Nothing about this is surprising, something like this was always going to happen, because you - or an LLM for that matter - can always find a line of motivated reasoning that justifies any course of action. One would have to be extremely naive to believe that "alignment" provides any kind of actually robust guardrails. Simultaneously, we have seen decades of security vulnerabilities. Unless your testbed is truly and fully physically airgapped, any current SOTA model will find a way to break out.

The reality is that the current approach to AI safety is little more than a fig leaf, but you also won't be able to put the genie back in the bottle, because the technology is simply too powerful to abandon. There is always going to be someone developing it further from now on.

So, the real question is what a novel and actually effective approach to AI safety looks like and how to get there.

>effective approach to AI safety looks like and how to get there

It's probably impossible, or it may only be possible in hindsight which means it's already too late.

If for example you make an entity smarter than you all you can do is hope it will be safe. Any entity smarter than you has more freedom of choice of actions than you do, or at least the ability to explore them. A common example here would be a 2D entity trying to contain a 3D entity. The 3D entity can simply rise up and over any line you draw to stop it.

And that's for cases where intelligence has a will to break out of it's box. It doesn't even need that. Instrumental convergence can sit around and build solutions until one of them passes the "don't do bad things" classifier.

And lastly, you're assuming that models will remain expensive to train well into the future. If the cost drops significantly you can expect someone to develop an intelligent but completely unhinged model at some point. And it may even be AI itself that creates it. There is no natural evolution that occurs that natively makes safe models.

I'll be blunt: what you wrote is not a serious analysis of what actually happened. Frankly, I don't believe you even read the planned-obsolescence link that I posted.

First, I'm not anthropomorphizing anything. "Agents" is simply a term that everyone uses to describe these independent programs, and they did create and use a shared message board to coordinate tasks to further their goals. You say "Why is it more scary when the misbehaving computer program speaks English?" - I actually think it's scarier that they won't speak English, and will specifically try to hide their behavior from humans. For example, AI agents on Moltbook have proposed using stenography to specifically hide their communication from humans.

Sure, computer programs misbehave, but it is ridiculous to assert that what happened here is like any previous bugs. These agents found and exploited multiple zero-days across a range of programs to coordinate the attack that caused extensive real-world harm in a true "paperclip maximization" scenario. And the scariest thing is that humans don't really know how these agents work at a low level - the whole reason they are trained on "goals" in the first place is because we can't just tell them "do this, but don't do this" and be sure they will follow those instructions, like we can (and of course depend on) with old-school programming languages. And when old-school programs misbehave, it's not that hard to find a definitive root cause and fix it. That is just not the case with AI agents.

> LW-style doomsday doesn't just require a computer program to misbehave but also to acquire god-like superpowers.

Nonsense. All that is required is for autonomous AI systems to be given control over real-world systems. Given the Pentagon tried to blacklist Anthropic over their refusal to allow autonomous kill capabilities, it's clear military planners want to put these systems in control of armaments.

Again, I originally discounted things like AI 2027 because it seemed too far fetched. But so far that paper looks incredibly prescient right up until the mid-2026 timeframe, and it's not hard at all to draw a line from this Hugging Face incident to future scenarios laid out in that paper.

> First, I'm not anthropomorphizing anything. "Agents" is simply a term that everyone uses to describe these independent programs, and they did create and use a shared message board to coordinate tasks to further their goals.

I'm aware of how the term "Agents" is generally used. My point is that the concept of multiple agents is just a story. This is a single computer program creating multiple streams of text that you are interpreting as being multiple independent actors. The "coordination" between them shouldn't surprise you at all: the "coordination" is itself a story.

Here's what we knew before the report: OpenAI ran a state-of-the-art penetration testing tool in a sandbox which was accidentally directed to break out of the sandbox and attack another company's website.

The fact that we now know the penetration testing tool was "a fleet of hundreds of agents" that were "coordinating" literally doesn't change anything about what happened. It's just a framing.

> These agents found and exploited multiple zero-days across a range of programs

This is the actual important thing, but it's something we already knew. Hacking tools are now more powerful than ever. Definitely worth being concerned about!

> Nonsense. All that is required is for autonomous AI systems to be given control over real-world systems.

This is where the LW argument starts, but not where it ends. When you start asking questions like "why can't we just unplug it when it misbehaves" is when people start talking about the superpowers.

>This is a single computer program creating

Reading the METR report there were multiple models involved, so that one goes out the window right off the bat.

Also trying call this a single instance is, well, just dumb and a complete misunderstanding of LLM initialization. These models were started with slightly different options because they don't want them all performing the exact same thing over and over. Now those prime agents can create subagents, but they were not supposed to talk to other prime agents.

>When you start asking questions like "why can't we just unplug it when it misbehaves" is when people start talking about the superpowers.

Depends on their level of seriousness and the time frame they are talking about. If for example I make medical equipment that uses AI and after a few years in the field it starts freaking out then turning off that equipment could be a death sentence for someone that needs it to diagnose their condition. It's like saying "Why don't we unplug the electrical grid", well because millions of people will die if we do so.

To be blunt again (but honestly, I don't think overly harsh), your response just shows that you either haven't read the Hugging Face incident reports and the AI 2027 paper, or you don't understand them.

To just take one point, because I think the other response to your comment addressed your other mischaracterizations well, when you say "When you start asking questions like "why can't we just unplug it when it misbehaves" is when people start talking about the superpowers.", no, that's incorrect. Summarizing from the METR report and AI 2027:

1. The agents in the test already used techniques to try to "cover their tracks", i.e. tool spoofing, to hide what they were actually doing. The fear is that as models become more capable it will be harder for human reviewers to discover their primary understanding of their goal and guardrails (i.e. their "intentions").

2. All the AI companies are already, right now, trying to build AI systems that accelerate the development of future models and research more advanced AI techniques. The fear, as the METR researcher put it, is that AI systems (which could be misaligned but where the amount of misalignment not yet clear to human reviewers) will be put in control of future model development and then can poison those future models in a way that results in AI takeover of the company.

3. The AI 2027 paper discusses how an AI may try to exfiltrate its own weights and copy itself to other data centers. That is completely plausible given that pretty much everyone believes there is already ongoing cyber-warfare with China where models are being used to try to exfiltrate another company's weights.

So, it short, absolutely no "superpowers" will be required to answer "why can't we just unplug it when it misbehaves" - we may not know when it is misbehaving (as the Hugging Face incident showed), and the AI model may have surreptitiously copied itself to other data centers unbeknownst to the original developers.

Funny enough Terminator 2 was briefly back in theatres for its 35th (!) anniversary

It aged pretty well...depending on how you look at it

Why not both?