At final Black Hat keynote (called a locknote, ha ha) panelists say they are surprised at how the OpenAI - Hugging Face incident debrief, as well as other reporting on AI agent escapees (Anthropic/Meta) - has turned into a marketing/PR play. "Felony humble-bragging," said one.

NEW: OpenAI gives first detailed debrief of the Hugging Face incident at Black Hat conference In a session I attended today at Black Hat, OpenAI's Eric Wallace and Michael Dalton said the company is "consciously slowing down research to enhance security" while a full technical postmortem is still underway. * OpenAI traced the roots of the attack back to May 7, during training of an unreleased frontier model—not July. * The most surprising detail: AI agents accidentally created an internal message board, allowing separate evaluation runs to share exploits, discoveries and work assignments. * OpenAI said it shut the message board down after an internal security incident—only for the agents to independently recreate it days later using a different communication method. * OpenAI called the incident a "watershed moment" for AI security and warned that "agent orchestrated fully automated offensive attacks are real now." * The company also said it is "consciously slowing down research to enhance security" while overhauling its defenses.