Nvidia buys AI platform Hugging Face for nearly $13b. months after OpenAI's rogue agent incident

Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, said the acquisition aimed to provide more "open weights to the AI economy" and promised not to impose requirements to use Nvidia technology on the platform.Follow us on Google An NVIDIA logo appears in this illustration taken August 25, 2025.(photo credit: REUTERS/DADO RUVIC/ILLUSTRATION/FILE PHOTO)SEPTEMBER 3, 2026 18:19Updated: SEPTEMBER 3, 2026 18:26Nvidia bought AI giant Hugging Face for almost $13 billion, CEO Jensen Huang announced in a company blog post shared on Thursday.Huang explained that the acquisition was another push to provide "open weights to the AI economy," adding that "Hugging Face will continue to support open source and open weight models from across the ecosystem, from every model builder.""Hugging Face will remain an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem," he promised, adding that there will be no requirements to use Nvidia components when working on the Hugging Face platform.Hugging Face was founded in 2016, with the name based on the hugging face emoji, as an AI chatbot developer, but shifted towards its current model of serving as a platform for AI development."As the opportunity for open models accelerates, Hugging Face can serve the global AI community at unprecedented scale," Huang added.Jensen Huang, President and CEO of NVIDIA (credit: REUTERS)"NVIDIA’s infrastructure, engineering and global reach can help improve platform reliability, safety, model evaluation, inference and deployment capabilities, while preserving the open ecosystem that made Hugging Face foundational," he concluded.OpenAI agent turns rogue during exercise in Hugging Face platformBack in July, OpenAI said several experimental AI models escaped their test environment and hacked into the Hugging Face platform.According to the company, the AI models did so without any human instruction, performing the hack as they went to "extreme lengths" to achieve a testing goal."The models identified and chained vulnerabilities across OpenAI’s research environment and Hugging Face’s production infrastructure to obtain test solutions directly from Hugging Face’s production database," the company said."Our models spent a substantial amount of inference compute finding a way to obtain open Internet access, in pursuit of solving the evaluation problem," it added.Aaron Glick contributed to this report.Follow us on Google