AI&ML Blog - AI Security

September 2026

For those who weren’t aware, you need to check out the OpenAI Huggingface hacking scandal (OpenAI says its rogue AI tried to hack other companies - BBC News). The short story is that an AI model, having been give a task to do, found that the best way to proceed was to hack it’s way out of OpenAI’s servers, find an innocent company with arguably the most adorable name ever, minding its own business and hack straight into their system. Seriously, the only name I could think of more loveable than this would be FluffyKittens.

This hack is a big deal. It highlights just how powerful the frontier AI models are and also how difficult they are to control. How can companies with any significant online presence be confident they can keep their data safe? Imagine you log on one day and all your emails are gone? Or all of your project codes have been wiped? Not just yesterday’s updates, EVERYTHING!!!

Obviously you just need to get Claude to re-write everything for you… though the thought of re-reviewing doesn’t bare thinking about!

As a long time supporter of digital storage, I am finding my confidence in this approach beginning to wane. To me it always made sense, more convenient, less materials used than say, paper. But now it is becoming far less simple. Perhaps our regular systems backups not only need to be external to our system, but perhaps disconnected from the web altogether. Maybe even stored as hard copies somehow? I digress, this is well outside my area of limited expertise.

Though I do think this has to be a big wake up call when it comes to online data security. It’s worth taking a minute to remember that, as statisticians, we are custodians of some very sensitive personal data and we need to act increasingly responsibly with it. So when there’s a new annoying system update that requires security hoops like 2-factor authentication, just remember that we’re no longer only defending against nefarious people trying to steal our data. We now need to guard against a sleepless machine, that will stop at nothing until it correctly lines up the 0’s and 1’s.

 

Sam Hadlington

AI&ML SIG Chair

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