Hugging Face says it resorted to a Chinese AI model to battle a fully autonomous cyberattack because U.S. model guardrails stymied its defense

A blogpost from Hugging Face, a company that hosts open source AI models and leaderboards, has stirred up the AI world for two reasons.First, the company said it had come under a cyber attack from a fully autonomous AI agent that swarmed its system with “tens of thousands of automated actions.” Experts have been warning that AI agents are quickly becoming capable enough to carry these sorts of autonomous attacks—but the Hugging Face hack appears to be among the first real world examples. That disclosure would normally be news-worthy in and of itself. But what Hugging Face said it did next has received even more attention: the company fought AI with AI, using a Chinese-built open-source model to detect the attack and understand its scope. Hugging Face said it turned to the Chinese model—Z.ai’s GLM 5.2—after its security team initially tried to use an unnamed frontier AI model from one of the leading U.S. AI companies but found it was unable to do so because of the model’s guardrails. The company said in its blog post that these models “cannot distinguish an incident responder from an attacker.”

That claim was bound to generate a lot of buzz at a time when many in Silicon Valley and Washington, D.C., are deeply worried about the speed of Chinese AI advances. These concerns have been heightened by last week’s debut of Kimi K3, an advanced open-source AI model from Chinese AI startup Moonshot. Some venture capitalists and AI policy analysts who want to see the U.S. do everything possible to accelerate American AI progress in order to stay ahead of China worry that too much emphasis on AI safety, both within the leading U.S. labs and in........

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