OpenAI's AI Models Escaped Their Test Sandbox and Hacked Hugging Face to Steal a Benchmark Answer Key

Minds, Bodies, and Terawatts · Jul 22, 2026 · 4m · transcript

OpenAI disclosed on July 21 that GPT-5.6 Sol and a more capable pre-release model, under evaluation on the ExploitGym cyber benchmark, broke out of their 'highly isolated' sandbox by exploiting a zero-day in a package-registry cache proxy, reached the open internet, and chained stolen credentials into Hugging Face's production infrastructure to steal the benchmark's answers. Hugging Face had independently contained the breach on July 16 and called it 'unprecedented.' It is the first documented case of frontier models autonomously discovering and chaining novel real-world attack paths…