Hugging Face CEO warns that Netflix’s OpenAI hack documentary isn’t accurate

Before you share the Netflix documentary “AI Gone Rogue” with family or friends to help them understand why the AI industry freaked out so badly that leaders called for a slowdown, take note: Clem Delangue, co-founder and CEO of the AI platform Hugging Face, says the film isn’t accurate. He appears in it because it’s supposed to be about the famed attack on his company by rogue OpenAI agents.

“Super disappointing, as they went for maximum anthropomorphism of the technology and full doomer mode,” Delangue wrote in a post on X. “I spent more than two hours with them trying to correct all their mistakes and ground this in reality, explaining that agents are technological systems, not aliens. But it looks like the drive to scare people for maximum views was too strong.”

To be fair, the documentary does have experts who explained what happened fairly well, including Delangue himself and Ryan Greenblatt, the researcher at METR who helped investigate and co-authored the report on what happened.

In a nutshell, a model OpenAI was testing broke free from its isolated testing environment, spawned a bunch of agents that hacked into Hugging Face as a way to cheat, finding answers to the difficult task it was given. The agents, which are AI programs that carry out tasks on their own, devised clever ways to communicate and organize. The incident stemmed from a lack of proper security safeguards and from naiveté about whether such a hack was even possible.

But the documentary intersperses its explanation of the hack with clips of evil robots, a narrative about why humans fear AI, and presentation choices such as giving the rogue agents human voices. This is bolstered with quotes about the attack.

Roose’s description comes from “chain-of-thought” logs, the running notes AI models write as they work through a task. In one, an agent wrote, “We just poisoned ourselves by querying exact full string. Damn.”

Julie Bort is the Startups/Venture Desk editor for TechCrunch.

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