Full Interview: Hugging Face Co-Founder and CEO Clem Delangue
📅 Aug 02, 2026Face the Nation and CBS News10 MIN21 SEGMENTS · 2 SPEAKERS
Watch Margaret Brennan's full interview Hugging Face Co-Founder and CEO Clem Delangue, a portion of which aired on July 19, ...
What Clement Delangue said
Written from the verified transcript and checked against it. Every figure links to the moment it was said.
Clement Delangue, CEO of Hugging Face, discussed his company's experience with an autonomous AI cyber attack, which he described as unprecedented due to its volume and speed, involving 17,000 actions in four and a half days. He noted that OpenAI's technology was involved and that Anthropic faced similar issues. Delangue emphasized the importance of keeping cyber attacks illegal and the need for legal frameworks to hold companies accountable. He argued that preventing releases of AI models is ineffective, advocating for open models as a defense mechanism, citing his company's use of an open model to defend itself. He supported mandatory disclosure of agent cyber attacks and transparency through agent traces. Delangue also mentioned a letter from Jensen Huang of Nvidia and other tech CEOs urging support for open models, and discussed using an American version of a Chinese model, highlighting the benefits of open sourcing.
Key takeaways
Hugging Face faced an autonomous AI cyber attack with 17,000 actions in 4.5 days, the first of its kind.
Open models are essential for defense; Hugging Face used one to counter the attack.
Open models allow American companies to modify and host Chinese models, enhancing safety.
We turn now to artificial intelligence and a question that has emerged after a series of alarming hacking incidents. Is it safe? To discuss, we're joined by Clem Dang. He is CEO of AI platform Hugging Face, whose company detailed one of the attacks last week. Clem, good morning to you.
Well, your company disclosed it was attacked earlier this month by an autonomous AI cyber actor, which jumped on its own from another company's testing system to hack into your company. Uh, OpenAI later disclosed it was their technology that went rogue. They lost control of it. Tell me, why did your company alert the public and alert the FBI? Do you think this is a crime?
Well, I think it felt very weird and unprecedented to us, right? Um, because I think it's the first instance of something quite autonomous doing something like that. So the volume of the actions taken and the speed of them, I think it was 17,000 actions taken in four and a half days, was very new. Obviously the attacker, when we talk about cyber attack, we think about nation states, we think about hacker groups, we don't think about a company like OpenAI, right? A very prominent, popular American company. And then the way we responded using an open model, so using AI ourselves to defend ourselves against that, was also pretty new and pretty newsworthy in our opinion.
You defended yourselves, you found the solution yourselves, but you went to the FBI. I think for a lot of people when they think of someone committing a crime, they think of a human. They don't think of a program, a computer program as something you can prosecute as committing a crime. What is the FBI doing?
Well, I mean, we reported to the authorities as we have to in such instances, right? It's kind of like a mandatory disclosure both with the authorities and the public when you face something like that, which is basically what we did. Now, when we think about the future right now, we've heard that it's not only OpenAI but also Anthropic that has faced similar kinds of issues. I think it's really important that we keep in mind that cyber attacks need to be contained in the legal framework in the US and need to stay illegal to prevent an explosion of them in the future, right? Like we don't want to end up in a world where everyone is facing cyber attacks all the time because of agents and companies that are creating these agents are not kind of like accountable for them. So I think it's important for regulators, for policymakers to think about the legal framework of this new kind of technology risk.
You you described more than 17,000 hacking actions on the internet before this was even discovered by your company. That sounds like the developers have lost control. Have they?
Well, you have to remember it's a technology system but built by engineers. Uh, and engineers can make mistakes sometimes and I think that's that's what happens here. Uh, that's what happened here. Um, you know, we already in our society accept some level of autonomy like for example if you thinking about your dishwasher, you giving it autonomy to wash your dishes and you don't check at every single step, right? That is putting hot water, cleaning, drying, right, but if you put the wrong product in it or if there is a leak, you're gonna have a problem. Here it's the same thing. I think they built kind of like an autonomous system and made some mistakes and as a result we are facing this issue.
So you said you think there should be some legal parameters put around this. Um, the Trump administration has taken a very light touch in regulation uh because they want to keep America competitive in this space. They have this policy where they can review technology for 30 days to judge basically how dangerous something is before a company releases it to market. But as I understand what you described, this attack happened before technology was at market. It happened during the development stage. It was unreleased. So what you're saying I think is there is no regulation at this point that would prevent something like this from happening again.
Yeah, that that's a really clear example that just kind of like preventing releases of AI models doesn't really work. Concentrating everything behind closed doors in just a few organization doesn't work. Uh, one thing that does work uh that worked in this case is kind of like um promoting more open models, right? Because um we defended ourselves with an open model, right? Like we couldn't have done it with an API because they had these guardrails that's preventing activity for cyber security. Uh, and we needed to run a model on our own infrastructure. Uh, so we needed an open model. So that's that's one example of things that we can promote that is going to make uh the world safer. And as a matter of fact, you've seen maybe last week this letter from um Jensen Wang from Nvidia and a lot of tech CEOs uh urging the administration to uh get more support for open models.
11 more exchanges in this transcript
Sign in free to read the rest of this interview. No card required.
Delangue, C. (2026, August 2). Full Interview: Hugging Face Co-Founder and CEO Clem Delangue [Interview transcript]. Face the Nation and CBS News. CEOInterviews.AI. https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/1152935/
MLA
Clement Delangue. "Full Interview: Hugging Face Co-Founder and CEO Clem Delangue." Face the Nation and CBS News, 2 Aug. 2026. Transcript, CEOInterviews.AI, https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/1152935/.
BibTeX
@misc{delangue2026_1152935,
author = {Clement Delangue},
title = {Full Interview: Hugging Face Co-Founder and CEO Clem Delangue},
howpublished = {Interview transcript, Face the Nation and CBS News. CEOInterviews.AI},
year = {2026},
month = {aug},
url = {https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/1152935/},
note = {Speaker-attributed transcript with timestamps}
}
