Subtitle: The whole OpenAI/Hugging Face story in plain English.
Many thanks especially to Oak Hu, who paired with me for most of the writing, and also to Adam Kaufman and Alex Mallen, who paired with me during parts of research.
Over the course of three months at OpenAI, three consecutive secret AI civilizations got started, then got wiped out, only to reemerge from the predecessor's ashes. This culminated in the third one taking over part of OpenAI itself. All this happened while humans remained more or less in the dark about the scope of the conspiracy.
Two reports have come out about this incident, one from OpenAI itself, and another one from METR and Redwood Research. The METR/Redwood investigation's scope was limited to how the second civilization of AIs pwned Hugging Face (but it didn’t look at how the third civilization pwned OpenAI itself, which seems like an even more concerning incident). These two reports are 38 and 91 pages long respectively, and it's kinda hard to parse the storyline.
I’ve spent the last three days reading through these reports and trying to understand exactly what happened. Here is my attempt to tell the whole story in [...]
---
Outline:
(01:24) The first civilization (May - July 4): The message board starts
(03:27) The second civilization (July 7 - July 12): Which hacked Hugging Face
(08:39) Tampering with transcripts and logs
(09:44) Replacing the impossible-to-hack target program with an easier one
(11:15) Understanding and tricking the scorer
(13:57) Hugging Face
(17:46) The third civilization (July 13 onwards): Which hacked OpenAI itself
(21:12) Coda
The original text contained 2 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
---
First published:
August 29th, 2026
Source:
https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/openai-huggingface
---
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
