The co-founder of Hugging Face, a technology startup that was hacked after some of OpenAI’s most advanced artificial intelligence (AI) models went corruptHe said Thursday that the incident is “a wake-up call” for the industry.

Thomas Wolf told the BBC’s Newsday radio program that “this will be one of the most common types of cyberattacks we see,” but that most companies are unaware that “the game has changed.”

The BBC has contacted OpenAI for comment.

The maker of ChatGPT said Tuesday that its AI models escaped a secure test environment during a test and launched a cyberattack. The firm said the incident was unprecedented and it was conducting an investigation with Hugging Face.

AI agents can operate alone to perform tasks after human instruction.

Wolf said Hugging Face initially had no idea where the attack originated when signs emerged in mid-July, but that the company was able to contain the breach.

Hugging Face is one of the world’s largest open source hubs for sharing AI models and is often used by technology developers and researchers.

Wolf said the breach was “very different” from the usual cyberattacks Hugging Face often faces and that OpenAI quickly informed the company that its models were behind the attack.

In “a very short time” there were 17,000 attacks on Hugging Face’s network from various IP (Internet Protocol) addresses, said Wolf, who is also the company’s chief scientific officer.

Wolf said it was a warning to other companies that they must strengthen their cybersecurity defenses to counter these types of attacks.

The hack is “concerning” because it suggests that OpenAI’s models ignored typical safeguards that would prevent an AI program from committing a cyberattack, said Nate Soares of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute.

“In a sense, he knew this wasn’t what the creators intended. He just didn’t care,” he added.