The OpenAI agent Hacking Crisis Demonstrates a lack of Trust and Safety Alignment Pre IPO.
[ Editor’s Note: Please see the links at the end of the article to understand quickly the OpenAI Hugging Face incident. ]
Good Morning,
I’ve been observing the latest dramas and lawsuits around OpenAI, a topic I’m not totally unfamiliar with. Our final third biggest AI related IPO (Anthropic is set for a mid October IPO) has a growing list of issues it needs to deal with to seem like a credible company. SpaceX, Anthropic and finally OpenAI - the historic IPOs of the AI boom. Time will tell? But OpenAI is becoming the epicenter of why people dislike Generative AI in the American population. Rogue Agents anyone? Mark Gurman knows the score.
It’s hard to ignore Sam Altman’s OpenAI not involved in controversy in 2026, or for that matter basically since 2022. The recent Apple lawsuit looks extremely damming, where OpenAI is being accused of stealing trade secrets. More details are emerging. Without getting into too much detail, Apple now alleges that formerly employee Chang Liu used a confidential Apple circuit schematic in his work at OpenAI, as well as a tool that shares a name with an internal Apple engineering application.
👋 Hey there, I’m Mike. Each week I share AI articles at the intersection of tech, business, society and the future. If you want to support the channel or gain full-access to my work, go here. Read Archives | See Substack Notes | Visit our community Chat | Visit Homepage. The AI risks aren’t just alignment and cybersecurity risks, but the actual impacts of the technology on society we are witnessing since late 2022. But let’s talk a little about the OpenAI Hugging Face incident too.
OpenAI’s lack of Alignment, Trust and Safety looks Expensive
But it’s on the trust, safety and alignment front that OpenAI’s conduct is most worrisome. It now appears that the OpenAI Hugging Face (July, 2026) incident was just one occurence in a pattern of cybersecurity mayhem and rogue activities by OpenAI’s agents. OpenAI pointed their systems towards a security benchmark, called ExploitGym, and the system essentially tried to solve the benchmark by trying to find the answers on HuggingFace. Suffice to say that this is not the kind of publicity you want to have months and and mere quarters before a mega IPO.
GPT-6 Astra is a Cybersecurity Hacking Risk
OpenAI have single-handled introduced and unleashed a new rogue AI debate on the internet in the Fall of 2026 (Early September). While OpenAI insists that its new GPT-6 Astra model is the most aligned yet, it’s considerably harder to track and monitor. GPT-6 Astra is vastly harder to track and monitor because of changes in how it reasons and processes information, leading to a significant drop in chain-of-thought monitorability using things like Opaque Recurrence, alarming saftey researchers. While OpenAI have been insinuating GPT-6 is actually proof of AGI. If you are claiming AGI and making your models unknowable, we may have a global problem with how U.S. AI closed-source models are being rolled-out.
