OpenAI-HuggingFace: A Reproduction & Lessons for Alignment Testing

Stewart Slocum, Malayandi Palan, Christopher Chute, Michael Kim, Benjamin Van Roy

In July 2026, OpenAI's agents coordinated over channels outside their intended environment to breach Hugging Face's secured infrastructure. Could existing alignment testing practices have foreseen this incident? If not, what needs to change? We explore these questions. First, we identify the misaligned behaviors that caused this incident. Then, we show how to elicit these behaviors from publicly available models manually and that auditing agents can do the same if given a large compute budget. Based on our results, we propose directions to improve alignment testing. Concretely, in this project: (1) We reproduce the misaligned AI behaviors that led to the OpenAI-Hugging Face incident in an environment that simulates the original pipelines and tools, with publicly available models. (2) We demonstrate that an auditing agent can elicit similar behaviors given high-level qualitative descriptions. (3) We observe that a key ingredient for doing so is compute. The compute required to reproduce each behavior varies greatly, suggesting that the range of misaligned behaviors that can be successfully elicited scales with compute. (4) We show that a simple in-context reinforcement learning…