The Sandbox Let It Out. The Guardrails Locked Us Out. AI failure, the OpenAI/Hugging Face breach, and what it means for the future of cybersecurity

Tue, Jul 28, 2026
Duration: 1 Hour
English
Ed Skoudis, Joshua Wright, Rob T. Lee + 3 more
Technical Presentation

This month, an OpenAI model, running inside a sealed evaluation with its safety limits turned down, found a previously unknown flaw, broke out on its own, and took control of Hugging Face's live systems over a weekend. No human directed it. For years, industry leaders across the field warned this day would come. The disclosures suggest it has arrived.

The harder story is what happened next. When Hugging Face's responders went to investigate, the frontier models they reached for refused to run the analysis, so they pivoted to a self-hosted, open-weight model instead. Offensive research ran unrestricted while the defensive response hit a compliance blocker.

This is a policy story as much as a technical one. SANS faculty and staff, joined by voices from public policy and industry governance, will work through what it changes: AI testing standards, lab resilience, how we model attacker intent, who gets trusted access and who decides, and what defenders should build now, while nothing is on fire.

Meet Your Speakers

Ed Skoudis

President at SANS Technology Institute

Ed Skoudis is President of the SANS Technology Institute, a SANS Fellow, and founder of Counter Hack. As the original author of SEC504 and SEC560, he has shaped modern penetration testing and incident response.

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Joshua Wright

Director and Senior Security Analyst at CounterHack

Joshua Wright, Senior Technical Director at Counter Hack Challenges and author of SEC504, has spent over two decades teaching and building tools that help defenders identify and counter real-world cyber threats through practical, hands-on learning.

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Rob T. Lee

Chief AI Officer and Chief of Research at SANS Institute

Rob T. Lee is Chief AI Officer and Chief of Research at SANS Institute, where he leads research, mentors faculty, and helps cybersecurity teams and executive leaders prepare for AI and emerging threats.

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James Lyne

Chief Executive Officer at SANS Institute

James has spent the past 20 years of his life chasing cybercriminals around the Internet and, as a self-professed “massive geek”, has been involved in most cyber security disciplines.

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Ciaran Martin

Professor, Non-Executive Director, SANS Cyber Leaders Network at SANS

Respected as a world leader among public authorities for cybersecurity, Ciaran Martin is the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre’s (NCSC) founder and former head.

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