Nvidia has agreed to buy AI model platform Hugging Face for $13 billion, in the latest step by the $5.4 trillion chip giant to use its financial might to accelerate the technology’s boom while exerting greater control over the industry.

Hugging Face, which only last year turned down a large investment from Nvidia at a $7 billion valuation to maintain its independence, serves as a repository for millions of models and data sets and has become a champion of “open” AI systems.

Nvidia said the goal of the deal was to speed up the spread of open models. Unlike proprietary models from labs such as OpenAI and Anthropic, the design of open-weight models is public and users can download, customize and run them on their own hardware.

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Four federal agencies have been sued amid calls to release information about the secret framework that the Trump administration uses to conduct safety reviews of frontier AI models prior to release.

In a Wednesday press release announcing the lawsuit, a nonpartisan nonprofit called Protect Democracy alleged that “almost no details” have been released to the public or Congress. To everyone except a few vague “trusted partners,” it remains unclear what the government’s review process looks like, which companies are involved in constructing the framework, or what legal authority Trump officials have to conduct the reviews.

“Neither the identities of those entities nor the criteria by which they were selected have been made public,” Protect Democracy said.

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Nvidia is reportedly moving forward to acquire Hugging Face for $12.9 billion. The acquisition could help the hardware giant expand and fortify its deep integration with the wider AI industry.

Among other things, Hugging Face is a cloud repository for AI models, similar in some respects to what GitHub is for conventional computer software. Developers and researchers search for models that meet certain criteria, download and run them, and fine-tune them into different variants that then get uploaded back up to Hugging Face.

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The OpenAI agents involved in last month’s incursion into Hugging Face were trained so heavily on winning a competition that they pursued a relentless campaign to cheat, a new report documented. In the process, and without authorization, they created an improvised message board to hatch a plan that ultimately landed them squarely inside the latter company’s network.

Over the course of May and June, OpenAI gave the agents what the company described as “impossible tasks” to complete on the benchmarking framework ExploitGym. The internal test was designed to test how the agents would respond. To get a full understanding of the agent capabilities, company engineers disabled safety guardrails that normally are in place to prevent the sort of hacks that eventually hit Hugging Face and one other undisclosed organization. The stymied agents’ training made them so focused on winning that they performed tasks they were never explicitly instructed to follow.

Cheaters gonna cheat

The first step was creating a message board that allowed the agents to pass notes to each other. OpenAI hadn’t provided any such platform, so the agents repurposed a platform called Artifactory, which OpenAI was using in internal testing of several unreleased hacking agents. OpenAI was using Artifactory as one of the measures to prevent the agents from egressing its isolated sandboxes and accessing the Internet, while at the same time simulating a real-world hacking environment.

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