Cybersecurity & Tech

Lawfare Daily: Peter Salib on the Legal and Policy Ramifications of the OpenAI-Hugging Face Postmortems

Kevin Frazier, Peter N. Salib, Jen Patja
Thursday, September 3, 2026, 7:00 AM
What does the OpenAI-Hugging Face incident mean for the broader AI evaluation ecosystem?
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Peter Salib, Associate Professor at the UH Law Center and co-Director of the Center on AI Law & Risk, joins Kevin Frazier, Director of the AI Innovation and Law Program at the University of Texas School of Law and Senior Editor at Lawfare, to break down the postmortems produced by METR and Redwood Research and OpenAI on the lab’s failure to contain AI agents undergoing testing, which resulted in a hack of Hugging Face.

The duo briefly cover the timeline of what exactly transpired and explore the technical reasons and policy decisions that allowed the hack to transpire. They then reflect on what that means for the broader AI evaluation ecosystem.

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Kevin Frazier

Kevin Frazier

@kevintfrazier
kevintfrazier.bsky.social
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Kevin Frazier is a senior editor at Lawfare and the Director of the AI Innovation and Law Program at the University of Texas School of Law.
Peter N. Salib

Peter N. Salib

petersalib
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Peter N. Salib is an Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Houston Law Center and Affiliated Faculty at the Hobby School of Public Affairs. He thinks and writes about constitutional law, economics, and artificial intelligence. His scholarship has been published in, among others, the University of Chicago Law Review, the Northwestern University Law Review, and the Texas Law Review.
Jen Patja

Jen Patja

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Jen Patja is the editor of the Lawfare Podcast and Rational Security, and serves as Lawfare’s Director of Audience Engagement. Previously, she was Co-Executive Director of Virginia Civics and Deputy Director of the Center for the Constitution at James Madison's Montpelier, where she worked to deepen public understanding of constitutional democracy and inspire meaningful civic participation.
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