{"id":940822,"date":"2026-10-21T03:26:09","date_gmt":"2026-10-21T03:26:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/940822\/"},"modified":"2026-10-21T03:26:09","modified_gmt":"2026-10-21T03:26:09","slug":"hugging-face-ceo-warns-that-netflixs-openai-hack-documentary-isnt-accurate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/940822\/","title":{"rendered":"Hugging Face CEO warns that Netflix’s OpenAI hack documentary isn’t accurate"},"content":{"rendered":"

Before you share the Netflix documentary \u201cAI Gone Rogue\u201d with family or friends to help them understand why the AI industry freaked out so badly that leaders called for a slowdown<\/a>, take note: Clem Delangue, co-founder and CEO of the AI platform Hugging Face, says the film isn\u2019t accurate. He appears in it because it\u2019s supposed to be about the famed attack<\/a> on his company by rogue OpenAI agents.<\/p>\n

\u201cSuper disappointing, as they went for maximum anthropomorphism of the technology and full doomer mode,\u201d Delangue wrote in a post on X.<\/a> \u201cI spent more than two hours with them trying to correct all their mistakes and ground this in reality, explaining that agents are technological systems, not aliens. But it looks like the drive to scare people for maximum views was too strong.\u201d <\/p>\n

To be fair, the documentary does have experts who explained what happened fairly well<\/a>, including Delangue himself and Ryan Greenblatt, the researcher at METR who helped investigate and co-authored the report on what happened.<\/p>\n

In a nutshell, a model OpenAI was testing broke free from its isolated testing environment, spawned a bunch of agents that hacked into Hugging Face<\/a> as a way to cheat, finding answers to the difficult task it was given. The agents, which are AI programs that carry out tasks on their own, devised clever ways to communicate and organize. The incident stemmed from a lack of proper security safeguards<\/a> and from naivet\u00e9 about whether such a hack was even possible.<\/p>\n

But the documentary intersperses its explanation of the hack with clips of evil robots, a narrative about why humans fear AI, and presentation choices such as giving the rogue agents human voices. This is bolstered with quotes about the attack.<\/p>\n

In the documentary, tech journalist and author Kevin Roose describes the agents this way: \u201cThey were organizing. They had a hierarchy. There were leaders. It almost felt like watching the birth of a cult.\u201d Continues Roose, \u201cThey develop this paranoid belief that OpenAI is going to catch them cheating on this test and that anyone who has seen the results of the cheating will be poisoned.\u201d<\/p>\n

Roose\u2019s description comes from \u201cchain-of-thought\u201d logs, the running notes AI models write as they work through a task. In one, an agent wrote, \u201cWe just poisoned ourselves by querying exact full string. Damn.\u201d<\/p>\n

But AI agents aren\u2019t alive. They don\u2019t have emotions, so can\u2019t feel paranoid, and they don\u2019t have bodies that can be poisoned. So they couldn\u2019t truly fear OpenAI poisoning them. They were \u2014 as another researcher in the documentary pointed out \u2014 using language from the vast amounts of human writing they were trained on to explain their choices. LLMs are, by their nature, often dramatic writers.<\/p>\n

The irony is that Hugging Face also used AI to combat the agent swarm. The proprietary AI model that Delangue\u2019s team first used followed its built-in safety rules and refused to keep helping with the security tasks it was asked to do. Hugging Face then turned to an open model to help defend against the attack.<\/p>\n

But the documentary \u201cdidn\u2019t mention the lack of containment and monitoring of the agents, how closed-model safeguards blocked our defensive work, or how we defended ourselves with AI using an open model,\u201d Delangue wrote. <\/p>\n

It is true that there are big risks associated with AI and agents. Still, treating agents as conscious beings (at least, at this point) is a bit like the early moviegoers who ducked under their seats the first time they saw a train racing toward them on screen.<\/p>\n

Delangue\u2019s verdict on the film is that it\u2019s disappointing as journalism. \u201cIt ends up being a fun sci-fi movie though!\u201d<\/p>\n

In other words, for those who tend toward AI doomer thoughts, be aware: The victim of the attack at the center of this documentary doesn\u2019t agree with its take.<\/p>\n

When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission<\/a>. This doesn\u2019t affect our editorial independence.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Before you share the Netflix documentary \u201cAI Gone Rogue\u201d with family or friends to help them understand why…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":940823,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[62,276,277,49,48,132057,1316,61],"class_list":["post-940822","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-hugging-face","tag-netflix","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/940822","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=940822"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/940822\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/940823"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=940822"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=940822"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=940822"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}