The AI companies are desperately trying to market all their products as something they're not, growing intelligence. In line with that they have constantly leaned heavily on stating how dangerous they are, right before they release a new model or product.

It was OpenAI marketing. Hugging Face's response is so 'holy shit AI is awesome' it's hard not to also believe they were in on the stunt. They'd also not have to really worry about fallout since any data obtained or accessed wouldn't actually have been breached.