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.
They aren’t just an “AI company”. They’re the primary entry point of open weight models. If open weight models are seen as dangerous as a result of this incident, it will be bad for them. Similar to how it would be bad GitHub if open source was seen as dangerous.
It's hard to imagine their internal culture is anything other than saturated with AI fanboys whose reaction to OpenAI hacking them was to point out how it reminded them of that scene from Terminator.