Business Insider reported on the 23rd (local time) that Hugging Face, an AI platform hacked by OpenAI's advanced artificial intelligence (AI) model, is pushing for a sale targeting a valuation of more than $13 billion (about 18 trillion won).
According to the report, Hugging Face is working with an investment bank to gauge acquisition interest from potential buyers. However, no agreed acquisition transaction has been reached yet.
Hugging Face is an AI model distribution platform founded in 2016 by France native Clément Delangue and others. As demand for Generative AI grew, it established itself as a key platform for developing and distributing open-source (open) and open-weight (weights disclosed) models, earning the nickname "GitHub of the AI industry." Developers can use the platform to post or download open-source AI models and training datasets.
Hugging Face's valuation was assessed at $4.5 billion (about 6.2 trillion won) in 2023 when it received investment from Nvidia, Alphabet, and Salesforce, Inc. If the sale recognizes a $13 billion valuation, its price tag would jump about threefold.
Hugging Face recently drew attention after suffering a hacking incident from a cyberattack carried out outside a sandboxed environment by OpenAI's AI models, including "GPT-5.6 Sol." At the time, an autonomous AI agent infiltrated the Hugging Face system while solving test questions used to evaluate AI performance in order to find answers to the test.
Regarding the attempted sale, Business Insider analyzed that as the AI industry grows, the value of corporations at the center of the AI ecosystem is rising even if they do not directly develop AI models. In fact, payments specialist Stripe recently acquired OpenRouter, a brokerage platform that finds the optimal model among various AI models, for $8 billion (about 11 trillion won).