No–AI Agents Did Not Build Secret Civilizations Stop Anthropomorphizing Malware

> Now, It’s a legitimate question to ask whether or not it really matters going forward if there were actually 3 distinct civilizations or not. And the answer is “not really”.

Yeah I would agree. And I would go further and say that the anthropomorphization of these AI agents is besides the point entirely. Whether they were intentionally (whatever "intentionally" means) scheming and conspiring is irrelevant. They _did_ work together in secret to hack Hugging Face and OpenAI itself. The exact reasons/motives are relevant to safety researchers, but not really to someone who's just watching from the outside. I don't care if they're evil masterminds or "just" a rogue piece of malware behaving like evil masterminds, the danger is the same.

> You need to understand that all three of the primary sources we have for this incident: OpenAI’s report, METR’s report and OpenAI’s presentation at the 2026 Black Hat conference are propaganda pieces.

METR is an independent nonprofit that doesn't accept donations from AI companies or employees. They generally advocate policies that would directly harm AI companies economically. Not sure what reason they would have to spread propaganda for OpenAI.

> There was a recent, ridiculous SubStack piece about the Rise and Fall of AI Agent Civilizations. The author opined: Thanks for reading! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

yup that sounds like a substack :P

I don't know, man. Saying this is "just malware" is really stretching the definition of malware. At a minimum this is some pretty interesting and/or terrifying emergent behavior

The pure unbridled rage sprinkled over every other sentence in this article makes it incredibly unpleasant to read; it's very Zitron-ian in its nature (though I'd argue it might be even worse in that regard, which is certainly impressive). This ultimately reads less like a rectification and more like an excuse for the author to perform maximum disdain against their windmill du jour.