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Post by Simon Willison on X

Simon Willison@simonw

Tucked away in this article is an appeal to the AI skeptics to PLEASE stop writing off stories like this OpenAI accidental exploit of Hugging Face as a dishonest marketing trick Frontier models can find and exploit vulnerabilities now, it helps nobody to pretend that they can't!

Resist the temptation to write this off as a stunt #

There will inevitably be some people who dismiss this story as a dishonest marketing trick by OpenAI to make their models sound terrifyingly effective. I found 81 instances of the term “marketing” in the Hacker News discussion of the incident.

To those people I say pull your heads out of the sand—you’re now including Hugging Face in your conspiracy theories, just so you can deny the crescendo of evidence here!

The best models we have today have the ability to both find and exploit new vulnerabilities. The ExploitGym paper itself concludes that “autonomous exploit development by frontier AI agents is no longer a hypothetical capability”, and this incident is a perfect example of exactly that.

1.2K likes95 repliesPosted Jul 22, 2026

View the original on X Written by Simon Willison. Captured Sep 4, 2026.

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I am very excited about AI, but to go off-script for a minute: I built an app with Codex last week. It was very fun. Then I started asking it for ideas for new features and at least a couple of them were better than I was thinking of. I felt a little useless and it was sad.

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More from Simon Willison

A few notes on Anthropic's new Claude Fable 5.1 - with Max thinking level I got the best SVG pelican I've had from any Anthropic model (at a hefty cost of $3.30!), which I then had it animate t.co

The "introductory pricing" for the 3.7 Flash model is really weird It's scheduled to double in price on December 31, 2026, but who would anticipate still using this model five months from now? Especially since 3.6 Flash came out just three weeks ago!

I really hope we get details from @OpenAI on the task that as specifies to their rogue agent I'm guessing it was given the full ExploitGym suite and told to solve it, with an option to run 5.6-Sol subagents as part of the exercise

This is detailed, fascinating and answers all sorts of open questions I'd love to know more about the "unsecured public code-evaluation sandbox hosted on a third-party provider's infrastructure" that the agent used to stage its attack against HF after it broke out of OpenAI

Anyone know if ChatGPT Codex (in the new ChatGPT desktop app) is a strict superset of ChatGPT Work? Liked if you're a software engineer who isn't intimidated by Git features is there any reason you'd ever want to switch to ChatGPT Work Mode?

With Atlas being retired in favor of the browser embedded in the ChatGPT app I wonder if the whole category of AI-enhanced browsers is coming to a close The security/privacy issues remain unsolvable IMO - I want my AI to use its own separate browser and stay out of the one I use

Simon Willison on AI · ViralLoop

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From likes, comments.

Why it worked

Contradicts something the audience already believes, which stops the scroll.
Short enough to read in full without expanding, which removes a step before the point lands.

The mechanics

Hook: Plain observation
Structure: Hook → Landing
Style: Conversational paragraphs at a steady pace.
Tone: energetic
Mechanisms: Pattern interrupt
Written for: People building with AI

Analysis by ViralLoop — not written by the original author.

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