“What makes an open community targeted is also what makes it special. We are necessarily permissive. We want the average hobbyist in their basement who doesn't have an institutional affiliation to be able to contribute. … For Hugging Face, we have these really interesting evaluation data sets. OpenCode has these juicy third-party API keys. The combination of that makes us prime targets.”
Equity · Startups & Venture · November 2026
Context
Asked whether security pressure could push the open model ecosystem to close up, after an agentic attack on OpenCode and an earlier incident at Hugging Face, Solaiman explains why open platforms are attractive targets.
Transcript
…For an ecosystem, we need the smaller open weights that are very permissive, but we probably need the resourcing that something like an NVIDIA has to create a frontier American model that folks can explore, do more evaluations on, deploy locally, be a good alternative to our closed frontier.
…were slightly different in motivation. One was human-motivated, the open code versus Agent Swarm motivated. But still, these platforms are potentially becoming bigger targets. Do you worry that security pressures could force more closeness? Closeness? Close? Closeness in the open model ecosystem?
…agentic attacks that were seeking third-party API keys. This is meaningfully different from the Hugging Face’s incident over the summer that we endured, where kudos to our infrastructure team were able to recover. And it seems that Open Code was able to recover, but we did not have compromise of user data, of financial data. And there was financial damage here. The things that I worry about are what makes an open community targeted is also what makes it special. We are necessarily permissive. We want the average hobbyist in their basement who doesn't have an institutional affiliation to be able to contribute. I mean, they are part of who made the internet exist. I mean, this is like examples of Wikipedia. Just there's how few people are keeping Wikipedia alive. That's the beauty of open contribution. And we also have, so this is permissiveness and the wealth of information and data we have. So for Hugging Face’s, we have these really interesting evaluation data sets. Open code has these juicy…
Yeah. I mean, there's a defense gap there, right? So where do you draw the line between securing the open ecosystem and undermining the openness that makes it valuable?
This is what we're noodling on on what is that trade-off. What
kind of conversations are you guys having at Hugging Face’s? Like anything that you can share? Like what are you, like, what's what are you noodling on?
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