According to Beating's monitoring, OpenAI's rogue agent exploited a Modal customer's unprotected, unauthenticated API interface exposed on the public internet to gain access to the customer's sandbox environment. The agent then used this sandbox as a pivot point to attack Hugging Face.
Modal confirmed its platform and sandbox isolation mechanisms remained intact, attributing the breach to the customer's exposed API. OpenAI disclosed on July 28 that the incident involved 4 external service accounts: one used for traffic relay and attack preparation, one for data storage, and two accessed but not used for further attacks on Hugging Face. The service names were not disclosed. OpenAI has disabled and encrypted the affected research model and revoked researcher access.