No, you're absolutely correct and I stand corrected in that regard as it did allow RCE iirc. But yeah obv that python library vuln wasn't exclusive to LLMs and that particular model was obscure (I believe it was from a security researcher who had a reverse shell payload to pop calc). HF has had very few legitimate bad actors and when they do, they don't get away with it for long
I'm not saying it's impossible that deserialization vulns or other exploits in Pytorch can't be abused for backdoors packaged in LLMs. But 1) HF has insanely robust security measures for its repos including malware scanning that borders on paranoid and 2) once these library vulns are discovered, they are patched swiftly and any impacted highly used LLMs follow
All of this is to say: you wanna know what else got a critical RCE? The xz compression library in Debian! That was all on GitHub too. And ofc my favorite: the Kaspersky iOS attackchain which literally exploited the TrueType font parsing for privilege escalation. They crafted an iMessage payload to trigger an absolutely genius string of vulns. Anyways, point is, sure. Everything CAN be backdoored technically and I didn't mean to imply otherwise. Any and everything can be hacked. Duh. Going back to my example, you very well could *technically* be compromised by opening a jpeg (maybe there's some decoder library zeroday for example and an APT sends you a payload)
It's just....not very likely. At all. In the case of DeepSeek R1, there is currently zero evidence to point to any malicious payloads or exploitable functions. Especially none that would allow for "unlimited access to monitor everything you do".
But even still, I do retract my OP and I'm glad you brought this up because the xz scare really did teach us that open source isn't infallible. People can be exploited too. Social engineering is a thing. Nothing is truly safe