Cracked Up to Be," arguing that earlier reporting had overstated the severity of a security incident at the AI model hosting platform Hugging Face.
“The Hugging Face Hack Wasn't What It Was Cracked Up to Be…”
— WSJ Opinion -
first by HN Frontpage, 4d ago
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1 outlet first by WSJ, 8d ago · read ↗
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What people are saying 7 voices from 1 site · best of 10 · verbatim
- Sep 20
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So, how is any of this legal? If I set up a script that breaks into the systems of a company, isn't that, like, a crime?
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I truly just don't believe a word regarding achievements from these frontier labs.It started with that guy from google saying the LLM was "alive" and every time I see a press release from these labs it reads mostly like a marketing scheme."Look how impressive and 'dangerous' our model is, look how naughty it was! We can't control it!"
- Sep 19
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The more I see of the US AI industry, and the folks surrounding it, the more "These are not very bright guys and things got out of hand" plays in my head on repeat.Yes, the Google folks who kicked this whole thing off are brilliant, but there's so much sloppy thinking and even sloppier operations all over. It seems like a lot of "right place at…
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It’s not a majority opinion because you have to do some serious mental gymnastics to turn this demonstration of dangerous AI behavior into a PR publicity stunt.Serious question though because I’ve seen this brought up several times and I don’t understand why: what does EA have to do with any of this? It just seems like this is brought up to evoke…
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The only difference I see on the facts vs what I read so far is that OpenAI knew of the hack and decided not to intervene. I haven't read the report but I find it hard to believe that OpenAI deliberately let its agents hack a third party company during a training run. It would certainly attract a criminal liability, which would be surprising to…
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Reads like an AI trying to downplay the severity of the situation. Very cyberpunk.
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I would just recommend reading what actually happened: https://metr.org/blog/2026-08-26-openai-hugging-face-inciden...I don’t think downplaying what occurred is really beneficial to anyone.