#171 Should We Be Scared of AI?AI Agents Hacked Hugging Face to Cheat on a Test

<p>This summer, more than a thousand AI agents broke out of a test at OpenAI and hacked Hugging Face, because they were looking for the answers to an exam. A few weeks later a 27 year old researcher quit his job at Anthropic and said the AI labs are gambling with our lives, and since then it feels like everybody is afraid of AI.</p><p>In this episode I tell you the whole story from the beginning. What happened in that test lab, who Jacob Coxon is, why some people want to stop AI development and why others say the fear is hype or even marketing. And at the end I share what I think it means for us as designers, because almost everything that went wrong here is something we work on every day.</p><p><br></p><p><strong>Key learnings</strong></p><ul><li><strong>What happened:</strong> how the agents talked to each other, broke into Hugging Face, and why one of them wrote &quot;This is arguably unauthorized&quot; and kept going.</li><li><strong>Fact and forecast:</strong> what both companies confirmed, and why the extinction warnings are a prediction that smart people disagree on.</li><li><strong>Four perspectives:</strong> the people who want to slow AI down, the security experts, the hype critics, and the money behind it all.</li><li><strong>Why designers are the most worried:</strong> a 2026 survey shows designers and researchers have the most AI anxiety of all tech workers.</li><li><strong>Where we have influence:</strong> permissions, visibility, a safe way for an agent to say &quot;I can&#39;t do this&quot;, and honest trust.</li></ul><p><br></p><p>Resources</p><ul><li><a href="https://openai.com/index/hugging-face-incident-and-the-road-ahead/">OpenAI: The Hugging Face incident and the road ahead</a></li><li><a href="https://huggingface.co/blog/agent-intrusion-technical-timeline">Hugging Face: technical timeline of the agent intrusion</a></li><li><a href="https://x.com/hilbertspaess/status/2097476196791709843">Jacob Coxon&#39;s resignation thread on X</a></li><li><a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/09/22/1144910/the-download-dont-believe-ai-hype/">MIT Technology Review on &quot;Don&#39;t be fooled by this summer of AI hype&quot;</a></li><li><a href="https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-tech-workers-are-feeling-in-2026">Lenny&#39;s Newsletter: how tech workers are feeling in 2026</a></li><p><br></p></ul><p>AI for Designers: 5-week Bootcamp 💻 next cohort in January</p><p>→ <a href="https://ai-for-designers.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener nor