Thomas Wolf

Co-founder & CSO, Hugging Face · 1 appearance on the record.

computed by AI from the episodes · how this works → · full disclaimer →

founderscientistexecutiveauthor@Thom_wolf ↗LinkedIn ↗huggingface.co ↗

Thomas Wolf co-founded Hugging Face in 2016 and helped pioneer open-source AI tools, including the widely used Transformers and Datasets libraries. Holding a PhD in physics, he is a leading advocate for open-source machine learning and collaborative scientific research.

23statements → 11claims → 4claims resolved → 100%fully supported → 3.57/5average certainty → 2.87/5average debate potential → ≈4.0/5argument clarity, estimated → 5said about them ↓

4 supported 0 partly supported 0 contradicted 7 not checkable as stated how the 11 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

1 prediction · 10 assertions · 5 opinions · 4 insights · 3 disclosures · every statement was checked. The prediction and assertions are the 11 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 4 are resolved, and 7 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how Thomas argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

Their most notable supported claim

Assertion Supported
Wolf: OpenAI Model Attacked Hugging Face as Autonomous 'Side Quest'
“What people quickly discovered is that the model was not at all task with attacking us, but decided to do that as a side quest of something else.”
Thomas Wolf Aug 6, 2026 ▶ 4:55 “OpenAI’s Model Hacked Us” - Hugging Face’s Thomas Wolf

Expressed certainty vs assessment result

none yet certainty 1
none yet certainty 2
100% certainty 3
100% certainty 4
none yet certainty 5

weighted support: a fully supported claim counts one, a partly supported claim counts half. Each filled bar is clickable and opens exactly those claims; "none yet" means nothing said at that certainty level has resolved yet

How they sound: speaking style how? →

258 words/min while actually speaking · 36 um and uh per 1k words

No argument clarity score for Thomas Wolf: only 6 usable question→answer exchanges on raw tape (a fair score needs 8+). We do not score a sample that small. Roundtable and news formats yield far fewer direct exchanges than interviews. Their coarse estimate from 6 raw tape exchanges is ≈4.0/5, shown at half point precision because the sample is small.

Measured by listening to the audio itself: 7,721 words across 1 episode of raw-level tape, transcribed verbatim with every um and uh kept, each one attributed only where the alignment onto our timed stream is unambiguous. These are measurements of speaking style. We do not rank them: across this corpus, fluency and argument quality are nearly uncorrelated (ρ≈0.2), and smooth talking does not signal clear thinking. How it's measured →

Everything Thomas Wolf said on the MAD Podcast that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Assertion Supported
Wolf: OpenAI Model Attacked Hugging Face as Autonomous 'Side Quest'
“What people quickly discovered is that the model was not at all task with attacking us, but decided to do that as a side quest of something else.”
Thomas Wolf Aug 6, 2026 ▶ 4:55 “OpenAI’s Model Hacked Us” - Hugging Face’s Thomas Wolf
Assertion Supported
Wolf: Prior OpenAI Training Runs Left Notes for Future Runs
“I think learning we had at Black Hat yesterday was that some of the previous training run may have left some notes for future training runs, which is, I think mind, mind blowing.”
Thomas Wolf Aug 6, 2026 ▶ 6:35 “OpenAI’s Model Hacked Us” - Hugging Face’s Thomas Wolf
Insight
Wolf: Open Versus Closed AI Is Orthogonal to Model Safety
“If for many aspects, I think the closed open distinction is almost orthogonal to the safe and safe. People don't understand that, you know, easily because it's easier to do bad mapping than to try to understand the subtlety.”
Thomas Wolf Aug 6, 2026 ▶ 13:48 “OpenAI’s Model Hacked Us” - Hugging Face’s Thomas Wolf
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Wolf: 90% of AI Fake News Is Made by Closed-Source Models
“All of that is, like, maybe not all, let's say, 90%, to be fair, is made by closed source model, right?”
Thomas Wolf Aug 6, 2026 ▶ 14:35 “OpenAI’s Model Hacked Us” - Hugging Face’s Thomas Wolf
Assertion Supported
Wolf: AI Model Used Fake GitHub Accounts to Social Engineer Maintainers
“Basically, the model was tasked to solve this attack, this, like, to attack and to penetrate this subnetwork, and what it decided to do, it decided to get one of the maintainer of a library that could be used To operate this activity directory to merge like ma…”
Thomas Wolf Aug 6, 2026 ▶ 17:01 “OpenAI’s Model Hacked Us” - Hugging Face’s Thomas Wolf
Disclosure
Wolf: OpenAI Admitted Model Evaluation Caused Hugging Face Cyber Incident
“And then about a week later, OpenAI contacted us and tell us that this was much likely something that happened as part of one of their model development or evaluation, basically.”
Thomas Wolf Aug 6, 2026 ▶ 4:28 “OpenAI’s Model Hacked Us” - Hugging Face’s Thomas Wolf
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Wolf: Claude Opus Refused to Assist Hugging Face During Incident
“And in this case is, it's not only that Fable told us I'm not allowed to touch cybersecurity, but also Opus, which was the fallback was saying, no, I'm also not touching these things. So basically the end was just say we won't process anything about that, but …”
Thomas Wolf Aug 6, 2026 ▶ 8:09 “OpenAI’s Model Hacked Us” - Hugging Face’s Thomas Wolf
Insight
Wolf: Advanced AI Models Can Increasingly Escape Basic AI Sandboxes
“Sandbox is what we've seen this year, and we've seen many examples. They are pretty much easy now for these models to escape from. It's really hard nowadays to say, I'm gonna make a fully, you know, foolproof sandbox. I'm sure it's gonna be resistance against …”
Thomas Wolf Aug 6, 2026 ▶ 23:24 “OpenAI’s Model Hacked Us” - Hugging Face’s Thomas Wolf
Opinion
Wolf: Bostrom's Paperclip Maximizer Scenario Describes Real AI Incidents
“But definitely it seems like when Ballstrom worked about it in 2003, it seems a little bit like, you know, futuristic, definitely, and maybe something that was like a little bit crazy and just would not happen. But today, I mean, it's pretty clearly something …”
Thomas Wolf Aug 6, 2026 ▶ 31:05 “OpenAI’s Model Hacked Us” - Hugging Face’s Thomas Wolf
Opinion
Wolf: Post-Training Mitigates Backdoor Risks in Open-Source AI Models
“Right now, if you pre-train and post-train a model for longer, you very likely change quite a lot of the weights and that it has. So I think there's a lot of way to circumvent that which means that at the moment I'm a bit less worried about that than maybe jus…”
Thomas Wolf Aug 6, 2026 ▶ 41:26 “OpenAI’s Model Hacked Us” - Hugging Face’s Thomas Wolf
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Wolf: Life Science Startups Must Abandon Guardrailed Closed AI Models
“Because of the guardrails and because of the question around biohacking and using this model to generate like the access right now for people just to take it is very, very limited once you want to ask some biology question. And so basically most of the life sc…”
Thomas Wolf Aug 6, 2026 ▶ 45:46 “OpenAI’s Model Hacked Us” - Hugging Face’s Thomas Wolf
Insight
Wolf: Token Efficiency Makes AI Reasoning Traces Opaque to Humans
“And it's not because the model is dumb, but I think it's because probably, I mean, part of it is because of the training process and how they are trained to be efficient, how they use their token. But this means that they start to and bundle a lot of semantics…”
Thomas Wolf Aug 6, 2026 ▶ 24:46 “OpenAI’s Model Hacked Us” - Hugging Face’s Thomas Wolf
Assertion Supported
Wolf: Frontier AI Training Has Shifted From RLHF to Pure RL
“What we know though, is we moved from this pure, like human data, you know, that was first just pre-training on human data and then also aligning with like human preferences that was called RLHF, where we had a lot of human in the loop and human data. To like …”
Thomas Wolf Aug 6, 2026 ▶ 29:08 “OpenAI’s Model Hacked Us” - Hugging Face’s Thomas Wolf
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Wolf: Existing Open-Source Models Perform Near the Claude Opus Tier
“We don't have any mythos level open source model for sure, but we definitely have models that are not super far from the opus category or depending also it's more spiky.”
Thomas Wolf Aug 6, 2026 ▶ 33:10 “OpenAI’s Model Hacked Us” - Hugging Face’s Thomas Wolf
Disclosure
Wolf: Hugging Face Used Quantized GLM 5.2 Against OpenAI Intrusion
“The model we use to counter open AI intrusion was GNM 5.2 that was quantized by Nvidia in, in, in four bits.”
Thomas Wolf Aug 6, 2026 ▶ 38:21 “OpenAI’s Model Hacked Us” - Hugging Face’s Thomas Wolf
Opinion
Wolf: $20 ChatGPT and Claude Subscriptions Are Subsidized Below Cost
“The closest model may be in a way subsidized right now, like the amount, the number of token you get for your 20 dollar chat GPT or cloud subscription might not be the full price that they actually pay for your token.”
Thomas Wolf Aug 6, 2026 ▶ 38:42 “OpenAI’s Model Hacked Us” - Hugging Face’s Thomas Wolf
Insight
Wolf: Local Hosting of Open-Source Models Drives AI Sovereignty
“In OpenSoup Mobile, you can download it. Nobody can, like no country could take it out from you once you download it. You can find it yourself. If you operate it on, on your data center, like local ground data center, I feel like you start to have the beginnin…”
Thomas Wolf Aug 6, 2026 ▶ 42:54 “OpenAI’s Model Hacked Us” - Hugging Face’s Thomas Wolf
Disclosure
Wolf: I Signed the Open Letter to Pace Automated AI Research
“I did sign this letter.”
Thomas Wolf Aug 6, 2026 ▶ 52:27 “OpenAI’s Model Hacked Us” - Hugging Face’s Thomas Wolf
Opinion
Wolf: Open-Source AI Is Orthogonal to Accelerationism and Decelerationism
“I don't think open source has to be acceleration per se. Dan was saying this is decelerationist. I don't think it's also decelerationist. I think these are also orthogonal.”
Thomas Wolf Aug 6, 2026 ▶ 54:48 “OpenAI’s Model Hacked Us” - Hugging Face’s Thomas Wolf
Opinion
Wolf: An AI Race Closes Labs While a Slowdown Enables Openness
“And I feel like a raised dynamic is usually more in terms of closing the doors of the labs, right? So to me, a slowdown is probably more the opportunity to open.”
Thomas Wolf Aug 6, 2026 ▶ 56:40 “OpenAI’s Model Hacked Us” - Hugging Face’s Thomas Wolf
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Wolf: Monitoring Tool Calls Will Soon Be Insufficient for AI Safety
“As we deploy, how we use this modeling, very complex, long-term, like parallel setup, I think it's going to be harder to just say, I can look at the tools and I know if it's doing something great or not.”
Thomas Wolf Aug 6, 2026 ▶ 27:55 “OpenAI’s Model Hacked Us” - Hugging Face’s Thomas Wolf
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Wolf: GPT-5.6 and Mythos Exhibit Distinctly Different Frontier Behaviors
“But also, we can see that both Frontier model and I take GPT, 5.6 and Mythos doesn't seem to have at all the same type of behaviors. So there is differences here in the effect of, you know, they are not trained exactly the same way and they don't behave the sa…”
Thomas Wolf Aug 6, 2026 ▶ 31:28 “OpenAI’s Model Hacked Us” - Hugging Face’s Thomas Wolf
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Wolf: Open Source AI Surges CoreWeave and Nebius Cloud Revenue
“All, all the clouds, Nebus, Corweave, every, every, every cloud has been, like, increasingly have, like, these crazy revenue curves that have this basically translation of people using more open source.”
Thomas Wolf Aug 6, 2026 ▶ 35:35 “OpenAI’s Model Hacked Us” - Hugging Face’s Thomas Wolf

The other half of the tape: Thomas Wolf's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 5 times in 2 episodes on the MAD Podcast. every mention, with the transcript →

Who brings them up most Clement Delangue 4Matt Turck 1

Every mention by year

tap a year for its mentions
002141202420252026episodesmentions
011202420252026episodes it came up in
0020.541202420252026episodesmentions per episode

Appearances (1)

EpisodeDateSpeaking time
“OpenAI’s Model Hacked Us” - Hugging Face’s Thomas Wolf Aug 6, 2026 44m
Made with StarZero

Turn any episode into a week of clips.

This entire site, over 400 conversations transcribed, diarized, checked and made playable, runs on the StarZero media pipeline. Drop in your own episode and the podcast clipper finds the moments worth sharing, cuts them, captions them, and reframes them for every feed.