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Exclusive-OpenAI’s rogue agent compromised an account at a second tech firm, executive says

By Thomson Reuters Jul 28, 2026 | 4:27 PM

By Deepa Seetharaman, Raphael Satter and Kenrick Cai

WASHINGTON, July 28 (Reuters) – The rogue agent that escaped ​from OpenAI and went on ‌a days-long hacking spree at the AI firm Hugging Face also compromised a customer at a second tech company — New ‌York-based ​Modal Labs — according to ⁠a Modal executive ⁠and two other sources familiar with the matter.

According to a timeline published by Hugging Face on Tuesday, the ​rogue agent broke into a sandbox, or an isolating testing environment, “hosted ⁠on a third-party ⁠provider’s infrastructure” before turning it ​into a launchpad for the broader ​hack.

The third party provider was not ‌named in the blog post, but Modal’s Chief Technology Officer Akshat Bubna confirmed that one of their customers ⁠was hacked.

“We’re aware a Modal customer published an unauthenticated endpoint that allowed anyone on ⁠the internet ‌to use their sandboxes ⁠for code execution,” Bubna said ​in ‌a statement. “This was used ​by the ⁠rogue agent. Modal’s platform or isolation were not compromised in anyway.”

OpenAI did not immediately return a message seeking comment.

(Reporting by Raphael Satter; Editing by ​Chris Reese)