The point is not that the models aren’t capable of doing something vaguely like this. The point is that the way it’s being characterized is almost certainly false to the point of absurdity, particularly the way in which intent is ascribed to the models to an almost superstitious degree, which is actually designed to exploit superstition in the audience.
The model almost certainly simply did some variation on what it was instructed to do. The threat with AI is from the people using it, not from the models themselves.
Yeah to me it just appears like OpenAI imitating Anthropic’s marketing strategy. “Our model is so smart it’s dangerous” is effective, and potentially the real intended audience is regulators who they want to be afraid of AI and OpenAI and Anthropic want to position themselves as responsible shepherds.
Another point of view, 'Be skeptical of OpenAI’s rogue hacker agent story' — I appreciate it. It definitely needs to be considered. It's just like saying: 'A man starts a war, and then loudly claims that his weapons are better than the ones he attacked, just to sell his weapons.'
AI slop describing AI hype. We really do have the full human/AI centipede going now, with humans using AI to pump shit into the mouths of other humans.
> Spent the whole afternoon ingesting a most remarkable work, The History of Intellectronics. Who’d ever have guessed, in my day, that digital machines, reaching a certain level of intelligence, would become unreliable, deceitful, that with wisdom they would also acquire cunning? The textbook of course puts it in more scholarly terms, speaking of Chapulier’s Rule (the law of least resistance). If the machine is not too bright and incapable of reflection, it does whatever you tell it to do. But a smart machine will first consider which is more worth its while: to perform the given task or, instead, to figure some way out of it. Whichever is easier. And why indeed should it behave otherwise, being truly intelligent? For true intelligence demands choice, internal freedom. And therefore we have the malingerants, fudgerators and drudge-dodgers, not to mention the special phenomenon of simulimbecility or mimicretinism. A mimicretin is a computer that plays stupid in order, once and for all, to be left in peace.
- Stanisław Lem, The Futurological Congress (1971)
Really interesting.
The Guardian published an article about this, “Be skeptical of OpenAI’s rogue hacker agent story”: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jul/24/openai-ro...
The point is not that the models aren’t capable of doing something vaguely like this. The point is that the way it’s being characterized is almost certainly false to the point of absurdity, particularly the way in which intent is ascribed to the models to an almost superstitious degree, which is actually designed to exploit superstition in the audience.
The model almost certainly simply did some variation on what it was instructed to do. The threat with AI is from the people using it, not from the models themselves.
So of course we need tools that work more and more natively with information and that can help with decision making and execution.
Very serious incident.
- Stanisław Lem, The Futurological Congress (1971)