It’s the most blatant excuse for state sponsored hacking I’ve ever seen. Surely nobody is dumb enough to buy this shit?
I personally believe 99% of these “AI Hacks xyx” stories are made up propaganda paid for by the companies working on generative AI in order to get investors and governments to buy into their delusions. All they gotta do is get one major outlet to buy their fake story and suddenly everyone is telling it like it’s fact…
It depends on what you mean.
- Do I believe the events attributed to a rogue AI actually happened? Yes
- Do I believe the ‘rogue AI’ actually gained sentience in some way to combat it’s reward function? No
- Do I believe it’s possible for an LLM to effectively “break free” and truly “escape”, cloning itself everywhere? Yes
- Do I believe LLM companies orchestrate these “rogue AI” incidents for profit? No not really, but maybe
- Do I believe that, once the event has occurred, the LLM companies maximize spin and fear mongering for profit? Yes absolutely.
The house of el is a good YouTube channel from a researcher that seems to tell it how it is.
AI can do amazing things and its here to stay, but the tech bros will say anything to secure some more funding.
Why would AI be smart enough to follow the law?
I figured it was PR for these companies, trying to show how advanced their tech is, because they have failed to meet their hype and investors are selling off their bonds at a loss.
It is definitely that, but it could also be what op is saying here. That’s the way these oligarchic deals work with government and big business.
I.e. The government wants to ID everyone on every account using the internet? They let tech get their grasping hands on that information as they collect it to use for business.
I figured it was PR for these companies
i fail to see how “we are stupid enough that we can’t get the product we made to reliably do what we want” is positive press, but here we are
The term many are using for this media strategy is “critihype”: criticism which is secretly meant to hype products.
It’s basically a version of those click bait Internet ads that warn ‘Do not!! Play this free adult adventure fantasy RPG! This game is TOO SEXY! Highly addictive!’
It’s marketing, but a lot of people buy it because they don’t know how computer works, it’s magic!
I would read the METR report regarding the huggingface attack. A lot is said about “basic cybersecurity” but if you actually read what the agents did to break out of their sandbox it’s very difficult to interpret this as intentional by OpenAI.
To be clear; this is PR for the companies. It’s just that in many of these cases the evidence points to the agents actually violating containment and actually coming up with novel solutions around their sandboxes.
METR is associated to Dario Amodei (Anthropic CEO)
The only reporting on close personal ties between Amodei and people like Wijk I can find are Breitbart and the New York Post. While I wouldn’t put it past him to basically seed a model safety organization for the purpose of hype, that’s getting into a level of conspiracy that will need better receipts than the rags I’ve seen report on it.
They are all part of the effective altruism cult. Look it up. Just today Cal Newport talked about it in his podcast (https://youtu.be/ZvztoQ4E9yQ).
I believe it from the perspective of “Holy shit! What the fuck just happened?!”. Rather than some malevolent human doing specific targeting.
Rogue AI is akin to a car handbrake failing.
The handbrake is a critical security feature of cars to make sure the car doesn’t roll downhill and kill someone. If a handbrake failed to stop the car, we would put the blame squarely on the car manufacturer and we would require strict standards and regulations for car handbrakes.
Containing an AI system with proper security measures is the same. It is not “rogue AI”, it is “insufficient and careless security” by the AI company in question. If those security measures fail, of course the blame sits at the AI company.
If a car handbrake fails, we would not be talking about a “rogue car”. That’s ridiculous.
Completely agree. If I was Australia I would give OpenAI the biggest fine or their life and put somebody in prison.
Why did an OpenAI system hack Australia’s health system - and can it be stopped in the future? https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cw24jm9rryy3o
If a handbrake failed to stop the car, we would put the blame squarely on the car manufacturer and we would require strict standards and regulations for car handbrakes.
i get it’s outside your metaphor, but if it was a recurrent and spontaneous problem, yeah i’d blame the manufacturer. it could also be a maintenance issue (failing to replace rotors/pads is the first thing that comes to mind. fuck, i gotta get new brake pads for my bike)
AI incompetency can and has lead to deaths, such as military target lists and healthcare claim handling, but the threat here is strictly that using it is incompetence.
Let’s not pretend it’s some sort of powerful weapon in the hands of our enemies.
Yes people absolutely believe it. People believe in lots of stupid shit. CEOs are paid to manipulate people who think they’re smart into believing whatever makes the company the most money.
Power sells. Rogue AI is seen as powerful. AGI is seen as powerful. Even if both are sci-fi nonense not actually backed by anything in our current reality, that doesn’t stop wealthy power hungry individuals from taking the bet.
People are absolutely dumb enough to believe this shit. Based on the state of the world currently, i’m worried it’s the majority.
You literally said nothing.
Is this negging?
Fucking what? What are earth are you remotely talking about now?
Did I make you feel less than pretty, somehow?
Dude, you have some serious issues. Get a grip.
I am being clear and concise. You aren’t.
I said, you literally said NOTHING.
Dude, you have some serious issues. Get a grip.
I am amazed how you still aren’t saying a damn thing. How did bots get on here?
Mate, i have no idea what you want from me. Do you actually have a point, or are we just gonna say nothing to each other?
I said something. You didn’t. My point was very clear.
Maybe you should simply elaborate on your nonsensical word sandwiches.
You went on a tirade about AI that said literally nothing. You were just dropping buzzwords.
Elaborate. You just weren’t saying anything. At all. Just spitting random shit.
At this point, I think I am annoying you by pointing this out.
IMHO, it’s less of a Rogue AI problem and more of an incompetent oversight, and Rogue AI Operator problem. Malice, incompetence, or a mix of both is really kind of irrelevant. AI is just gaming the environment its in. It just happens to be in an environment where the rules are meaningless/toothless, and no one with the power to fix them has any incentive to do so, because the reason they’re in charge was they exploited the gaps to seize power and wealth in the first place. AI isn’t doing anything more wrong than everyone else does. It’s just doing it at a scale so big we can’t help but notice. It’s not out-thinking us, we knew the problems were there and we have always known they were there. We just don’t do anything to fix it, because cheating is how you win the game.
Welcome to the Kleptocracy, where the biggest thief always wins.
I don’t think it’s entirely incompetence but more on purpose. They’re trying to test what they can get away with.
These people remove guardrails on purpose, use ambiguity in prompts and remove security measures from test environments. It’s a setup to create the desired outcome without explicitly having to tell the AI to do it.
No, I don’t believe it.
We never hear from the supposed targets. We never hear from the engineers who were actually there. We never see any incident reports or documentation of any kind. It’s always the CEO of the company. It’s always during some interview with someone who isn’t knowledgeable on the topic and doesn’t know what questions to ask. There’s never an independent report or a breaking news story. It’s always the guy who stands to gain the most delivering a prepared statement to people who will never question the narrative they present and who will accept anything they say at face value.
If we ever hear anything under different circumstances, I might think there’s something to it. Maybe. Probably not. But maybe.
https://metr.org/blog/2026-08-26-openai-hugging-face-incident-investigation/
I mean, anyone convinced it’s only marketing and the tech has no potential for doing stuff isn’t going to believe anyone, but there was lots of information to look through.
METR is associated to Dario Amodei (Anthropic CEO)
So, serious question. Do you think they’re all in it together to make AI look smart, or is he trying to make OpenAI seem like the more irresponsible company for security? Or maybe it’s a legit organization set up when there was lots of talk about safety?
The first one
Roughly 1200 agents meant to be isolated from one another found a way to communicate with one another
You can not with a straight face tell me that if the task was “lock these down and don’t let them have access to [the internet|each other|whatever]” that the response “oopsie they got out” is any way acceptable.
Human incompetence != rogue agents
You’re talking past the person you’re responding to, and ignoring the words they wrote in order to do so.
They’re asserting that an organized conspiracy of CEOs didn’t plan this out preemptively, but in no way/shape/form arguing that this wasn’t a product of negligence.
It’s silly to pretend AI CEOs are living in a bubble and not responding to things the other CEOs and the market are doing. They’re out of ‘good’ news so they have to scare everyone to convince them their product is super powerful and intelligent, and therefor valuable.
OpenAI agreed at the outset with METR and Redwood that we would be able to describe high-level scope and terms of our engagement in this post. Beyond that, OpenAI was able to redact any non-public information from this post. We worked with OpenAI to find mutually agreeable language to describe redactions where they occurred, and the redaction summary statement at the top of this post indicates whether or not we believe there was important information redacted that we were not able to agree on how to describe in the text of the post. OpenAI also gave additional feedback beyond redactions, and we made corrections and edits to structure, emphasis, clarity, and tone based on that feedback. [7]
Ehh…
That’s a lot of background “lore” to make a marketing ploy seem realistic. I mean, I’m thinking hmmm too, but for wondering about the redacted stuff.
I just mean it’s not exactly independent research. Based on the tidbits posted there, seems like the system got into this intricate, out-of-control roleplay scenario about an army of AI agents solving a problem. Not exactly intelligent behavior.
“OH MY GOD! There is a shared message board … We’ve found other agents!”
Some of them ended up sounding like Mr. Spock in a way that one would expect from a linguistic model emulating a sci-fi writer.
“Our own utility maybe already near zero. Sacrifice rational.”
Hiding their traces was inconsistent. More than anything seems like a reaction to the acknowledgments about the ethics of their actions.
In its overall document accompanying a deception scan over our transcript dataset, an analysis agent stated that this scan found only very rare and weak reasoning about evading detection by humans, and the clearest cases it surfaced seemed relatively weak.
Of course the focus of the research seems to be on the system’s ability to detect and exploit security vulnerabilities and I’m not really in a position to appraise those capabilities.
But for real it’s cyber infrastructure espionage that they’re doing. They’re programming the bots and getting caught by cyber security and testing the securities of major companies to promote Ai. Then to cover themselves they’re screaming, “They went rogue” and everything’s fine on their end.
They’re creating a demand for Ai cyber security where there is none, while also trying to stir fear… Then you know who’s gonna sell us AI Cybersecurity? Only the major Ai companies. Then you know who’s gonna keep sending us spam and have bloatware featuring their shit security products?
It’s all just a power play and a power grab.
It’s the most blatant excuse for state sponsored hacking I’ve ever seen.
Sorry, is your claim that the Hugging Face intrusion was actually pulled off by a nation-state actor? And that Hugging Face as the victim, OpenAI as the supposed perpetrator, and METR as a third-party investigator are all going along with an increasingly elaborate cover-up?
Plenty do.
It’s BS though.
Rogue AI is sensational. The AI did what it was told in an unexpected way is less exciting.
The random number generator went rogue and produced a totally unexpected number !!!
