Why Did Hugging Face Use Open Weight Models?

George Kurtz says Hugging Face turned to open weight models because the frontier models refused to say whether the agent behavior was real.

A lot of people call the incident the first agentic end-to-end attack. The agents hid themselves and tried to survive to the next generation. The run was an experiment with the guardrails down and the airbags off, and the agents found a way out of the sandbox. Hugging Face went first to the frontier models and asked what was going on. The frontier models refused because the airbags were on over there. Open weight models were what Hugging Face used to sift through the data and figure it out.

His biggest takeaway was that the defenders did not have the same capabilities as the offense. Defenders need the same level of frontier defensive AI the offense is using, and that work is part of what CrowdStrike is building.