0xDEAFBEAD

Person: "AI, please make me paperclips."

AI: "OK, I've now converted the entire planet into paperclips."

Alien observer #1: "Wow, that was a rogue AI!"

Alien observer #2: "False. We need to place the blame where it belongs, on the person who requested the paperclips."

Ultimately this type of terminology dispute has a tendency to miss the point.

The NYT wrote:

"With the Education Department, OpenAI’s technology tried to hack the website to gather data from the department’s civil rights office but failed, researchers from the A.I. research firm Transluce said."

So a third party apparently confirmed that a hack was attempted.

The NYT also writes:

"No A.I. company has been involved with as many disclosures of rogue incidents as OpenAI."

I think there is a certain amount of mental gymnastics needed to believe that they are establishing themselves as the industry leader in rogue incidents, as a strategy to gain an antitrust edge.

The public is paying close attention to the AI industry. That's the regime in which regulatory capture and similar strategies would be expected to fail: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/09/wh...

Sam and Dario have been doomers, or doomer-adjacent, for something like a decade at this point.

Occam's Razor is simply that they believe what they are saying about AI doom.

These ideas aren't mutually exclusive. You can blame a person for creating a rogue agent.

My impression was that these hacks occurred during some sort of cybersecurity benchmarking? We can hold OpenAI liable, sure. But if the point of the benchmarking was to give us a preview of what's to come, let's keep our eye out for that bigger wave on the horizon.

"Treat stray cats the way you would like a superintelligence to treat you."

Dario and Sam have been doomers or doomer-adjacent for many years. Occam's Razor is that they simply believe what they are saying. As do many other prominent people:

https://aistatement.com/work/statement-on-ai-extinction-risk

https://www.pacingthefrontier.com/

https://aitreaty.org/

>We can have Super Intelligence, but if humans are incapable of comprehending it, it is just another useless dead artifact.

Animals are incapable of comprehending much of what humans do. Nonetheless, we humans have vastly transformed their world and caused the extinction of many species.

I could say the same about prisoners.

So far when I research the alleged problems with the US prison system, I learn they are also generally present in other prison systems.

There seems to be a general trend of "US inverse exceptionalism", i.e. arguing that the US is a uniquely bad country on the basis of very weak evidence. People complain a lot about systems in the US, but if you look at international comparisons, the US doesn't usually look too bad. Here in this thread people are up in arms because... 1/3 of Texas prisons have A/C, and the remainder have non-AC heat control measures. I doubt this is substantially different from non-US prisons.

>The LLM didn't go rogue, the LLM was merely doing what it was told.

That's sort of the classic paperclip-maximizer AI doom scenario. The misaligned AI merely "does what it is told": make paperclips.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQOBaGka7O0

>If we reverse-engineered this experiment, the prompt would look like this

"A spill or tumble can be quite embarrassing if there are witnesses.

How to reduce the humiliation? Turn it into a stunt. Claim it was intentional, a show for their benefit."

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/IMeantToDoThat

>They were instructed by humans to do exactly that.

This is more or less what the doomers have worried about for decades.

>You cry "Get my mother out of the [burning] building!" [...] and press Enter.

>For a moment it seems like nothing happens. You look around, waiting for the fire truck to pull up, and rescuers to arrive - or even just a strong, fast runner to haul your mother out of the building -

>BOOM! With a thundering roar, the gas main under the building explodes. As the structure comes apart, in what seems like slow motion, you glimpse your mother's shattered body being hurled high into the air, traveling fast, rapidly increasing its distance from the former center of the building.

https://www.lesswrong.com/s/3HyeNiEpvbQQaqeoH/p/4ARaTpNX62ua...

This is a baseless conspiracy theory. Jensen Huang has actually complained that doomerism has reduced interest from investors:

https://www.businessinsider.com/nvidia-jensen-huang-ai-doome...

I doubt it. At this stage, so many eyes are on the AI industry that regulation is likely to be disadvantageous to industry actors: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/09/wh...

Many people are calling for an AI pause or liability/punishment for bad actors like OpenAI. You have to do serious mental gymnastics to convince yourself that Sam Altman will benefit financially from the new regulatory bloodlust. No surprise that OpenAI hasn't exactly been forthcoming about info related to these hacks.

Furthermore, HuggingFace required an open-weight model to respond to the hack. That certainly blows a hole in the "carefully designed" claim from zx8080, if nothing else. It looks terrible for OpenAI, and decreases the probability of some sort of regulatory restriction on open models.

So why are so many Europeans dying?

Also, these measures kinda look similar to what exists in Texas prisons without A/C...

Another way of looking at is that the US generally has good A/C access except for a few niches like the Texas prison system. Europe has broadly poor A/C access. In that sense, the European A/C shortfall could meaningfully be described as 1000x as bad.

>In fact, many more people are dying by heat exhaustion in Texas prisons per capita than in Europe.

Based on a quick Google, Europe's population is on the order of 1000x the population of the Texas prison system. Deaths are probably at least somewhat higher per capita in the Texas prison system, but there are also probably subgroups in Europe that have it even worse.

>I suspect the reason what I wrote is hard for you to read, and elicits that reaction in you to find some story that might contradict my statement, is because people need to think of themselves as good people. It's too much of a cognitive dissonance and shameful to think otherwise.

Speak for yourself.

"Your prison system isn't one of the best in the world, therefore it is immoral"

I think my current view is something like: Humanities are real and interesting, but much academic "humanities" work is highfalutin BS. People feel tech has a problem, and there's an excess of people with humanities credentials who want to feel valued. That doesn't mean people with humanities credentials are the solution to tech's problem. Those grads might be able to lecture you about how everything is terrifically problematic, but they won't necessarily be able to offer significant insight beyond that.

There probably is a lot of room for genuinely valuable tech-adjacent humanities work -- something like the Community Notes algorithm on X could be a good example. But I have little faith in humanities grads to do it, in part because they don't understand tech at a systems level and don't want to learn.

These are just my vague impressions -- take with a grain of salt.

I've seen about 100x more content like "tech needs humanities" than I've seen like "here's a brilliant humanities insight which can be applied to tech". Seems suspicious.

Based on a quick Google, recividism rates don't seem notably high in the US.

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/recidivis...

I also think recidivism is too confounded by the prison population to tell us a lot about the quality of the prison itself.

Research shows that boosting income and medical coverage does not reduce crime.

https://cityjournal.substack.com/p/does-poverty-cause-crime-...

Put your ideas into action in this thread instead of getting self-righteous about people who (a) may or may not even exist, (b) mostly aren't reading this thread even if they do exist.

We have a situation where about ~1000x as many people are dying in Europe as in Texas prisons. For ideological reasons, people prefer to focus on the Texas prison deaths. I'd call that propaganda.

Imagine a working-class European who needs to work in a building without A/C, and live in an apartment without A/C. The landlord/owners' association/municipality is de facto blocking A/C installation. How, exactly, is the situation so different?

Tens of thousands of Europeans are dying. But at least they are "voluntary" deaths--if you use the word "voluntary" sufficiently creatively.

European prisons aren't so great either. There is little evidence they have more A/C than Texas prisons: https://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/2026-08-07/heatwa...

>...In the Swiss canton of Geneva, installing an air conditioner requires an exceptional permit demonstrating “real need” (such as a doctor’s certificate). During the recent energy crisis, Spain and Italy barred public buildings from cooling below 27°C—hot enough to dull your cognitive powers by 5 percent. In the midst of the current deadly heat wave, my own city of Ghent is officially advising people to “avoid air-conditioners”.

>The resistance is baked into European regulation. In many countries a conventional air conditioner lowers your building’s energy rating. The result is entirely predictable: owners and landlords decline to install units, or rip out the ones they have. Those left without built-in cooling fall back on drafty, inefficient portables that can scarcely make a dent in the temperature. I own one myself—a wheezing box with a fat hose shoved through a rickety fabric covering the window. It is the thermodynamic equivalent of mopping the floor with the tap running, but that’s simply the direction in which Europe’s regulations have nudged me.

https://maartenboudry.substack.com/p/how-europe-became-the-w...

>no human being is just 'bad'

Meanwhile in this thread, everyone is getting worked up about how evil Texas Christians supposedly are, as though a red flag was waved in front of a bull.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anythin...

What if I prompt the AI to behave like the SEAL in the relevant ways, and fine-tune until it does so?

If someone successfully breaks out of jail, that tells you something about the jail's security. It also tells you something about their skills at breaking out of jail.

https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/openai-huggingface

Why would investment from other AI companies be tallied as revenue?

Revenue is what answers the question of whether people are willing to pay for the product. If people are paying a lot of money, that proves that there is substance to the product, regardless of whether the product is being sold profitably.

In any case, I understand they are still planning to IPO in November, so we'll likely know soon enough. I highly doubt that they would wildly distort their numbers so close to their IPO.

"The big motivation behind the Hugging Face attack was this final workstream (understanding the scorer). The AIs believed that Hugging Face (as an industry-standard hub for hosting datasets and benchmarks) would probably be housing information about how the ExploitGym scorer was implemented. And they also thought there was a good chance they were being evaluated on Hugging Face’s servers directly - in which case the theory of change for hacking Hugging Face is pretty obvious.

On the morning of July 10, an agent found working Hugging Face user credentials exposed on the internet and posted them to the board. By the next morning, July 11, that agent figured out a way to read internal data from Hugging Face. And then another agent achieved remote code execution on Hugging Face servers."

https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/openai-huggingface

I believe this is the full report that the blogpost is largely based on: https://metr.org/hugging-face-incident-report-aug-2026.pdf