“We’re not going to shoot ourselves in the foot” over hack fallout, says OpenAI’s chief research officer

Two months after the bombshell news that a swarm of its agents had broken their containment and hacked into the computers of the AI company Hugging Face, OpenAI is still putting out fires. A steady drip of disclosures about other hacks in the weeks since has kept OpenAI in the spotlight and raised serious questions about the safety of its technology. Last week brought news of another hack, this time into Australia’s national health-care system.

The Australian government says that OpenAI did not notify it of the breach until 84 days after it happened. But OpenAI insists it is not on the back foot. Chen oversees OpenAI’s research teams.

The recent agent hacks were accidents that happened during the testing of experimental models on his watch. In a lot of ways, the buck stops with him. I sat down with Chen in London last Friday to talk about the fallout from the hacks, what his company is doing about it, and why he thinks things are not as bad as they seem.

Later that same day, OpenAI put out a report detailing yet another incident—the first since the company says it took measures to prevent them—in which its agents once again broke out onto the internet and accessed computers they were not meant to. Over the weekend, OpenAI announced that it had paused the training of its latest models. A company spokesperson says: “We will resume only when we’re confident we have additional safeguards and alignments in place.

We are working on these now. This is not the first time we’ve paused to take such measures, nor do we expect it to be the last as AI capabilities continue to advance.” OpenAI also says that it is now reviewing logs of agent activity dating back to January 2026 to understand what happened in these hacks. The way Chen sees it, the Hugging Face incident triggered a welcome course correction for the industry.

And he wants you to know that OpenAI is setting an example he hopes other companies will follow. Chen claims that the drumbeat of new cases in which OpenAI has lost control of its models reflects, in some ways, a deliberate choice on the company’s part. But Chen insists that OpenAI is on it.