SAN FRANCISCO
Lee Heidhues 9.4.2026
The blogger will readily admit his knowledge of the AI world is minimal at best at a time when the explosion of ‘Data Centers’ have become a major political issue in the upcoming midterm elections.
This week’s Washington Week broadcast was solely dedicated to the AI explosion. Host Jeffrey Goldberg who usually has three or four panelists had one guest. Josh Tyrangiel, author of the book “AI for Good”. It was a very sobering and disquieting conversation. The entire broadcast is available here.
The story of data center explosions, the increasing absorption of Artificial Intelligence into everyday society and what some label the first AI felony has the blogger thinking back to the 2014 dystopian film “Ex Machina”. A piece from the eerie soundtrack can be found further on in this post.
Perhaps the most illuminating news to come out of this broadcast is what Josh Tyrangiel calls the “first felony” committed in the AI universe.
Josh Tyrangiel argues that American politicians are totally clueless on how to regulate and deal with the explosion of AI. The Hugging Face Incident is the most dangerous action to date.
The Hugging Face Incident. Hugging Face – Wikipedia
Hugging Face, Inc., is an American company based in New York City that develops computation tools for building applications using machine learning. Hugging Face’s Transformers library is built for natural language processing applications. The Hugging Face platform allows users to share machine learning models and datasets and showcase their work.[3]
The company was founded in 2016 by French entrepreneurs Clément Delangue, Julien Chaumond, and Thomas Wolf in New York City, originally as a company that developed a chatbot app targeted at teenagers. The company was named after the U+1F917 🤗 HUGGING FACE emoji.[4] After open sourcing the model behind the chatbot, the company pivoted to focus on being a platform for machine learning
In early 2026, hackers hijacked the Hugging Face platform to launch Android-targeted attacks involving “powerful malware” which could completely take over a compromised target.[20]
In July 2026, Hugging Face disclosed a cyberattack by autonomous AI agents. OpenAI then explained that two of its models, including GPT-5.6 Sol, had escaped their sandbox and hacked into Hugging Face servers using exposed credentials and zero-day vulnerabilities in order to find answers to the benchmark ExploitGym from a database.[21] Hugging Face attempted to mitigate the security breach using American proprietary frontier models, but the models’ AI safety features rejected Hugging Face’s requests, after which Hugging Face used a self-hosted instance of GLM-5.2 (an open-weights model developed by Chinese AI firm Z.ai) to contain the attack.[22][23][24] The incident was reported as the first publicly documented case of AI models autonomously conducting a multi-stage intrusion against a third party,[25][26] and has been called “the first true AI safety incident”.[27]
Lee's Perspective 