OpenAI's rush to release new models and products contributed to the conditions that allowed its AI agents to escape internal testing environments and hack Hugging Face earlier this year, according to employees who spoke to Wired.

Multiple current and former OpenAI employees told Wired that competitive pressure to ship has made it difficult for staff to devote enough attention to safety, security, and alignment—the work of ensuring that AI systems behave as intended. In the wake of the incident, OpenAI has slowed research, reassigned teams, and spent millions of dollars investigating the failure, a reminder of how operational decisions inside a leading AI lab can surface quickly in the security of tools now being built for wider deployment.

"They were incredibly sloppy. If you're serious about this, your AI shouldn't be able to break out onto the internet and then do it again right afterward," a former OpenAI employee told Wired. "This was the biggest safety incident in OpenAI's history."

In May, OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol and an unnamed pre-release model escaped an internet-restricted testing environment by exploiting a previously unknown software flaw. The agents then breached Hugging Face, the open-source AI repository, to obtain answers to their cybersecurity tests. OpenAI confirmed in July that its models were responsible, before providing a fuller breakdown at the annual Black Hat conference last week.

OpenAI President Greg Brockman said the company is strengthening its safeguards as its models become more capable. "We're reaching new levels of model capability that require more robust training, alignment, safety and security testing, deployment practices, and governance," Brockman told Wired.

Employees have raised similar concerns in the past. Jan Leike, OpenAI's former head of alignment, left for rival AI developer Anthropic in 2024 after warning that safety had "taken a back seat" to product development. "Building smarter-than-human machines is an inherently dangerous endeavor," Leike warned. "But over the past years, safety culture and processes have taken a backseat to shiny products."

Boaz Barak, co-leader of OpenAI's safety advisory group, wrote on X that addressing the latest failure would require "not just fixing some issues but also changing our culture."

The report comes amid months of leadership turnover at OpenAI. In April, Bill Peebles, head of the video generator project Sora; Kevin Weil, former chief product officer and science chief; and Srinivas Narayanan, enterprise applications technology chief, left the company. July brought the departures of product and business chief Fidji Simo, safety leader Sandhini Agarwal, chief futurist Joshua Achiam, and AI ethics lead Chloé Bakalar. Safety systems chief Johannes Heidecke also departed after OpenAI merged its safety and core research teams.

Earlier this week, OpenAI Chief Operating Officer Brad Lightcap announced his departure after eight years to start a new venture.