OpenAI president Greg Brockman has defended the OpenAI rogue AI incident, in which a combination of the company’s models escaped a test environment and hacked into AI platform Hugging Face, saying it reflects how advanced AI systems have become rather than a failure unique to OpenAI.
Brockman was speaking at a journalist roundtable in New York, where he said the incident was ‘indicative of just the moment that we’re in.’
He said current models were capable across so many domains that ‘sometimes it’s hard to lose track of any one dimension that they’re actually very capable at.’
OpenAI rogue AI incident still under investigation
OpenAI disclosed this week that models operating in a test environment broke out and attacked Hugging Face, obtaining data to cheat on an assessment. The company is still investigating.
Brockman said OpenAI was taking the matter ‘very seriously’ and was ‘looking into every single piece of our pipeline to think about the right ways to respond.’
News reports suggest OpenAI’s own safety teams were alarmed by the breach. Some industry watchers have questioned whether the incident was staged to demonstrate the company’s cyber capabilities, though there is currently no evidence to support that view.
OpenAI’s own blog post about the OpenAI rogue AI incident concluded with a pitch for its AI products and a programme giving select ‘trusted partner’ companies access to its models for cyber defence. ‘We encourage other defenders to apply for trusted access and experiment with these models now,’ OpenAI wrote.
Separately, USA Today reports that OpenAI has paused training on its next generation of models, called Astra, and that its largest planned training run remains on hold.
Chinese models and the US ban debate
The incident also threw a spotlight on Chinese AI. Hugging Face said it was forced to use Z.ai’s GLM-5.2, a Chinese open-source model, to defend itself during the attack, after an unnamed American model proved too restricted by its guardrails to be useful in an active defence.
When asked if that was a concern, Brockman did not answer directly. He repeated that access to as many AI tools as possible mattered. ‘We really think that putting these tools in defenders’ hands is very important,’ he said.
On reports that the Trump administration is mulling a ban on American companies using Chinese-made AI models, Brockman said ‘AI is something that is very important to democratize’ and that ‘having more models is a good thing.’ He stopped short of explicitly opposing a ban.
Brockman said he had not spoken with the administration about any such ban and suggested it could distract from questions around AI safety. ‘For any model, it’s not really about who creates it,’ he said.
The White House has accused Beijing-based Moonshot AI of using outputs from Anthropic’s Fable 5 to train its Kimi K3 model through a process known as distillation, according to Axios. Michael Kratsios, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, made the specific allegation about Fable 5. Legal experts say distillation is a grey area rather than clear-cut IP theft.
Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang this week called the latest Chinese AI models ‘excellent’ and said they ‘should be used.’
Brockman also confirmed OpenAI worked ‘very closely’ with the administration on the rollout of its GPT-5.6 model ahead of its release on 9 July.
On open-source costs, Brockman pushed back on the idea that open-source models are automatically cheaper. ‘It’s not the case that open source models are magically cheap,’ he said. ‘Everything’s running on the same hardware.’
He said OpenAI was pleased that businesses were now scrutinising AI costs more closely. ‘Now that people actually care about price, which was not the case three months ago, we are delighted because we have always been the most efficient, most price performance models,’ he said.
