What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2026-68770: sentence-transformers Arbitrary Code Execution on Local Model Load Despite trust_remote_code=False

• Severity: critical (CVSS 9.8 v3.1)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 0.9% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: none known
• Published: 2026-07-31 · updated 2026-10-23
• Weakness: CWE-94

Description

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: through 5.5.1

References

• https://github.com/huggingface/sentence-transformers
• https://github.com/huggingface/sentence-transformers/commit/ae1acc3fb2aa2004577b297eb4a915ce7a03316a
• https://github.com/huggingface/sentence-transformers/issues/3801
• https://github.com/huggingface/sentence-transformers/pull/3807
• https://www.vulncheck.com/advisories/sentence-transformers-arbitrary-code-execution-on-local-model-load-despite-trust-remote-code-false
• https://github.com/huggingface/sentence-transformers/issues/3801

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