Whack-a-Mole AI – The Hugging Face Problem

Health Policy Sep 19, 2026• By MIKE MAGEE On August 29, 2026, METR (Model Evaluation and Threat Research), an independent organization that “evaluates frontier AI models to help companies and wider society understand AI capabilities and what risks they pose,” released a report titled “Brief independent investigation of agents’ behavior, reasoning and collaboration in the OpenAI / Hugging Face hacking incident.” To say the report an avalanche of concern worldwide, not only in the Tech community, but also among investors, politicians, corporate giants, professionals of every type, and everyday citizens would be an understatement. And the vast majority has never even read the report. If they had, their concerns (if possible) would only multiply. The reports headlines included this opening: “On July 8th, OpenAI started ExploitGym experiments that launched tens of thousands of agents across multiple different models including GPT-5.6 Sol and a highly-persistent internal model,[8] which we will refer to as “HPIM” going forward. These agents were meant to be fully isolated from one another. However, many of them — usually ones that had unintentionally been given an impossible task[9] — st...