As an old-school newshound — meaning I can remember typewriters — I am familiar with the old newsroom saying, “If you don’t like the news, just wait a few minutes.”

Lately, I find myself waiting more than a few minutes for another shoe to drop in a present-day saga widely referred to as the “Hugging Face” breach.

Or perhaps you’ve heard it referred to as the “rogue” OpenAI agent, although I still have questions about just how how rogue it was, since it seems to have been doing only what it was designed to do, like it or not.

The story came out July 21, when tech giant OpenAI revealed in a blog post that an autonomous AI agent powered by OpenAI models, as part of a test to quantify its cyber capabilities — namely, its capabilities for “advanced exploitation using complex attack paths” — did its job perhaps a bit too aggressively.

On its own, which is what “autonomous” means, the agent broke out of its test environment, known to the techies as a “sandbox,” and jumped over to the internet, where it discovered leaked usernames and passwords to accounts it used to break into another company, Hugging Face, an online hub for AI models and datasets, where it looked for hidden answers to the benchmarks it was trying to solve.

Hugging Face, for its part, published a forensic timeline, describing how the autonomous AI system spent four and a half days executing 17,600 distinct hacking actions across multiple organizations —........

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