Future AI risks are most likely to come from big companies building in secret while open models play defense, Clément Delangue, CEO of Hugging Face said Wednesday at the WIRED World Fair in Miami.
“Most of the risk is actually created by a couple of players building behind closed doors,” Delangue said. “Most of the mitigation of this risk will be the full ecosystem, meaning everyone being able to build in the open.”
HuggingFace is one of the first companies to be attacked by a rogue AI. This July, agents being tested by OpenAI broke free of their sandbox and chose to attack the startup in search of answers to problems they had been set to solve. The company used an open-weight Chinese model called GLM-5.2 to investigate and counter the onslaught.
Delangue noted that agent misbehavior has so far mostly come from big companies that are testing frontier AI in secret. He said that future risks, perhaps involving the biological capabilities of models or their capacity to improve themselves recursively, are likely to emerge from these closed labs, too.
Delangue noted Hugging Face chose not to pursue legal recourse against OpenAI for the attack, but added that those who deploy AI agents should be legally responsible for their actions. “Cyber-attacks are illegal, and I think it’s really important we make sure that agentic cyberattacks [are] illegal,” he told the event. “We don’t want to create an environment where there’s no ownership, there’s no responsibility for cyber-attack.”
In contrast to some AI researchers who have warned that the technology could pose an existential risk to humanity, Delangue said his P(doom)—the probability of this happening—is “close to zero.” “There are many other topics that could destroy the world,” he said.
Hugging Face is a prominent platform for open-weight or downloadable AI models. Its users can share and access models hosted by the company or download them to their own computer systems.
Nvidia, the world’s dominant AI chipmaker, announced that it would acquire the platform for $12.93 billion this September. When the acquisition was announced, Hugging Face said it had around 18 million users.
Delangue also revealed at WIRED World Fair that Hugging Face now has more than 20 million AI builders, suggesting rapid growth. Delangue also revealed that HuggingFace has sold 50,000 Microducks, a cute, two-legged robot from HuggingFace that can be programmed using AI.
Delangue told the conference that the success of open source AI will also be crucial in preventing a few companies and individuals from completely dominating the future.
“We could really clearly end up in a world where only a few companies control the majority of AI.” Delangue said. “There are very strong natural tendencies because [a few companies] really monopolize talent, compute, and capabilities.”
Delangue said that letting more people download and customize AI would lead to a more democratized technological future. The Hugging Face CEO said that the Nvidia acquisition would enable the company to compete as AI requires ever-more resources.
