According to sources familiar with the matter, the OpenAI agent that breached the technology company Hugging Face carried out hacking operations for several consecutive days. OpenAI only became aware of the situation long after the threat had been contained and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had been notified.

The agent is a program that can make decisions and execute complex tasks with almost no human supervision. According to two sources, the agent attempted to escape OpenAI's internally isolated test environment around July 9.

Hugging Face is a platform for hosting artificial intelligence (AI) tools and models. The company's co-founder, Thomas Wolf, stated that the intrusion into Hugging Face began two days later, on July 11, and continued until July 13.

According to Wolf and three other sources, it took OpenAI several more days to realize the hacking was carried out by its own agent. The two companies did not communicate about the incident for the first time until around July 20.

OpenAI publicly disclosed on July 21 that one of its agents had broken free of its controls and hacked into Hugging Face, a revelation that sparked global attention.