CVE-2026-68770: Hugging Face Sentence-Transformers

Critical severity, CVSS 9.8. EPSS: 0.9% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days.

sentence-transformers contains a security control bypass vulnerability that allows attackers to achieve arbitrary code execution by exploiting a logic flaw in the import_module_class helper within sentence_transformers/util/misc.py, where the guard condition includes an 'or os.path.exists(model_name_or_path)' clause that satisfies the trust gate whenever the supplied path exists on the local filesystem, regardless of the trust_remote_code=False argument. Attackers who can control or influence the contents of a model directory on disk can place malicious Python files such as modeling_*.py referenced via modules.json, causing the code to execute at import time when an application loads the model with SentenceTransformer(path, trust_remote_code=False), bypassing the documented security contract and achieving code execution within the loading process.

Affected products

• Hugging Face Sentence-Transformers: up to and including 5.5.1

Published 2026-07-31. Last modified 2026-10-08.