The Download: OpenAI’s chief research officer explains its hacking response

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. “We’re not going to shoot ourselves in the foot” over hack fallout, says OpenAI’s chief research officer Two months after OpenAI’s agents hacked into the computers of AI company Hugging Face, the company is still dealing with the fallout.

Last week brought news of another hack, this time into Australia’s national health-care system, which the government says OpenAI did not report for 84 days. But OpenAI insists it is not on the back foot. “I do kind of reject the premise that OpenAI is a company with visible impacts in the world and therefore OpenAI is not training safe and aligned models,” says Mark Chen, the company’s chief research officer.

In many ways, the buck stops with Chen. I sat down with him to talk about the fallout from the hacks, what his company is doing about it, and why he thinks things are not as bad as they seem. Here’s what he told me about…