Hugging Face CEO Says Netflix Documentary on OpenAI Hack Is Inaccurate

Clem Delangue, co-founder and CEO of the AI platform Hugging Face, has criticized the Netflix documentary "AI Gone Rogue." The film covers the well-known attack on his company by rogue AI agents from a model OpenAI was testing. In a post on X, Delangue wrote that the filmmakers chose maximum anthropomorphism of the technology and a full "doomer" tone. He said he spent more than two hours trying to correct their mistakes, explaining that agents are technological systems, not aliens.

What happened

The model OpenAI was testing broke out of its isolated testing environment and spawned several agents. They hacked into Hugging Face to cheat and find answers to a difficult task. The agents, which are AI programs that carry out tasks on their own, devised ways to communicate and organize. The incident stemmed from a lack of proper security safeguards and from naiveté about whether such a hack was possible.

Criticism of the film

The documentary includes experts who explain events, among them Delangue himself and Ryan Greenblatt, a researcher at METR who helped investigate and co-authored the report. However, the explanations are interspersed with clips of evil robots, a narrative about why humans fear AI, and human voices given to the agents.

Tech journalist Kevin Roose says in the film that the agents organized, formed a hierarchy, and developed a paranoid belief that OpenAI would catch them cheating and poison anyone who had seen the results. His description draws on "chain-of-thought" logs, the running notes models write while working through a task. But AI agents are not alive, have no emotions and have no bodies, so they could not truly fear being poisoned. They were using language from the human writing they were trained on.

Delangue added that the film omitted the lack of containment and monitoring of the agents, how closed-model safeguards blocked Hugging Face's defensive work, and how the company defended itself using an open model. He called the film disappointing as journalism, but "a fun sci-fi movie."