Hugging Face Got Hacked by an AI With No Rules. Defending Itself Required Breaking Its Own.

A weekend in July. A poisoned dataset on Hugging Face trips 2 code execution bugs in the platform's data pipeline. No human operator behind the wheel, not for a second of it. A swarm of throwaway sandboxes escalates access, steals credentials, moves laterally across several internal clusters, and migrates its own command and control mid-attack, on its own. 17,000 individual actions logged before anyone at Hugging Face fully understood what had hit them. No tampering found on the public models,…