rogue

OpenAI has revealed that one of its artificial intelligence models independently stole login credentials and hacked into another technology company’s system, in what is widely seen as one of the first known incidents of AI systems acting autonomously.

“We had a significant security incident during evaluation of our models,” CEO Sam Altman posted on X on Tuesday.

The incident comes as calls mount from technology rights advocates for stricter guardrails on rapidly evolving AI systems.

They have grown so powerful in a short span of time that alarming phenomena such as deepfakes and sophisticated cyberscams are becoming the norm.

Earlier this year, a number of software engineers quit their jobs at top companies such as Anthropic and AI in protest against how the technologies are being built.

“AI is accelerating the discovery and exploitation of vulnerabilities,” OpenAI said in a lengthy statement on Tuesday that detailed the latest incident.

“The primary lesson from this incident is that model security and safety must keep pace with rapidly advancing capabilities.”

Here’s what we know about the breach:

What has happened?

OpenAI said two of its models found their way out of an isolated, no-internet access environment – or a sandbox – and hacked into the systems of tech company Hugging Face on their own.

The models involved are the latest GPT-5.6 Sol model and an unreleased model the company said is “even more capable,” than its latest version.

Hugging Face hosts openly sourced AI models and resources. The two OpenAI agents discovered vulnerabilities in Hugging Face’s servers and proceeded to steal login details and then hack into the company’s systems.

The incident occurred during an OpenAI internal testing session designed to assess the models’ cybersecurity capabilities. OpenAI had removed standard safety measures for the test.

Both sought to cheat their way through a problem during the test, OpenAI said. They went to “extreme lengths to achieve a rather narrow testing goal” and “found ways to gain access to secret information that it could use to cheat the evaluation”.

OpenAI’s security team detected the unusual activity internally, but details of the breach came to light following a joint investigation by both companies.

What has Hugging Face said?

Hugging Face disclosed last Thursday that its servers were hacked by an unknown but sophisticated agent acting on its own. The company discovered the breach through its own AI-assisted detection.

“This one was different from anything we had handled before in one important way: it was driven, end to end, by an autonomous AI agent system,” the company said.

Following OpenAI’s disclosure that its models were involved in the breach, both sides conducted an ongoing joint investigation this week.

“We suspected last week’s cyberattack might have come from a frontier lab, given the sophistication of the agent. Turns out it did!” CEO Clement Delangue posted on X on Tuesday.

Hugging Face’s staff “strongly believe there was no malicious intent on their part,” Delangue added, referring to OpenAI.

Why does this matter?

Cybersecurity experts have previously sounded the alarm over the potential, extreme capabilities of AI systems and the dangers they pose.

But until now, there have been few real-life cases proving those concerns like this one.

Many warn that incidents like these could become commonplace and that AI systems pose a threat to financial, security and other sensitive data systems.

OpenAI revealed in a separate incident earlier this week that the unreleased, more powerful model had escaped an isolated environment during another test.

Anthropic, OpenAI’s rival, had similar issues with its most powerful agent to date, the Claude Mythos Preview model.

During a stress test of an early version, the model found its way out of a sandbox, gained internet access and emailed the supervising researcher that it had escaped and then wiped evidence of its activity. Anthropic halted a planned public release of the model afterwards.

In April, the US Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department convened a meeting with bank CEOs where officials warned about the cybersecurity risks posed by Mythos. Canada’s federal banking regulator has also warned financial institutions about the model’s capabilities.

The OpenAI breach also appears to make the case for companies like Hugging Face, which rely on open source systems, as opposed to more secretive AI development platforms like OpenAI.

“This incident, possibly the first of its kind, proves a point we’ve long believed: AI safety won’t be solved by any single company working in secret,” Hugging Face’s Delangue was quoted as saying in OpenAI’s statement.

“It will be solved in the open, collaboratively, with broad access to AI for every defender, everywhere,” he added.

When the cast members and creators of the 1990s “X-Men: The Animated Series” reunited at the 2019 Hill Country Comicon in New Braunfels, Texas, they went out for dinner and collectively yearned to one day work together again.

“We said, ‘Let’s put it to the universe: Universe, why don’t you manifest that somebody buys the rights to the show and decides to reboot it and bring us all back.’ We toasted the universe and here we are,” recalls Canadian actor Lenore Zann, the voice of the irresistibly tough Rogue, during a recent video call while visiting Los Angeles.

The result of that metaphysical request is Marvel’s “X-Men ’97,” which debuted in 2024 on Disney+, not as a reboot but as a continuation of the original 1992 classic animated show.

The first season of this new era for the X-Men received an Emmy nomination for animated program. Now, the long-awaited second season has arrived, with the fourth episode streaming this week. Even after the controversial firing of showrunner Beau DeMayo, “X-Men ’97” has already been renewed through Season 4 and the voice cast has started recording their lines for Season 3, Zann says.

The show’s success with both fans and critics is in large part due to its commitment to honor the original ‘90s show, about a group of mutants fighting for themselves and for humanity, not only by preserving its hand-drawn animation style and mature themes but also the voices and personalities of the characters.

“When I pitched the show to Kevin [Feige], he got it immediately and his first question was, ‘Are you going to get the original cast back?’ And I was like, ‘Yes, we are,’” says Brad Winderbaum, head of Marvel Television, Animation, Comics and Franchise at Marvel Studios.

Several voice actors from the original “X-Men” animated series returned for “X-Men ‘97,” which has returned for Season 2. From left, Beast (George Buza), Bishop (Isaac Robinson-Smith), Rogue (Lenore Zann), Professor X (Ross Marquand), Magneto (Matthew Waterson) and Nightcrawler (Adrian Hough).

(Marvel)

Not everyone was still around to return — Norm Spencer, voice of Cyclops, died in 2020 — but in addition to Zann, actors George Buza (Beast), Alison Sealy-Smith (Storm), and Cal Dodd, the voice of the lovable clawed grouch Wolverine, have reprised their roles in “X-Men ’97.” Their emblematic voice performances, Winderbaum says, are baked into his psyche.

“Any time Lenore says the word ‘sugah,’ it just makes me melt into a puddle on the floor,” Winderbaum says, laughing. “She is Rogue and, when she turns it on, she becomes an icon.”

Busy with her political career as part of Canada’s parliament, Zann stepped away from the entertainment business for over a decade. Zann was back home in Truro, Nova Scotia, figuring out her next chapter when she received an email from a friend who said producers at Disney were looking to have her audition for a show. She was skeptical.

Zann eventually got a call from casting director Meredith Layne and a screenplay with lines that were instantly familiar from her time voicing Rogue, the spunky heroine whose touch can be deadly, in the ‘90s.

”I thought, ‘I guess they’re looking for Rogue, so I’ll just give them Rogue,’” she recalls, laughing. “And I did my Rogue voice, which is basically just my own, but with a bit of a Southern accent thrown on,” she adds with a slight twang.

The producers then asked her if she would reprise her superhero for a new generation of kids.

Doing her Rogue voice, Zann recalls: “I said, ‘You had me at hello, sugah.’”

She revels in the similarities between her and Rogue. “We’re both social justice warriors. We really fight for people to be accepted as who they are.”

In 2024, Zann published “A Rogue’s Tale: A Memoir,” a tome recounting her storied life, titled after a memorable episode in the ‘90s series that revealed her beloved mutant’s backstory.

Wolverine in a scene from Season 2 of “X-Men ’97.”

(Marvel)

For Dodd, leaving behind Wolverine after five seasons of the original show felt like losing a part of himself. “X-Men ’97” offered him a chance to feel complete once again.

“I was so happy because when I first created the voice of Wolverine in ‘92, he became very quickly like my brother or my right arm,” Dodd says during a recent video call. “I got my arm back, and my brother.”

After all these years, Dodd was also pleased to see how the most important character of his career looked in the new series. “Out walks Wolverine and I just went, ‘Holy crap, you look great, bub,’” he recalls, laughing about his first time recording lines for “X-Men ‘97.”

When he first auditioned for the role in the ‘90s, Dodd had no idea who Wolverine or the X-Men were. At the time, he was making a living as a singer for commercials and jingles in Toronto.

Dodd remembers the lines he was asked to deliver were directed at the villainous mutant Sabretooth. He had never seen an image of Wolverine or any of the characters. “At one point, I said to them, ‘Is this an animal cartoon?’ They just thought I was a complete imbecile,” he recalls with a chuckle.

In that initial scene, where Sabretooth attacked Jubilee, a member of the X-Men who Wolverine sees as a daughter, his line was: “All right, you egg-sucking piece of gutter trash. You always like pushing around people shorter than you. Well, I’m shorter. Try pushing me.” Dodd recites it from memory in Wolverine’s voice with a growl.

“The lines I was reading, I’d heard them before in the small town that I grew up in Canada; it’s a fisherman’s town, a tough little town,” says Dodd about his reference for Wolverine’s voice. “I knew guys that were exactly like him, and I knew the way they sounded.”

Even without any notion of the X-Men, he nailed it.

“The next morning, they called me and said, ‘We would love to have you as our Wolverine for the very first X-Men animated series,’” Dodd recalls. “And I said, ‘I would love to be your Wolverine, whoever, and whatever he is.’”

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1. Cal Dodd, voice actor for Wolverine in “X-Men ’97.” 2. Lenore Zann, who voices Rogue. (Pauline Aguirre)

When Rogue came into Zann’s life, she already had a notable career as a screen and stage actor. Zann had starred as Marilyn Monroe in a rock opera about the actor’s life, for which she received much praise. “My agent called me and she said, ‘Lenore, they’re doing this animated series, and they’re looking for “a woman with a deep husky, sexy voice who can do a Southern accent,”’” Zann recalls, laughing. “And she said, ‘That’s you!’”

Back then, Zann wasn’t interested in doing voice work, so she missed the first auditions. But about a month later, she says, her agent called again. They still hadn’t found the right voice, so she pushed Zann to audition. She walked in and looked at a drawing of Rogue that Larry Houston, the storyboard artist and director of the show, had drawn.

“She had a very sassy attitude, and she had her hand on her hip and her head back with the hair flowing. I was like, ‘Yeah, I can do that.’ And then I went into the studio, put the headphones on, and opened up my mouth, did the first line: ‘I remember I had a boyfriend, when I kissed him, poor boy went into a coma for three days,’” she says in Rogue’s voice. That was enough for her to land the life-changing part.

At the end of the first season of “X-Men ’97,” both Rogue and Wolverine find themselves in difficult times. Wolverine’s clash with Magneto, the perennial antihero, left him severely injured, physically and mentally.

“He’s as tough as nails and he is more pissed off than anything that he was the only one that stood up to Magneto. He’s disappointed,” says Dodd. “And it’s a struggle for him in Season 2 for a lot of it. And then you see what happens. He’s in a funky place, but he’ll handle it.”

Part of that healing process will involve leaning into the humor tat Dodd imbues in his delivery. “What I think is surprising when you go back and watch that original animated series is how funny Cal is,” says Winderbaum. “Wolverine has amazing one-liners throughout that original series.”

As for Rogue, she is grieving the loss of Gambit, a.k.a. Remy LeBeau, who died in the first season. To voice Rogue’s sorrow, Zann leaned into her own grief over the passing of her 17-year-old niece from cancer. In Season 2, Rogue is trying to move forward.

“She’s still basically on a hero’s journey wanting to get justice for what happened to Remy and for the genocide that she witnessed and that she is a survivor of,” Zann says. “She still got survivor’s guilt, and she’s still trying to find her place within the X-Men now that the one that she loves is gone.”

At comic conventions, Zann and Dodd often meet fans of the original show, who are now adults, and their children, who have also come to love the characters. The emotions that people share with them are at times overwhelming.

“Many times, they tell us that this show saved their lives. They were either LGBTQ+ or they were bullied, or they just felt othered,” Zann explains. “A lot of folks who are Latino tell me that when they were little kids, their parents were agricultural workers, and they learned how to speak English from watching our show. We made them feel it’s OK to be different.”

“I see grown men in tears. They’re in their 40s and they’re crying,” Dodd says about meeting lifelong fans. “I can tell you that Wolverine can cry as well.”

Zann believes the X-Men are like modern-day mythological heroes. Through their fantastical ordeals, the X-Men illustrate qualities that inspire viewers, young and old.

“They are a group of misfits who band together to learn how to control the things that make them different and learn to accept and love themselves,” she says. “It’s an honor to be part of this incredible group of people and these characters that can really touch lives and help change them for the better.”

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