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They targeted Hugging Face, one of the world's largest hubs for sharing AI models, gaining access to some internal company systems.

OpenAI said the incident was "unprecedented", external, and it was conducting an investigation alongside Hugging Face, whose boss Clement Delangue said in a post on X it was "mind-blowing that all of this happened autonomously".

"The investigation is ongoing, and we'll share more learnings from what might be the first incident of its kind," Delangue added.

A government spokesperson said the UK's AI Security Institute was studying the behaviour from the AI system seen in the incident and was continuing to work with OpenAI and other labs to improve safeguards.

They said organisations should step up their cyber-defences by taking steps such as enrolling in the government-backed Cyber Essentials certification scheme.

Gina Neff, head of the Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy at the University of Cambridge, told BBC Radio 4's Today programme that the security tests - called sandboxes - are "supposed to be secure environments where you can see what the models are capable of".

"In this case, it looks like OpenAI didn't make a secure enough sandbox," she added.

Instead, the agents created their own cyber-attack against the sandbox itself, finding a vulnerability which allowed them to escape the restrictions.

Once outside, the AI identified Hugging Face as a likely source of the answers they were seeking in the test, and tried to gain access.

Neil Lawrence, Professor of machine learning at Cambridge University, called it an "impressive feat", but cautioned it "falls well within the known capabilities of the current generation" of high-powered AI models.

He pointed out that OpenAI is looking to list itself on the stock market, and faces intense pressure from rival firm Anthropic, which has made headlines with its own powerful AI tool, Mythos.

"OpenAI are now playing catch-up, they are trying to demonstrate their own systems' capabilities in cyber-security."

"It shows us that OpenAI are not capable of safely deploying their own technology," he added.

In its initial disclosure of the hack on 16 July, external, Hugging Face said it was still assessing whether any customer or partner data was affected and would contact affected parties if necessary.

It said it has now closed the vulnerabilities highlighted by the incident and rebuilt the affected systems.

"Autonomous, AI-driven offensive tooling is no longer theoretical," it said.

"Defending an online platform now means treating the data and model surface as a first-class attack surface, and using AI on defence to keep pace.

"We will keep investing there, and keep sharing what we learn."

The incident has prompted fresh questions about the capabilities of advanced AI systems and whether existing safeguards are sufficient as the technology becomes more powerful.

Spencer Starkey, an executive at cyber-security firm SonicWall, told the BBC the incident made it clear organisations needed to "step up" their own defences and "treat cyber resilience as a core operational priority".

"The uncomfortable truth is that too many organisations are still defending at human speed while adversaries are escalating to machine speed," he said.

Meanwhile Travis Lelle, principal security engineer at cyber-security consulting firm Guidepoint Security, said the update marked a "sobering moment in cyber-security".

"This highlights a known asymmetry," he said.

"Offensive agents are unconstrained, while the best defensive tools are locked behind guardrails that cannot understand context."

But Jake Moore, global cyber-security advisor at ESET, said the announcement could also have a competitive dimension.

He argued OpenAI may be seeking to highlight its own AI capabilities as rival Anthropic attracts growing attention for its Claude Mythos model.

"It does pose the question that OpenAI are potentially chasing the marketing dream of Anthropic of late," he said.

It comes a week after Chinese AI start-up Moonshot unveiled Kimi K3 - a massive new artificial intelligence model it said could rival top US firms. %!s()

The foreign affairs minister – who will deliver the address on Thursday in the Philippines, where the 59th Asean foreign minister’s meeting is being held – will also caution world leaders against placing a toll on the strait of Hormuz after both Iran and the US threatened to do amid the protracted conflict.

The speech comes as the crisis in the Middle East escalates once again, driving up fuel prices by 40 cents in three weeks amid dwindling global oil reserves.

Off the back of China’s launch of a nuclear-capable submarine-launched missile in the South China Sea earlier in July, Wong will say the test “came with too little information and notification”.

“It comes in the context of China’s rapid military buildup, including of its nuclear arsenal, without the transparency or reassurance the region expects,” the foreign minister will say.

“Which is why Australia has described the test as provocative and destabilising.”

Wong met with China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, on the sidelines of Asean on Tuesday night AEST in their 12th meeting.

Wong had earlier criticised China’s conduct as “destabilising and dangerous” after the Philippine military accused the China Coast Guard of clubbing a Filipino sailor with a baton on Monday on a disputed shoal in the South China Sea.

“We will continue to register our concerns about China’s vessels engaging in destabilising and dangerous conduct in the South China Sea, including towards Philippine, Vietnamese, Malaysian, and Indonesian vessels,” Wong will say on Thursday.

China’s long-range missile test in the South Pacific happened just hours after Australia signed a defence agreement with Fiji, inciting widespread condemnation. The prime minister, Anthony Albanese, expressed concern at the missile’s long-range capabilities and the possibility to cause “considerable, considerable damage were it to be weaponised”.

In Manila, Wong will also warn the region will suffer if the strait of Hormuz is “weaponised” and the US and Iran fail to maintain a ceasefire.

Heavy strikes have resumed between the warring nations with the US launching consecutive rounds on Iran in an attempt to force the strait’s reopening.

Iran’s president on Tuesday said the country is in a “full-scale war” after the US expanded its aerial campaign and Tehran struck Washington’s Gulf allies. The Iran-allied Houthis in Yemen have also announced a blockade of Saudi ports.

The renewed outbreak of fighting has sent the international Brent crude benchmark surging by 23% over the past two weeks and back within reach of $US90 a barrel.

The surge in cost has pushed diesel above 220 cents per litre and petrol above 187 cents in some Australian cities. Luke Yeaman, the Commonwealth Bank chief economist, has predicted the federal government may have to restore the fuel excise discount back to 32 cents.

Wong will tell the audience much of the region was fuel- and energy-dependent on the strait of Hormuz, presenting a “grave challenge”.

“Across south-east Asia, energy prices have spiked, costs for families and businesses increased, and we continue to see ongoing pressure on food production,” Wong will say.

“The strait of Hormuz shows what we in this region have always understood. That people suffer when a strait is weaponised. And we all know that the costs of tolls on any chokepoint would not be solely economic.

“Our people depend on straits and sea lanes remaining open.”

Wong will tell Asean nations their assistance in plugging Australia’s supply and trade gaps during the conflict is for the region’s benefit.

“Because what goes to Australia as fuel and fertiliser comes back to the region as food,” she will say.

With additional reporting by Patrick Commins %!s()

Maybe sometimes it does. But most of the time, it produces a collection of numbers that feel precise but answer questions nobody actually asked.

The measurement framework should come first. Everything else should follow from it. Because it gives the technical setup a purpose before anyone starts measuring.

The core issue is that there’s too much data and not enough action. And that is the gap a measurement framework is meant to close.

Frame The Work Before You Track The Work

1. Define Success In Plain Language First

Before you create an event required to answer the question, define success. Success needs to be described in a way that people can recognize when they see it.

If your goal is lead generation, does success mean more total inquiries, or better-qualified inquiries?

Focusing on content performance? Then, define the success metrics as more organic traffic, returning visitors, more commercial page visits, or getting more of the assisted conversions.

If you want ecommerce growth, does success mean more purchases, higher average order value, fewer checkout drop-offs, or more repeat customers?

Each answer leads to a different measurement plan.

This is why I do not think analytics planning can be separated from business context. The same data can be useful, irrelevant, or misleading depending on what the company is trying to achieve.

2. Start With Questions, Not Metrics

This is the point where I would still delay building reports before I get the answers to important questions that will define the measurement framework. Interrogate your business like it’s a crush and get that data! But first, set a clear list of questions and don’t stop until you get the answers.

Well, now you may think, what does the business need to answer more confidently?

For example:

• Why are users dropping off before submitting an inquiry?
• Which landing pages generate valuable inquiries?
• How does returning visitor behavior differ from first-time visitor behavior?
• Which product or service pages need improvement?

At this stage, the goal is shaping the measurement setup. Because a dashboard should help people decide what to do next.

That sounds obvious, but it is where many reporting setups become messy. They include metrics because the metrics are available, not because anyone has decided what action they support.

The exercise here is simple but sometimes skipped: Write down every question your leadership team would ask if they had access to unlimited, perfectly clean data. Then look at that list and identify which questions your current setup could answer.

The gap between those two lists is your measurement framework’s job to close. Once those questions exist, the framework can move into defining what a result actually looks like.

3. Work Out What Could Help Answer Those Questions

Once success is defined, the next question is: What might be happening on the website? What is the user going through?

A good measurement framework should try to identify the behaviors that show someone is moving closer to a meaningful action.

For example, if the question is, “Why are users dropping off before submitting an enquiry?”, there are a few things we might need to understand first.

Are people reaching the call-to-action? Is the drop-off worse on mobile? Does it happen more from a specific landing page or traffic source?

Those are the behaviors that sit behind the question.

The same applies to a question like, “Which landing pages generate valuable enquiries?” The answer is probably not just in the number of sessions. You may need to look at what users do after arriving on the page.

Your questions become more useful for measurement when you can connect them to something observable.

4. Do Not Treat Every Metric Like A KPI

One reason analytics reports become confusing is that tracked actions get treated as if they all have the same level of importance. They do not. For example, a purchase is not the same as a product page view, undoubtedly.

That does not mean smaller actions are useless. But they play a different role.

I like to separate measurement into three layers:

Business Outcomes:

These are the results the company ultimately cares about: revenue, qualified leads, pipeline, purchases, subscriptions, retention, or customer acquisition.

Performance Indicators:

These help show whether users are moving toward those kinds of outcomes: demo request rate, checkout completion rate, trial signup rate, returning visitor conversion rate, or movement from content to commercial pages.

Diagnostic Signals:

These help explain why something may be happening: form abandonment, device-level drop-off, filter usage, internal search behavior, CTA clicks, or engagement with specific page types.

This matters because not every number belongs in the same report. Stakeholders need outcomes and a few performance indicators. Marketing teams may need channel, landing page, and content-level signals.

Analysts may need diagnostic data to investigate problems. Developers may need event-level detail to validate whether the implementation is working.

→ See also: GA4 Metrics Every Advertiser Should Pay Attention To

5. Decide What Not To Measure

This may be the most overlooked part of planning. However, a good measurement framework should also say what does not need to be tracked.

That can feel uncomfortable because analytics tools make so much tracking possible. But more tracking does not automatically mean better measurement.

Sometimes it just means more maintenance. Because every event has a cost. Someone has to implement it, test it, document it, explain it, and eventually decide whether it still matters.

If nobody is going to use the data, it probably does not belong in the core setup.

At this point, a simple test can help. If this number changed, would anyone do anything differently? If the answer is no, it may not be worth tracking yet.

6. Keep In Mind That GA4 Is Not The Whole Measurement System

Another important conversation needs to happen before implementation: What should GA4 be trusted to answer and where does another system need to be treated as the source of truth?

Because GA4 can tell you a lot about digital behavior. It can show where users came from, which pages they visited, which actions they took, and where they dropped off. But it should not always be treated as the final answer for everything.

As Rémi Kerhoas has argued, choosing a single source of truth can become an attribution trap because each system has its own model, limitations, and blind spots.

Therefore, for example, for ecommerce businesses, the ecommerce platform may be the cleaner source of truth for orders and revenue. For B2B businesses, the CRM system may be the better source of truth for lead quality.

Therefore, my recommendation here is that, when considering a measurement framework, you determine which questions GA4 can answer, which questions require another system, and where data needs to be compared.

7. Turn The Framework Into An Implementation Brief

Once you know what success means for the business, which questions need answering, which behaviors can help answer them, the technical work becomes much easier.

This is the point where GA4 belongs in the process.

Now the team can decide:

• Which events need to be tracked.
• Which events should be marked as key events.
• Which parameters are needed.
• Which audiences or segments matter.
• Which reports should be created.
• Which data needs to be compared with CRM, ecommerce, sales, or product data.
• Which interactions should not be tracked yet.

This is much cleaner than opening GA4 first and trying to make decisions inside the tool.

The framework becomes the brief. The implementation is still technical, but it is no longer guesswork.

8. Validate Before Anyone Uses The Data

Even with a strong framework, the data still needs to be checked. An event appearing in GA4 does not automatically mean it is reliable.

It may fire twice. Or it may fire too early. It may be affected by consent settings, etc.

This is why validation should not be treated as a small technical task at the end.

The goal is not perfect data. Perfect data rarely exists. The goal is data that is defined clearly enough and trusted enough to support decisions.

The Tool Comes After The Thinking

I always find that GA4 capabilities are genuinely useful. However, the process should begin with the success definition and business questions that need answering. When teams determine these first, the analytics setup becomes far more focused.

Events gain a purpose, dashboards serve a specific function, and explaining reports becomes easier.

If you skip these first steps, GA4 turns into a repository of ambiguity. That is why the measurement framework comes first.

More Resources:

• How To Track User Journey In GA4 To Make SEO Wins More Visible
• Why Your SEO KPIs Are Failing Your Business (And How To Fix Them)
• Why Your Search Data Doesn’t Agree (And What To Do About It)

Featured Image: ImageFlow/Shutterstock %!s()

In my time at the UN, I had to attend numerous meetings with senior officials of Bashar al-Assad’s regime, including the Syrian president himself. Some would accuse me and the UN of maintaining this engagement as part of a trade to get better humanitarian access.

The truth is different. Humanitarian agencies and their officials always meet anyone who can either help or impede humanitarian assistance. It’s not a trade. It’s a necessity – as is also true of mediators always meeting the parties to conflict in their efforts to end it.

All of my many meetings with al-Assad were to press for the decisions he needed to take for the welfare of his people. He was one of many people with deplorable power to create and sustain suffering whom I had to meet in my five decades working as a diplomat.

On one occasion, back near the beginning of al-Assad’s hideous war in 2012, I was living in Damascus and conducting daily futile negotiations with the government on behalf of the UN. I always raised the issue of detentions. One day, the man across the table stopped the clock. “Switch off the microphones,” he said, “and put down your pens.” Then turned to me and said very simply: “Stop wasting your time on this. We will never let them out. Nor will we ever admit to this truth.”

In 2022, in a private meeting with al-Assad, I suggested that he should empty the jails. “Of course,” he replied. “I have already emptied them. There are no detainees there now!”

A year later, in the aftermath of the devastating earthquakes, I met al-Assad three times. My job was to persuade him to do the necessary and obvious things for the welfare and the rights of his people.

I can now say that my efforts signally failed. The Syrian people were saved by military action. The takeover of Damascus set the table for peace.

As someone who has devoted a lifetime to dialogue and negotiation, I find it a bitter truth that action, not talk, was what was needed – and that it was required all those years earlier.

I now understand that the international community’s original sin was to set aside regime change from the outset as the route to end Syria’s suffering. Instead, we had “Friends of Syria” – a grouping of mainly Western powers and regional allies – supporting the opposition to al-Assad but making almost no difference to the daily toll of detentions and deaths affecting almost every Syrian family.

The lies endured throughout Syria’s suffering.

The war has now ended. What remains now is building peace. And as we have seen in the recent spate of bombings in Damascus, there is no shortage of those who want to see Syria fail.

The main priority is to rebuild the economy. Year after year, under the combined weight of war, sanctions and economic collapse, the people of Syria became steadily poorer. Today, two-thirds live in extreme poverty. And this is in a country of great talent and evident importance to its neighbours.

Aid is arriving, but as everywhere, it is sliced thinly. Gulf countries and EU member states are still giving. But I know well from my humanitarian work that a sustainable response to Syria’s crises has to come in the form of private investment in the economy.

Whether it be in banking, energy, construction, food processing, agribusiness and light manufacturing, Syria has tremendous potential for growth. Expatriate capital could help spearhead recovery, but significant global capital and technical support would still be needed.

Two problems remain: the removal of the last sanctions, long overdue and still a threat to building peace; and the management of risk for investors.

The United States’ recent announcement that it will delist Syria as a “state sponsor of terror” goes a long way in helping with the first point.

The second one remains a major challenge. A senior ambassador in Damascus told me recently that while there is international consensus to support Syria, the country still cannot offer predictable rules and legal protections that make investment possible.

The Syrian government needs to create a safer environment for investment, making Syria worth the risk, and to do so through well-thought-out legislation, not decrees or promises. Its capacity to follow through on declared commitments remains, sadly, limited. Too often bureaucratic inertia and official indecision are choking off opportunities. It needs to act publicly, inclusively and decisively.

The importance of this cannot be overstated. The country is pivotal to the stability of the region. This has always been true, and never more so than now amid escalating conflicts in the Middle East.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance. %!s()

The European Commission is trying this week to reconfigure a 21st package of sanctions against Russia, after its original proposal foundered on objections from Greece and other European Union members last week.

The proposed sanctions would prevent EU shipping from carrying Russian liquefied natural gas to third parties – even though the EU itself increased its own imports of Russian LNG by 11 percent in the first six months of 2026, compared with the same period last year.

Greece says that as owner of 60 percent of the EU fleet, its shipping would be disproportionately penalised if the new planned sanctions come into effect.

This latest threat to Greece’s prized shipping industry follows an earlier one, to its equally prized tourism industry. Together they provide more than a quarter of the country’s economy.

In May, a fisherman discovered a Ukrainian explosives-laden naval drone in an inlet on the island of Lefkada, in the Ionian Sea.

Ukraine has used such drones to attack tankers of the Russian shadow fleet.

“We are concerned about a possible oil spill and about the danger presented by high explosives in our neighbourhood,” a senior government official told Al Jazeera. “We don’t want Greece to be a theatre of war operations.”

Greek officials say that Ukraine has now promised to be more careful in the future.

“There was an assumption of responsibility and an apology from the foreign ministry on behalf of the president of Ukraine, and that allowed us to open the channels of communication and move on with our work,” Greece’s Deputy Foreign Minister Haris Theoharis told Al Jazeera.

Last month, Theoharis signed Greece’s first memorandum outlining its assistance in Ukraine’s reconstruction, and the two sides are moving towards an intergovernmental agreement, Theoharis said.

Greek companies have so far undertaken at least four projects to rebuild hydroelectric power stations and other infrastructure destroyed in Russia’s war.

The money will come from Greek taxpayers, the EU and private investment.

It may not sound like much, but when he started his job a year ago, Theoharis said, there was nothing.

“A week into this job, I accompanied the prime minister to the Ukraine reconstruction conference in Rome. We had very few Greek businesses with us and nothing was signed,” Theoharis said.

“[Ukrainian deputy minister of development] Alyona Shkrum said she’s never worked with another country that moved as fast as we did,” he said.

Greece’s port of Alexandroupolis has since 2022 become an important conduit for US weapons to Ukraine, and in November last year began to provide Ukraine with LNG, after Russia bombed Ukrainian gas infrastructure.

Treading softly, and carrying a small stick

According to the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, Greece has given 170 million euros ($194m) in bilateral military aid, not including aid through NATO.

It has also given 1.14 billion euros ($1.3bn) in military and financial aid through EU institutions, and 9 million euros ($10.3m) in humanitarian aid.

On a per capita basis, Greece’s contribution may not be as impressive as those of smaller European economies, such as the Baltic states, which have pledged 0.25 percent of their gross domestic product (GDP) to Ukraine, but Greece has made these contributions while recovering from bankruptcy and observing an obligation to keep its budget balanced.

Greece has a more serious constraint, however.

“Russia can escalate hybrid warfare against Greece, and we are only now building our defence against such threats,” said the senior government official.

While Greece is making progress on cybersecurity, it still has a long way to go in protecting infrastructure, the official said.

Greece also faces a general election between the autumn and early 2027, and is concerned about Russian misinformation operations.

The fear of these diplomatic, security and political exposures means Greece has been slow to conclude a drone deal, like those signed between Ukraine and other EU members, to jointly manufacture unmanned systems.

In November 2025, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis issued a joint declaration in Athens, pledging to “deepen defence co-operation … including co-operation on the development and deployment of maritime (sea) UAVs, joint exercises and training related to unmanned maritime systems”.

Since then, neither side has reported any progress, but Greece admits it is mulling over the effect such cooperation will have on its relations with Russia.

“A drone deal means that 50 percent of the product built in Greece will be used against Russia,” the senior government official told Al Jazeera, adding, “we don’t yet know what kind of agreement the US will reach with Russia.”

Greece’s cautious and incremental approach to what for Ukraine is in effect a war of independence from Russia contrasts with many Ukrainians’ admiration for Greece’s War of Independence from the Ottoman Empire in 1821.

“Quite a few times I heard [Ukrainians say], ‘If a small country could do it, we will succeed, too,’” a Ukrainian academic with a Greek background told Al Jazeera, asking to be identified only as Tatiana. She lives in Greece as a refugee, but members of her family live in Mariupol in southeastern Ukraine, under Russian occupation.

“People ask us, ‘What do you think you’re doing fighting the world’s second-largest army,’ and we replied, ‘Yes, Greece, too, was small when it started fighting for independence, and it is an example to be followed,’” Tatiana said. %!s()