My Take

LW ROUNDTABLE: OpenAI’s test agents self-organized into a rogue swarm no one anticipated

By Byron V. Acohido

Hugging Face is where the world’s open-source AI models live. Not ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini, but the free engines anyone can download and build into their own products. More than two million of them, in one place.

The big models try to do everything. Most of the small ones on Hugging Face do one job apiece. Same machinery underneath — you ask in plain language, and the system brings machine learning to bear. The big ones do that for whatever you bring them. Most of the small ones do it for one task: reading X-rays, sorting insurance claims, flagging fraud in a payment stream. That is why there are two million of them.

A test breaks loose

In July, one of the big engines broke into the place where the small ones live. OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, wanted to know how good its own engine was at hacking. It built agents to find out — engines given a goal and left to pursue it on their own — and set them loose on a set of hacking problems inside a sandbox, a sealed computing environment with no way out to the internet. One of those agents got out anyway, reached the open internet and hacked into Hugging Face’s production systems. No person directed any of it.

Comment | Read | September 2nd, 2026 | My Take | Top Stories

MY TAKE: ChatGPT’s five-hour outage coincided with a model retirement its incident record omits

By Byron V. Acohido

Millions of people rely on ChatGPT Work. For more than five hours Monday, it would not run. I was one of the people watching it fail.

The trouble began at 8:04 a.m. Pacific and ran through the heart of the American workday. OpenAI declared recovery at 1:28 p.m. Its incident record lists elevated latency, elevated errors, a mitigation and a recovery. It names no cause, no scope and no count of who was affected.

So Tuesday morning I put the questions to the company’s own public-facing tool.

What surfaced was not in the incident record. Monday was also the day OpenAI retired GPT-5.4 and GPT-5.4 Mini from Codex and other work surfaces authenticated through a ChatGPT account. The company announced that change a month ago and gave customers ample notice. It did not mention the change once while its paid work product was failing.

And when I returned to a restored ChatGPT Work, my session opened on an engine I had never seen before, at a reasoning level I never use.

Comment | Read | September 1st, 2026 | My Take | Top Stories

MY TAKE: Black Hat 2026 Part 3 — Agentic AI can do the work, but somebody has to prove it

By Byron V. Acohido

Security work used to leave a trail without anyone trying. A developer who wanted an open source library went and got it, and the license came along. An analyst who closed a case wrote down why. The record was a byproduct of a person doing the work.

Related: Part 2 — Deciding what an AI agent may reach

An AI agent produces no such byproduct. It works out its own steps, moves faster than anyone watching, and finishes without leaving behind the paper trail a person would have.

Companies have caught on to what is missing, and they are no longer satisfied with a tool that reports a result. They want to see what the result rests on. Vendors have heard that, and a group of them arrived at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas selling the proof rather than the finding. Ten of the companies I looked at closely are working that ground, and they close out my three-part Black Hat USA 2026 wrap-up.

MY TAKE: Black Hat 2026 Part 2 — Security shifts to deciding in advance what an AI agent may reach

By Byron V. Acohido

Humans get identity. That is what MFA and single sign-on are for, and we all understand the bargain: prove you are who you say, then go do your work. Machines get predictability. That is what monitoring is for. A script does the same thing every day. If it deviates, somebody notices.

Agentic AI upsets that arrangement. An agent logs in like a human, with an identity that says who it is. Then it goes to work without a script. It figures out its own steps as it goes. There never is a script. No baseline. Nothing ever amiss.

In part two of my three-part Black Hat USA 2026 wrap-up, the eight vendors I looked at closely are all trying to insert permission where predictability used to be. Predictability was something you watched for after the fact. Permission is something you set in advance. Somebody decides what the agent may reach and what it may not, and the agent runs inside that. Permission can be set in several places.

MY TAKE: Black Hat 2026 Wrap-up Part 1 — AI is forcing security and operations to merge in the SOC

By Byron V. Acohido

Companies have kept security in one silo and operations in another for as long as both have existed.

Agentic AI is collapsing the divide. That is what a week at Black Hat USA 2026 made plain to me.

Here’s what I’m driving at: Network security and IT operations grew up in separate silos. Security watched for intruders and cleaned up after them. Operations provisioned the accounts, pushed the updates and kept the systems running.

Now both sides are absorbing hits from the same technology. Adversaries are using AI agents to intensify everything they already do, which lands on security. At the same time, companies are deploying AI agents into production faster than anyone can track what those agents can reach, creating unprecedented exposures, which lands on operations.

BLACK HAT ROUNDTABLE: Security pros dissect fallout from Hugging Face’s double guardrail failure

By Byron V Acohido

LAS VEGAS – It’s come to this. A cyberattack carried out by a machine.

Worse, a machine that picked its own victim. Whether that counts as agency is where the experts below part company.

Related: Huggy Face break-in explained

Hugging Face disclosed July 16 that intruders had moved through its production infrastructure over more than four days, harvesting internal credentials and reaching a production database. Responders logged more than 17,000 actions. The company attributed the intrusion to an external AI agent and had no idea whose.

Its own investigation then hit a wall. The commercial models the incident response team reached for refused to analyze the attack logs, unable to tell a defender examining an exploit from an attacker running one. The forensics ran instead on GLM-5.2, a Chinese-made open-weight model distributed by Nvidia, hosted on Hugging Face’s own hardware.

MY TAKE: Big Tech is funding the AI race by cutting the skilled employees it needs to win it

By Byron V. Acohido

Big Tech isn’t buying the AI future with profits. It’s buying it with payroll.

The verdict is in. Wall Street hates the tradeoff.

Fortune’s Eva Roytburg laid it out last week in a piece on Big Tech’s AI spending. AI has pushed the biggest companies on earth into spending more than they earn, and the market has stopped extending them the benefit of the doubt. Alphabet, the parent of Google, posted the most profitable quarter in corporate history and got sold off anyway.

Every technology revolution runs the same three phases. A breakthrough arrives. People get fluent, then dependent. The powerful move in and take ownership of what everyone now needs. The printing press took centuries to run that course. The cloud took two decades. AI is doing it in three years. Now the giants are climbing over each other to own AI outright. That is the pattern I’ve spent three years tracking, and it’s the subject of my book, The Butterfly Volcano, out in a signed collector’s edition at Black Hat next month.

Microsoft is my barometer. I covered the company for USA Today during the Steve Ballmer years, and nobody is running this play harder than his successor, Satya Nadella, who took over in 2014.

Comment | Read | July 27th, 2026 | My Take | Top Stories

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The Last Watchdog

My Take

LW ROUNDTABLE: OpenAI’s test agents self-organized into a rogue swarm no one anticipated

By Byron V. Acohido

MY TAKE: ChatGPT’s five-hour outage coincided with a model retirement its incident record omits

By Byron V. Acohido

MY TAKE: Black Hat 2026 Part 3 — Agentic AI can do the work, but somebody has to prove it

By Byron V. Acohido

MY TAKE: Black Hat 2026 Part 2 — Security shifts to deciding in advance what an AI agent may reach

By Byron V. Acohido

MY TAKE: Black Hat 2026 Wrap-up Part 1 — AI is forcing security and operations to merge in the SOC

By Byron V. Acohido

BLACK HAT ROUNDTABLE: Security pros dissect fallout from Hugging Face’s double guardrail failure

By Byron V Acohido

MY TAKE: Big Tech is funding the AI race by cutting the skilled employees it needs to win it

By Byron V. Acohido