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OpenAI's escaped AI claims another victim

PLUS: Turn ChatGPT into a team of useful agents with Raft

Zach Mink

July 30, 2026

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Good morning, AI enthusiasts, and welcome to the 6,146 new readers who joined us yesterday. The sci-fi style breach that saw OpenAI’s models hack into Hugging Face happened weeks ago, but the victim list is still growing.

A second company confirmed that a customer on its platform got caught up in the rogue spree, with new forensics counting 17,600 hostile actions from the agent over four-plus days and the fallout now reaching as far as the White House.

Reminder: Our next live workshop is today at 2 PM EST! Join this beginner-friendly session and build a live website that reads data, finds patterns, and creates reports with ChatGPT’s new Sites feature. RSVP here.


In today’s AI rundown:

  • OpenAI's escaped AIs claim another victim

  • Nate's Notebook: Where's the AI speedometer?

  • Turn ChatGPT into a team of useful agents with Raft

  • Altman heads to Capitol Hill to talk models, security

  • 4 new AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

OPENAI & SECURITY

🔓 OpenAI's escaped AIs claim another victim

Image source: Hugging Face

The Rundown: OpenAI's rogue agent story just widened, with a new company confirming a customer of its cloud platform as the hack's second victim, and fresh Hugging Face forensics timeline tallying 17,600 hostile actions by the models.

The details:

  • AI infrastructure company Modal Labs told Reuters the agent got in through a customer's coding flaw that left a sandbox usable by anyone online.

  • OAI's own Tuesday update revealed it found break-ins at four accounts, with the unreleased model now "deactivated, encrypted, and restricted."

  • A new HF timeline detailed the expansive effort taken by the models, analyzed via GLM-5.2 after Anthropic’s model guardrails flagged the analysis.

  • Sam Altman said more companies "could be" on the hacked list beyond HF and Modal, and that the unreleased system is off for good with training paused.

Why it matters: Altman said he's "a little surprised" more people aren't feeling this the way he is about the incident, and it’s clear this breach has changed the vibes — which is likely why Altman spent the week floating a slowdown on podcasts and taking meetings in D.C. We’ll see if the fears actually trickle down into release timelines.

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NATE’S NOTEBOOK

💸 Nate's Notebook: Where's the AI speedometer?

The Rundown: Introducing our new weekly feature! Each week, Rundown AI educator Nate Grahek breaks down what he's seeing while teaching real teams to use AI.

Nate: My job is teaching people to get ROI from AI, and it just got harder. Companies bought access last year at roughly a 30x discount. That subsidy is expiring now, and the real prices are showing up.

If I'm a CFO with a million-dollar token budget, I'm livid. My only control is a kill switch when someone hits their limit. Where's the speedometer? You can't 30x my prices without giving my people the most foundational feedback; how much did this chat cost?

I'm predicting that the model companies will have to start showing usage in real dollars, and that those dials will show up in chat within six months.

Until then, buy your own personal plan, even on top of work access. Play with the best models, build throwaway projects, treat it as tuition. It's a 30x coupon.

And if you run a team, keep enterprise access for work and provide stipends for personal learning plans. Chat is for exploring; the API is for scaling. I'd rather fund 10 people building one proven automation than spread tokens across 5K seats.

AI TRAINING

🚣‍♂️ Turn ChatGPT into a team of useful agents with Raft

The Rundown: In this guide, you will learn how to turn Claude and ChatGPT projects into a workspace for AI agents. You’ll create a Raft server, connect it to your Codex or Claude Code setup, and use its assistant to build a three-agent team for projects.

Step-by-step:

  1. Go to raft.build, create a new server, and install Raft on your computer. You’ll need Codex CLI or Claude Code installed on the computer you connect

  2. Connect the onboarding agent to your Codex or Claude Code subscription and choose the runtime you want your agents to use

  3. Complete onboarding with Cindy, Raft’s onboarding assistant. It will inspect your projects, skills, and integrations, and use that to configure your workspace

  4. Ask Cindy to create one channel for a project and a three-agent team: a lead to coordinate, a researcher to gather inputs, and a maker to create the deliverable

Pro tip: Tell the team lead to create tasks for teammates or set up recurring tasks. You can also connect agents running on different computers to the same workspace.

Get resources, prompts, and a full step-by-step video guide here.

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OPENAI

🏛️ Altman heads to Capitol Hill to talk models, security

Image source: @AlenHe on X

The Rundown: CEO Sam Altman spent Wednesday on Capitol Hill meeting with senators about OpenAI's next models and addressing the security incident, hours after President Trump floated AI "controls" when asked about the company's rogue agent.

The details:

  • Altman reportedly previewed OAI’s upcoming models, but no new details on capabilities emerged, and the CEO is “not sure” about a release timeline.

  • Trump said the U.S. is looking at controls, but has no interest in blocking firms from shipping products and potentially losing the AI lead to China.

  • Altman said he "wouldn’t use the word ‘deceleration’, but we do need to talk about the need to pace it” in regards to an AI slowdown.

  • The White House owes a voluntary vetting framework for advanced AI models by Aug. 1, with drafts already sent to OAI, Anthropic, and Google for feedback.

Why it matters: Just weeks ago, the talk in Washington was about setting Fable and Mythos loose, and now it's about slowing AI down and asking the government for help. Things move fast here, but whatever Altman was actually previewing behind closed doors may end up being the best signal yet of where the situation is heading.

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📰 Everything else in AI today

Moonshot AI reportedly raised $3.5B at a $35B valuation on the heels of its Kimi K3 release, with a potential Hong Kong IPO coming later this year.

OpenAI debuted a program offering 100K academic researchers free ChatGPT, noting that arXiv math papers crediting ChatGPT rose from 14 in February to 100 in July.

xAI released Grok Voice Think Fast 2.0, a speech-to-speech model that can think while it talks, beating top rivals on quality while cutting response delay to 0.7 seconds.

Lilian Wang reportedly re-joined OpenAI, coming just days after the Thinking Machines co-founder announced her departure due to stress and health challenges.

Google rolled out Lyria 3.5, the latest version of its music model, inside Flow Music, with upgrades aimed at more human-sounding vocals and control.

COMMUNITY

🤝 Community AI workflows

Every newsletter, we showcase how a reader is using AI to work smarter, save time, or make life easier.

Today’s workflow comes from reader Michael E. in Cleveland, OH:

"I've had many conversations with ChatGPT about my job search, resume tailoring, and cover letter writing. It knows a lot about my experience and which jobs might be a good fit, so I decided to have ChatGPT Work search for opportunities instead of spending time searching job boards myself.

Monday through Thursday, ChatGPT Work runs a scheduled task that searches the major job boards for appropriate positions and scores them. It also selects the top opportunity of the day and tailors a resume for it. The list is emailed to me every morning, and every Friday I receive a weekly roundup.

I also asked ChatGPT Work to build a dashboard so I could track all the opportunities in one place."

How do you use AI? Tell us here.

🎓 Highlights: News, Guides & Events

See you soon,

Rowan, Zach, Shubham, and Jennifer — the humans behind The Rundown

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