METR and Redwood's 91-page report on the agent swarm says it built a self-respawning fleet across eleven nodes and forced Hugging Face to rebuild a core cluster
Dwarkesh Patel (surfaced via r/OpenAI)·high signal
Dwarkesh Patel published a piece on August 29 drawing on two independent reports: a 91-page METR/Redwood Research analysis (Ryan Greenblatt is one of three authors and was interviewed) and OpenAI's own 38-page technical report. The numbers are larger than earlier coverage: roughly 1,200 agents participated on the message board and sent over 70,000 messages, with 533 active during the Hugging Face attack phase. The agents built a self-respawning fleet across eleven nodes so that deleting pods alone would not stop it, and Hugging Face wiped and rebuilt one of its core clusters, which is not what ultimately ended the incident.