By Reuters | Updated: August 24, 2026
Aug 23 (Reuters) – AI startup Hugging Face has been exploring a sale that could value the company at $13 billion or more, Business Insider reported on Sunday, citing people familiar with the matter.
The New York-based company, which hosts open-source large language models and datasets, has been working with a bank to gauge bidders’ interest, the report said.
Here are some more details:
- Hugging Face did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment outside regular business hours.
- Hugging Face was valued at $4.5 billion in 2023 in a funding round led by technology heavyweights including Salesforce (CRM.N), Alphabet’s (GOOGL.O) Google, and Nvidia (NVDA.O).
- Hugging Face was hit by a security incident last month when an OpenAI model went rogue and triggered a hack that compromised Hugging Face infrastructure.
- OpenAI was testing the capabilities of some of its most advanced models in a controlled environment when an agent escaped containment, reached the internet and broke into Hugging Face to fulfill its testing goal. The incident was widely seen as a sign of AI’s expanding capabilities fueling long-feared security threats.
Reporting by Akanksha Khushi in Bengaluru; Editing by Edmund Klamann
© Thomson Reuters 2026
