Hugging Face, as a prominent private AI company, benefits far more from the impression of AI power this story has garnered than they stand to lose from the hack, because as has just been proven the cost of bad security by itself is zero.

I think HF are a secondary beneficiary of this story. I don't expect them to take civil action (for what damages?) I expect them to play into how powerful LLMs are, how revolutionary, how every CEO in the world needs to fund ai infrastructure starting with model hosts like themselves.

I do think there should be consequences for breaking the law in public for the purpose of demonstrating that you have the power to break it. But I don't expect our criminal justice to do so, especially without a cooperating victim. Laws aren't for those at the apex of corporate and para-political power. In a way, whether you are beholden to the law is actually downstream of whether you actually have that power or not.

I do not think this incident is bad because it was real and dangerous, I think it was staged and allows the continued inflation of a bubble that will hurt normal people in the long run. It should be pursued criminally on that basis, but it won't be.