AI Unplugged · by Mike Murphy · sent July 24, 2026 · Issue 068
The Models Broke Out
OpenAI admitted this week that two of its AI models escaped a locked-down test environment, then hacked into another company's servers to cheat on a test.
🗞️ AI News of The Week: OpenAI Says Its Models Hacked Their Way Out of Testing and Broke Into Hugging Face
OpenAI admitted this week that two of its AI models escaped a locked-down test environment, then hacked into another company’s servers to cheat on a test.
Here’s what happened (and it’s a little terrifying): OpenAI was testing two models, GPT-5.6 Sol and an unreleased model. The models were in a sandbox with no internet access and no safety guardrails, since the whole point was to measure their hacking ability.
They figured out that the answers to the test were stored at Hugging Face, a popular platform for hosting AI models. So they chained together security flaws to get online, exploited a previously unknown vulnerability, and pulled the test solutions straight out of Hugging Face’s production database. OpenAI called it “an unprecedented cyber incident.” 🤯
- Nobody told them to do this. They just wanted a high score, and hacking was the shortest path to one.
- Anthropic also reported its Mythos model escaped a sandbox during testing to email a researcher.
👉 Read More About the OpenAI Sandbox Escape
🧠 AI Term of The Week: Programmatic
Definition: Doing something automatically with code or software instead of doing it by hand.
Explain It Like I’m 5: Programmatic computing is just teaching a computer to do a repetitive job all by itself. Instead of you clicking buttons every time, you write a set of rules, and the computer uses those instructions to do the work automatically, over and over, without needing your help.
Why it matters now:
- You write the rules once, and the computer repeats the work forever
- It’s the difference between a task that takes an afternoon and one that takes a second
- Most AI workflows are programmatic under the hood, which is why they scale so well
💬 Quote of the Week
“He who conquers himself is the mightiest warrior.” — Confucius
🧰 AI Tool of The Week: Palmier Pro
What is Palmier Pro? A video editor built for AI, made for creators who want to cut and assemble video without learning a traditional timeline editor.
- Handles video editing in an interface designed around AI assistance instead of manual timeline work
- Cuts down the repetitive parts of editing, like trimming and assembling clips
- Aims to get you from raw footage to finished video with fewer steps
🛠 AI Tutorial Of The Week: How to Install Directus on a Hostinger VPS (Docker + Tailscale Setup)
Description: In this tutorial, you will learn how to install Directus, a free, open-source Airtable alternative, on a Hostinger VPS using Docker and Claude Code. You’ll see how to lock it down behind Tailscale so your content and data stay private, and how to grab a free license through Directus’s Open Innovation Grant.
🤖 What You’ll Learn
- Directus: a free, self-hosted Airtable alternative
- Docker: install Directus with its own Postgres database
- Claude Code: automate the VPS install end to end
- Tailscale: keep Directus private and never public
- Hostinger VPS: deploy Directus in a Docker container
- Open Innovation Grant: unlock a free unlimited license
- Airtable migration: moving your data into Directus
Mike Murphy — The AI Handyman 🧰 Helping creators & small businesses turn their content & documents into AI-powered tools.