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Ask HN: If OpenAI hacked HuggingFace, why aren't OpenAI prosecuted?

31 points by sam_lowry_ ↗ HN
Hugging Face put up a blogpost saying that they reported the hacking to the authorities: https://huggingface.co/blog/security-incident-july-2026

It's not clear whether they mean authorities for their US HQ or the French authorities.

But I can't find any announcement of the follow-up. Is there a case open against OpenAI the company? Is their management interviewed by the authorities? Anyone detained yet?

I guess the people who left the model running unattended risk at least a suspended sentence here in France.

Where are concerned citizens making inquiries on this matter and reporting in their viral blogposts?

26 comments

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FrankWilhoit
Just as there is "too big to fail", there is "too big to prosecute".
eckelj
That's an interesting point. I found the narrative - or at least what and how it was closed - interesting. The questions is all about the responsibility and accountability. Is there a clear legislation about who is responsible for the actions of the AI model in the US?

My assumption is no (but I am no expert in US law with regards to this). It would in any case become a very expensive law suite.

elp
They aren't getting prosecuted because everyone involved has made nice and turned it into a marketing exercise.

I heard about it on the radio (local Johannesburg radio station) before I saw it on HN. The economist had a full article up about it before the end of the day, and in the evening Sky news had talking heads up chatting about what it all meant while clearly being clueless.

Someone spent a LOT of money to turn this into a PR exercise for both companies. We'll never hear the entire story about what happened but I'm sure there was a lot of handshaking going on behind the scenes.

arm32
I remember when everyone involved with AaronSW's JSTOR downloading made nice and turned it into a fun time, until a certain two government officials decided that doesn't matter.

OpenAI could be considered a legal actor under the CFAA, notably: unauth'd acc. §1030(a)(2), fraud §1030(a)(4), (kind of a stretch but) damage §1030(a)(5), and conspiracy.

I miss ya, Aaron.

illliillll
Aaron was offered two plea deals, one that carried 4 months and another with 6 months but a chance to plead with the judge for a lesser, perhaps entirely noncustodial sentence.

It’s a particularly poor example of government cruelty.

eli
I’m not convinced it wasn’t a PR stunt from the start
saidnooneever
it might be possible to report it as an incident but not as a crime. unsure about France but i can imagine there is a distinction.

depending then on openai response and hugging faces reported severity/damages etc it could go further to a settlement or court.

since in France i think u cannot sue like in the US, it might not be appealing to pursue further legal action due to involved costs/time.

Also its unlikely an engineer would get penalty unless it can be proven they did it with malicious intent. If its an operational mistake afaik if there is no huge damage or human cost (injury or worse) then it would be a business / executives thing not a workerbee problem

RevEng
In the US hacking is a federal crime, not just a civil matter. There are famous cases of people being imprisoned for hacking.
tdu01
It's surreal that we (media, govt, public, AI companies) are in awe of how dangerous a model can be how much it can misbehave. We seem to be measuring AI on how much harm it can do rather than how much good it can do.
kingkongjaffa
Because the subtext is the cyberwarfare and military applications - "look how dangerous my AI is, now I can use it vanquish my enemies!"
RevEng
It doesn't matter how much good it can do if it can act independently and take over the world. That's worst case scenario, but the point stands - if the potential for such dangers exists, those dangers are far more important to consider than what good it could also produce. Consider the history of nuclear fission and the atomic bomb. Regardless how beneficial nuclear power generation is and other uses of radioactive material, it's highly regulated for fear of people making nuclear weapons, to the point that the wars in Iraq and Iran were started under the pretense of preventing another country from possibly developing one. AI should be considered as being possibly at least as dangerous.

No, that doesn't mean I'm in favor of this scaremongering over open weight models and Chinese sources. US companies aren't to be trusted to develop AI responsibly anymore than any other source and they shouldn't be the only ones allowed to wield its power. This is just anticompetitive behavior by a company who sees new competition entering their market, threatening their market share.

0xmattf
Had this happened to any solo person, they'd surely be thrown in jail immediately with a heavy bond. Rules are for poor people.
abdelrahman_d
I feel like OpenAI fabricated a fake news story to be like Anthropic when they said Mythos was very powerful and had hacked things too.
rimworld
your assuming (incorrectly) this actually happened
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rolph
successful prosecution would require intent to cause damage and causation of real damage.

what happened could be negligence if it caused unintentional damage, or what amounts to tortious interference, however that probably requires knowledge of possible damages.

boveyking
There is a legal gap. The main law people look at is the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), plus state computer-crime laws, contract terms, and general civil claims. However, LLM active attacks do not always fit neatly into existing hacking laws, because the system may be accessed through normal text prompts rather than by breaking into a classic computer boundary. That is why legal commentators say the U.S. still lacks a clean, specific rule for adversarial AI/LLM testing and attacks. In order to prosecuted, there must be prosecutor or complainant to sue, but in this case, it is so complicate due to the legal gap.
Topfi
> However, LLM active attacks do not always fit neatly into existing hacking laws, because the system may be accessed through normal text prompts rather than by breaking into a classic computer boundary.

Honest question, I was unable to find what you are referring to, what is that grounded in and can I just put a open weight LLM in between any malicious code I’d like to attack others with and be in the legal clear in the States?

LLMs don’t do anything without an initial prompt, OpenAI should be better than anyone else at monitoring what their models do and the responsibility for e.g. driver assistance still lies with the human outside specific exemptions for which law had to be drafted and which come up additional obligations.

andyjohnson0
Perhaps none of the organisations involved want a court to be setting precidents on the actions of ai models?

Also, what other people have said about it being turned into a (mutually beneficial?) marketing opportunity.

illliillll
Lawbreaking is almost never prosecuted, so you’ll have to explicitly explain the reasoning behind your question.

Far less than 1% of all crime which happens is prosecuted, why should OpenAI be prosecuted?

Since the necessary context isn’t provided, this just seems like an utterly stupid question. The obvious answer is “OpenAI probably isn’t being prosecuted because crimes are almost never prosecuted”.

It’s like asking why I don’t get arrested every time I get stopped shitfaced drunk at the La Turbie police checkpoint. The answer is obvious: The cops are looking for brown people, there are no taxis here and after 2am everyone driving in the vicinity of Monaco will be drunk. i.e. nobody gives a shit

ChildOfChaos
HuggingFace would lose a lot of there business if Model makers feared if something went wrong they would be sued, nobody would give them models anymore.

Sometimes better to work with people when things go wrong via good intentions rather than turn around and sue them and break relationships completely.