Michael Dalton

Security and infrastructure at OpenAI.

Co-presented the Black Hat USA 2026 reconstruction of the OpenAI–Hugging Face agent incident with Eric Wallace, covering the exploitation and response half: the two Artifactory zero-day chains, the privilege escalation and lateral movement across OpenAI’s container-as-a-service estate, the Hugging Face intrusion, and the detection and attribution sequence.¹

Dalton states the talk’s defender position: fully automated offense now has an existence proof and fully automated defense does not, so partial automation of the defensive loop relocates the bottleneck rather than closing the gap. See the reconstruction summary.

Footnotes

1. Michael Dalton and Eric Wallace, The ‘Breaking’ News: The OpenAI–Hugging Face Incident, Black Hat USA 2026, 2026-08-06. Exploitation and response at 13:22–29:37; defender position at 30:26–37:12. ↩