I had gone to Hugging Face for something else entirely. I ended up spending the evening reading the report of the first cyber-intrusion carried out, from start to finish, by an autonomous artificial intelligence. This is the story of that intrusion – but to tell it properly you first have to know what the platform that was hit actually is, how “open” AI models changed the landscape, what autonomous agents are, and why the alignment problem, which seemed like a thing for philosophers, has just become a matter for the incident-response handbook. If you're in a hurry, you can skip straight to the anatomy of the intrusion. But if there's one thing I'd ask you to read to the end, it's the twist: because five days after this case was published, the author of the attack confessed – and it's not who any of us would have bet on.

When the world woke up astonished in November 2022 to this “magical” chatbot, few realized that this magic was the result of decades of research. The history of artificial intelligence begins in 1943, when Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts proposed the first mathematical model of an artificial neuron. In 1956, at the Dartmouth Conference, John McCarthy coined the term “Artificial Intelligence” and the discipline was officially born.

The '60s and '70s were characterized by excessive optimism: people thought strong AI was just around the corner. Two “AI winters” followed – periods when funding disappeared and research slowed – because promises weren't materializing. But some continued working in the shadows. Geoffrey Hinton, Yann LeCun, Yoshua Bengio – those we now call the “godfathers of deep learning” – continued their studies on neural networks when no one believed in them anymore.