When it comes to understanding the OpenAI agent attacks on Hugging Face, and the subsequent disclosures from other models that had the same rogue agent problems, Rich Mogull, chief analyst of the Cloud Security Alliance, is a sure bet to help break through the hype. Mogull sat down with Dark Reading's Becky Bracken at the News Desk to unpack the details surrounding the AI agent escapes, and critically, what it's going to take for cyber defenders to win in this new goal-seeking AI agent world.
Mogull digs into specific strategies aimed at stopping rogue offensive AI attacks, and how defenders can start to implement them today. He also took time to explain the distinction between frontier, proprietary, and open-weight AI models, and the national security and international business implications of rising open-weight Chinese models. If US policy bans emerging models from China, will the US fall behind in research? It's an ongoing debate. The CSA, Mogull stresses, recommends including these open-weight models in any incident-response plan.
These new "industrial accidents," as Mogull characterizes this new flavor of offensive AI agent cyberattack, are here to stay. What happens next is still an open question.
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Dark Reading News Desk With Becky Bracken & Rich Mogull: Full Transcript
This transcript has been edited for clarity, readability, and length by Informa TechTarget's internal AI assistant and human editors. For the full experience, please watch the video.
Dark Reading's Becky Bracken: Hello, everybody, and welcome to the Dark Reading News Desk. We are coming to you here from Black Hat USA 2026. My name is Becky Bracken. I'm a senior editor with Dark Reading and I am very enthusiastic about our next guest, Rich Mogull from the Cloud Security Alliance. He and I just had a recent conversation on our Dark Reading Confidential podcast about the OpenAI Hugging Face debacle. And now he's back, so we can continue that conversation and really talk about the developments that have happened since. Welcome.
Rich Mogull: Thank you. Thanks for having me.
DR's Becky Bracken: Thank you so much for being here. OK. So when we last talked, we thought it was just OpenAI. We thought it was just Hugging Face, but things sort of exploded since then. Yes?
Rich Mogull: I don't even know if I can keep up with the developments. I was getting news reports today of other new ones. So, when we talked last, we knew about OpenAI/Hugging Face, and we had a lot of information from Hugging Face that had been released. OpenAI yesterday told their side of the story.
But in that intermittent time period, Anthropic said that they had three situations that were pretty similar. And then we had the UK's AI Cybersecurity Institute in there testing all the models, which basically cheated on the tests. I think I read that Meta just had the similar issue, but I think Meta, maybe they just want the attention.