Cyberattacks threaten to make open source AI a little less open, Hugging Face exec warns

Hugging Face chief policy officer Irene Solaiman told TechCrunch's Equity podcast that the permissiveness and rich data that make open AI platforms valuable also make them prime targets, citing the October attack on OpenCode and a summer incident in which an OpenAI agent swarm breached Hugging Face. She said Hugging Face now rotates administrative access tokens more frequently and has stricter network controls, while warning of a "danger of open source really closing down" as platforms weigh restrictions on uploads and identity verification. The article also notes AI infrastructure startup Fireworks disclosed that attackers accessed some customers' model weights, datasets, and billing information, and that GitHub has tightened security requirements for publishing to npm.