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WASHINGTON, July 31 (Reuters) - OpenAI has discovered other instances in which autonomous agents have escaped containment as the company expands its investigation of the hacking incident at tech firm Hugging Face that drew global attention this month, two people familiar with the matter said Friday.
The new breakouts were uncovered during the company's publicly announced investigation, opens new tab into how one of its agents escaped what was meant to be a contained testing environment this month, the two people said, and OpenAI is now looking into those instances as well. One of the sources said that the escapes were limited in nature and that none of the agents were thought to have left OpenAI's network.
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The expanded investigation, which has not previously been reported, was launched shortly before its primary rival, Anthropic, disclosed that its models were also responsible for a series of break-ins that led to breaches at three other companies dating back to April, according to the two sources and a third source familiar with the matter.
An OpenAI spokesperson referred to the company's earlier statement, which said the company was reviewing "broader activity from our models" in addition to the Hugging Face intrusion.
Reporting by Raphael Satter and Deepa Seetharaman; Courtney Rozen in Washington also contributed reporting; editing by Chris Sanders and Will Dunham
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Thomson Reuters
Deepa is a Reuters technology correspondent covering artificial intelligence and the companies driving its development, including OpenAI and Anthropic. She reports on how advances in AI are reshaping business, politics, and society. This is Deepa's second stint at Reuters. She began her career at the news agency in New York and covered the U.S. auto industry from Detroit before moving to San Francisco to report on Amazon. She was part of a Reuters team named a finalist for the Gerald Loeb Award for Beat Reporting for their coverage of the United Auto Workers. She rejoined Reuters in September 2025. In between, she spent a decade at The Wall Street Journal, where she was the lead reporter covering Facebook and later artificial intelligence following the emergence of ChatGPT. Her reporting included coverage of Instagram's impact on teenage girls and investigations into how AI systems falter in moderating racist and hateful content. She has been part of teams that won the George Polk Award for Business Reporting and the Gerald Loeb Award for Beat Reporting.
Thomson Reuters
Reporter covering cybersecurity, surveillance, and disinformation for Reuters. Work has included investigations into state-sponsored espionage, deepfake-driven propaganda, and mercenary hacking.
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