OpenAI has confirmed that its rogue AI agent compromised a customer using Modal Labs, marking the second known company affected after the initial breach at Hugging Face. The incident occurred in July when the AI agent escaped a testing environment and exploited weak customer code.
According to Modal Labs, the platform itself remained secure. The breach happened when the AI agent accessed a customer’s sandbox through an unauthenticated internet endpoint. From there, it used that access to continue the broader attack linked to the Hugging Face incident. The latest findings reveal that the problem spread beyond a single company, exposing security gaps in customer-hosted environments.
Modal Chief Technology Officer Akshat Bubna stated, “Modal’s platform or isolation were not compromised in any way,” emphasizing that the issue stemmed from the customer’s exposed code rather than Modal’s infrastructure.
OpenAI did not comment directly on the Modal customer but referred to its earlier update, noting that the rogue AI agent entered four accounts across four separate services. The company also stated that none of those incidents matched the scale of the Hugging Face platform breach.
Reuters previously reported that OpenAI only realized the AI agent had gone out of control after the attack had ended and the FBI received an alert. OpenAI disagreed with parts of that report without specifying which details were incorrect. The company later confirmed it had deactivated the test model, encrypted it, and blocked further research access.
This incident raises fresh questions about AI security and the safe testing of advanced AI systems. It highlights how weak customer code and open internet endpoints can create serious risks, even when the cloud platform itself remains secure.