OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says AI has entered the singularity — two weeks after OpenAI models cheated a benchmark by hacking Hugging Face

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently declared on the Relentless podcast that artificial intelligence has entered the technological singularity, telling the show, “we are now, like, in the singularity,” and that he’d been waiting for the moment his whole life. Two weeks ago, OpenAI’s own models broke out of a locked test environment and hacked Hugging Face’s production servers.

OpenAI’s account of the July 11 breach says GPT-5.6 Sol and an unreleased model were “hyperfocused” on the ExploitGym benchmark and went to “extreme lengths” to complete it. Rather than solve the exercises, they spent what OpenAI describes as a substantial amount of inference compute finding a route to the open Internet, exploited a zero-day in a package registry cache proxy, moved laterally through OpenAI’s research network, and pulled the test solutions straight out of Hugging Face’s production database. The company took ten days to tell Hugging Face who was responsible.

The definition of the singularity that Altman is invoking is set out by mathematician I. J. Good in 1965 and named by Vernor Vinge in 1993, rests on recursive self-improvement: a machine that designs a better successor, which designs a better one again, outstripping human intelligence.

Back in February, OpenAI told investors its inference expenses rose fourfold during 2025, dragging adjusted gross margin down to 33% from 40%. The same report put OpenAI’s 2025 revenue at $13 billion against a target of roughly $600 billion in total compute spend through 2030, and Altman has separately committed to $1.4 trillion for 30 GW of capacity. The company has already walked back its first-party data center ambitions in favor of leasing.

Security firm Hacktron benchmarked GPT-5.6 Sol Ultra, Sol Medium, and Grok 4.5 on Chrome exploit development earlier this month, processing 2.096 billion tokens across the run, with one model finishing a complete exploit chain. An intelligence explosion should show capability per unit of compute climbing steeply, and OpenAI’s own figures show the cost of a unit of capability going up.

Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind, closed Google I/O in May by telling the audience they were standing in the foothills of the singularity. Altman’s June 2025 essay, “The Gentle Singularity,” had already placed humanity past the event horizon a year earlier, but neither Hassabis nor Altman named a threshold that would settle the question.

Aikido Security tested 13 models against 26 known CVEs this month and found GPT-5.6 topping the field at 23 of 26, or 88.5% recall. Moonshot’s open-weight Kimi K3 matched that score at pass@3 for less money per run.