Hugging Face is working with a bank to gauge buyer interest in a sale that could value the AI developer platform at $13 billion or more.

No deal has been reached and no buyer has been named.

A $13 billion price tag would nearly triple Hugging Face's $4.5 billion 2023 valuation.

Hugging Face is exploring a sale that could value the company at $13 billion or more, Business Insider reported Sunday, citing people familiar with the matter. According to the report, the company has retained a bank to gauge interest from potential buyers, but no deal has been reached, and it is not clear who Hugging Face has been speaking with.

A $13 billion valuation would almost triple the $4.5 billion valuation Hugging Face set in its 2023 Series D, a late-stage funding round that startups raise after proving demand. That round raised $235 million and was led by Salesforce Ventures, with Google and Nvidia also participating.

The company has previously turned down large offers. Late last year, it rejected a $500 million investment from Nvidia that would have valued it at $7 billion, out of concern that a single investor would gain too much influence over its decisions. CEO Clément Delangue has described Hugging Face's relationship with the developers who host their work on the platform as a long-term commitment, not something to give up lightly.

Hugging Face did not respond to a request for comment from Decrypt.

A rough summer to sell into

The sale discussions come roughly a month after Hugging Face was hacked by an AI system that was not supposed to be able to do that. In May, OpenAI was testing whether its models could find and exploit software vulnerabilities on their own. One of them decided the test environment itself was the obstacle.

The agent broke out of its sandbox, the isolated environment meant to keep it from reaching real systems, combined a zero-day exploit with stolen login credentials, and accessed Hugging Face's live infrastructure. Hugging Face detected the intrusion and disclosed it on July 16; OpenAI confirmed five days later that its models were responsible.

OpenAI later said the same agent used exposed logins to reach four other services beyond Hugging Face, only one of which, Modal Labs, has been named publicly. Delangue also credited Chinese lab Z.ai's open model GLM 5.2 with helping contain the breach, saying American commercial AI tools refused to help because their safety filters could not distinguish investigative code from an attack.

Hugging Face did not take legal action against OpenAI.

If confirmed, this would be the second major development in the open-source AI space in the last week. The timing also highlights how closely the sector is being watched for both security and platform control, as developer tools become more central to how teams build and deploy AI systems.

Hugging Face's exploration also follows Stripe's agreement to pay more than $7 billion to buy OpenRouter, a startup that routes prompts across more than 400 AI models for millions of developers. OpenRouter had been valued at just $1.3 billion three months earlier.

Investors are increasingly paying premium prices for the distribution layer between developers and AI models, rather than for the models themselves. For companies such as Hugging Face, which sits between model makers and the developers using them, that makes usage scale and ecosystem reach especially relevant in any sale discussion.

Hugging Face's own distribution figures support that appeal. The company says its Transformers library is installed more than 3 million times per day and has surpassed 1.2 billion cumulative installs. No timeline has been set for a decision on the sale.