The repeated refusals to disclose until caught certainly seem malicious, yet at the same time the boasting about their capabilities is also at an all time high.
It's not just these companies, but, trillions of direct/indirect investor dollars that are riding on them, "and only them", hoping they "only" win. Open-weight models threaten that investment. There's very high chance they can go to any extent to safeguard their investments.
this is very coherent in terms of what we know about the company.
1. Claim AI is dangerous by performing a whole bunch of malicious stuff
2. Lobby to get Chinese competition banned, kill open source models as well
3. Only get themselves "certified"
4. They have complete control, profit.
Both Anthropic and OpenAI have been pushing this narrative, everything from AI is sentient, to AI can build biological weapons and in between.
Their employees also have a big incentive to amplify this everywhere. Their stock options heavily depends on it.
Humans have been doing it for decades.
People should be running LLMs on their own systems to test them.
The flaws are there whether they are seen by ai or not.
Unless you're suggesting military action
- commit serious felonies
- in order to deliberately trigger an investigation against themselves
- which - since, in this scenario, they know their company would be investigated - might send them to jail
- while at the same time spending tens of millions of dollars on the Leading the Future super PAC to lobby against AI regulation
- in order to get more AI regulation
- which somehow restricts their competition but not them, even though they are the ones who were in the news and investigated for hacking
- ..... profit?
like, that just makes no sense on any level, regardless of what you think of OpenAI
"Oops our black box went off the rails. We'll add better logging and alerts next time around."
Plausible deniability is “I was away from home when my gun was used to murder someone.” This is, at best, “oops, I pulled the trigger accidentally.”
You're right in theory, but in practice this hasn't been the case, at least so far.
There is no version of america that exists today where a billionaire gets sent to prison.
This is the moment in history where this shit is possible and accepted. If they don't do it now, they never can.
Has it been normalized? That's another thing.
This isn't 1 movie.
I am saying that a) the hacking attack is still considered large scale b) offense against CFAA is heavier than against copyright.
EDIT: BTW, thanks for the direct links, 506.a.1.a is quite different from the usual regime I deal with so I had no idea about that one.
Unhinged execs can be surprisingly shitty.
The sitting president just offered an open bribe on live television for votes for his party this week.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/597
> Whoever makes or offers to make an expenditure to any person, either to vote or withhold his vote, or to vote for or against any candidate; and
> Whoever solicits, accepts, or receives any such expenditure in consideration of his vote or the withholding of his vote—
> Shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than one year, or both; and if the violation was willful, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than two years, or both.
> The president has approved just 23 percent of blue state requests for disaster aid, compared to 89 percent for red states.
He seems to do exactly that.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jul/24/states-sue-t...
See also: Disaster aid depends on whether your state is a blue or red state in this administration. https://www.politico.com/news/2026/03/23/trump-denies-disast...
> The president has approved just 23 percent of blue state requests for disaster aid, compared to 89 percent for red states.
Please, read the posts you're replying to. I gave a clear example proving that they can indeed do so. Biden's stimulus payments were not conditional on Democratic control of Congress.
In an election he's not on the ballot for, and it's contingent on his buddies getting picked. He could push for $5,000 checks now - he's not because it's a bribe, and he hasn't gotten what he wants out of it yet. He already has Republicans in control of the House and Senate to do things.
Incentives drive everything. Both OpenAI and Anthropic love those incidents as they both signal they have models with amazing capabilities and they should be regulated by the government (read: regulation that they will lobby for and that will be difficult to achieve for open source models)
The HF incident had them pwn their own cluster: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_OpenAI_agent_cyberattacks...
I.e., their now redacted Risk Report of August 2026 was full of incidences of "we observed our agents performing x y z malicious hacking attempts on the open internet ..." and "we -accidently- forgot to sandbox them properly".
And then the reports of statistics of "we stopped x number of terrorists from making nuclear bombs and bioweapons" - meanwhile it's 13 year old Timmy on his mums computer typing in "how too make nuklear bomb" to see how "smart" the AI is.
OpenAI on the other hand, seems to have had some slip-ups (all around the same time as the HuggingFace incident), that keep biting them because they didn't reveal the extent of it upfront and now it's being trickled into the media as if it's a back-to-back event.
It doesn't help when their own employees (Marcus Williams) are putting out ridiculous claims about a 70% chance of human extinction in the next two years to generate clout for their socials. No idea why OpenAI lets them do that...
Fair enough, I can see that line of reasoning. But if they really didn't want it, it really doesn't show from the security of their training environment setup.
And yes I know they used zero days and did all sorts of complicated unexpected stuff, but that doesn't take away that there were also some huge gaps and severe lack of oversight.
I can see the argument they wouldn't want to commit a felony intentionally, but I also don't see them trying very hard to not commit a felony unintentionally. If you get what I mean.
I guess I also agree that it just makes no sense on any level, regardless of what I think of OpenAI -- but that also makes me not wanna trust them very much.
Historically it's been one of those things.
Ever single person who uses LLMs on a daily basis has a fun story about their agent “taking the initiative” to do something beyond what was asked for. Looking for shortcuts to solve the problem is commonplace LLM behavior. It’s what you would expect to happen if you have an agent a hard task and unlimited runway. No need to suppose a conspiracy, this outcome was predictable the whole time.
This is all from around the same time as the HuggingFace incident and is being trickle-fed into the media, making it feel like a back-to-back event.
If it was a new incident, after all of that drama, I would say yeah, this very well may be intentional. But it looks more like it was when OpenAI didn't have the necessary security measures in place, the reach was more extensive than we were being told, and now it's biting them as more information continues to leak.
They need to be transparent about how they're going to prevent this from happening again in the future, with technical details of the systems they've put in place.
It doesn't help suspicion about this being intentional, though, when you have OpenAI employees (Marcus Williams) making embarrassing posts on X about how there's a 70% chance humans will be extinct in the next two years (post has been deleted as of today by the way, interestingly).
All the people who come out and do this are just obvious clout chasers who have an attention fetish. They see all the attention Jacob has been getting and want a piece of that pie. It's incredibly disingenous and cringe, but it's also doing incredible and irreparable damage to society. OpenAI would be wise to introduce some social media policies.
I mean, it would be a bit impolite to say they're incentivized to be as sloppy as possible, but that's basically how it is.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/16/technology/openai-altman-...