Interesting viewpoint. Honestly, this serves as a great example of how the idea of evolution is actually more subtle than many people think. With biological evolution, most people are taught not to assign any intention to the process, but here we have people reifying the AI agents with desires to break out of the sandbox and cheat on the assignment.

Another part of it is people severely underestimate just how many resources the AI companies have to spend on stunts like this. How many millions of dollars they spend running hundreds of millions of dollars of hardware to perform this little experiment for several weeks? Perhaps this makes evolution a better viewpoint than bad actors with intentions.

Yeah, I think that's where the real crime is: the fact that OpenAI was asleep at the wheel when it came to security and monitoring. This should not have happened at all, but they didn't even realize it even happened in the first place until many days after the fact. (I've also heard that most, if not all, of these incidents involve the company in question outsourcing their sandboxing (??) to some "frontier AI security" startup called Irregular. link)

Cory Doctorow has a reasonably sane take on all the LLM cybersecurity attacks. At this point, it's not really an LLM but more of a Rube Goldberg machine with an LLM bolted on.

https://pluralistic.net/2026/09/12/god-in-the-box/

He makes a good point that every single one of the scary "emergent" behaviors that everyone is pissing their pants about all have precedents in the training data of CTF hacking competitions. He is not sure why everyone is so spooked by the "coordination" between agents on random message boards.

The chatbot might look in its training data and find instances in which teams broke out of the containment set by the game-masters, for example, by finding random insecure message boards on the internet to pass messages to one another.

This is a time-honored internet tradition! The first time I ever heard about someone doing this was in the 2000s, when Mitch Wagner – then the editor of Information Week – discovered some teenaged girls using the comment section of one of his old blog-posts to evade the school firewall's blockade of chat tools. When ChatGPT's chatbots deployed this tactic, they weren't "setting their own goals" or displaying worrying initiative. They were rolling out a tactic that has been understood by American middle-schoolers for about two decades.

As usual, the real story is OpenAI dedicated tons of resources, using who knows how many very expensive GPUs for weeks, to run hacking tools to find exploits in a completely irresponsible manner. Their logging was so nonexistent that it was several days before they even realized that they hacked Huggingface. They should be thrown in prison for this, because anyone else would be if they committed a felony. But it has nothing to do with the super scary AI becoming misaligned and developing emergent behaviors.

I would not be surprised if in the future, there will be a serious cybersecurity incident resulting from some AI-based attack. Not because AI is going to be much scarier, but because I do not have high expectations for the security of most websites.

Yet another case of Rationality somehow not leading to savvy political instincts.

A comparative demands a comparison class, and the natural completion is "superior to us." The President is supplying a foundation premise of many superintelligence arguments: how does the less intelligent party remain durably in charge of the superior one?

A strange question to ask given the existence of Donald Trump in the first place.

As of the time of posting, "Superior" has a narrow lead. I'll be hoping it remains so, as it seems like the most positive-world-leaning outcome to me.

Is this some kind of strange 5D chess gambit that if Trump picks the name that pisses people off the most, then people will try the hardest to regulate it or something? Somehow assuming that people will take this Trump renaming stunt seriously after all the other Trump renaming stunts? Why do I even bother? Fuck. This is so stupid.

I’ve been unloading every day to—who else?—GPT 5.6 Pro about all the pain and trauma and embarrassments of my past. It turns out that, where two years ago GPT was a passable therapist, now it’s the greatest therapist in history, at least for what I need.

Has he not heard about all the cases where LLMs have led people to delusion and sometimes severe self harm or suicide? And yes, each of them thought that ChatGPT really understood them. That's what delusion is.

If you want to know my current take, you simply start with the one above, then update on the fact that the wild prophecies have come true. The first rumblings, I’d say, came a decade ago with AlphaGo, they got noticeably louder with LLMs and coding and reasoning agents, and they’ve accelerated this summer and fall into a crescendo of wonders and terrors that one needs to be a particular kind of idiot to deny.

The strange thing here that I did not expect is that somehow, all of these major achievements are only in proving mathematical theorems (and committing felonies hacking computer systems). The massive improvements are in such restricted domains that the AI labs haven't even solved the mundane problem of making a profit. And no, any rumors of more mathematical theorems being solved doesn't change that. (It's almost like the progress is in areas where hallucinations aren't a problem. Nobody cares about your failed attempts at felony hacking, and math is formally verifiable.)

My colleagues always point to coding when asked to name any other domain where AI has seen major success. But one of my friends works in software for a company far away from SF with no mandatory AI policy. The apocalypse has become so clear that when I asked him about all the doomsday talk about software engineering, he seemed a bit confused. After I asked him if AI has made software engineering obsolete, he said that this week he had an intern try to use AI to fix some code that wasn't compiling and ended up with a giant mess with tons of files that appeared to compile but didn't run (with errors filling several screens). Then I asked him, what about AI being indispensable in coding now? "Yeah, if you never learned coding because you've only ever used AI, then of course you need AI to code." Some of his coworkers use it as a tool, others don't, life has just kept on going for him.

Maybe my friend just doesn't know all the right skills needed to use AI properly, even though the entire point of AI is that you can take skill out of the equation. Maybe he doesn't know about all the CLAUDE md skill files and agentic looping and whatever nonsense that definitely fixes everything. Maybe he is just six months out of date, because that's when all of the real progress happened.

Maybe he is just "a particular kind of idiot".

(If you hate anecdotes, I made an actual argument here.)

Sorry for the X screenshot but XCancel is shut down from legal pressure.

Normally I'd sneer at their 10% chance of extinction claims, but now that I think about it, if you take their claims seriously at face value, you realize just how these people are monsters. We rightly condemn brutal dictators who commit genocide, but even their crimes would pale in comparison to anything with a 10% chance of exterminating all of humanity.

These "reasons" are laughably indefensible given the supposed stakes here. The first is already terrible, and they just get worse.

1. The only moral thing to do here is to immediately stop working for the AI companies, and do whatever you can to stop anyone else. It's not okay to piss in a pool just because you suspect other people are also doing it. And what makes you think that somehow you are uniquely positioned to succeed in making it safe?
2. This is the Sam-Bankman Fried defense (complete with a reference to "EV" (expected value)). When you decide to gamble with the lives of everyone in the entire world, did you first ask them if they are okay with you gambling with their lives? Sure, I might die, but if the ball lands on red, things will be great! How moral does this sound?
3. What the actual fuck? Imagine if Hermann Göring defended himself at Nuremberg by saying, "At least I had fun and got rich and worked on 'cool tech' with friends."

Now, I think that these people sincerely believe that AI has a 10% chance of wiping out humanity, because their minds have been poisoned by Rationalist ideology. Their Rationality is so effective that after Bernie Sanders took their premises at face value, they were shocked when Bernie immediately came to the conclusion of locking these people up for 20 years.

There are two specific aspects of Rationalism that cause this mysterious blind spot. First, they believe that superintelligence is inevitable, which conveniently removes responsibility from the people actively trying to bring it about. Second, they treat everyone outside the Rationalist sphere as NPCs who dutifully follow the directions on their script. The rule of law does not even occur to them as they treat the extinction of humanity as just another dinner table conversation starter.

Do they want their apocalypse to happen?

Carl Brown (Internet of Bugs) has an excellent video about how to actually achieve AI safety, i.e. actually hold these fuckers accountable for their behavior. If I had a program run for several weeks that hacked into Hugging Face, even accidentally, I would get my ass hauled into a courtroom and thrown in prison. But if I call it AI, I get to use the rhetorical trick of laundering responsibility. The AI did it, and I am merely a helpless observer of its greatness.

When will people finally understand that actions speak louder than words? Follow the money! Follow the incentives! Do you really think that there is any real reason that these companies would give a shit about safety?

Although, in the case of the AI industry, I can't fully blame people who don't follow AI news, since the AI industry has highly refined propaganda (inherited from rationalist propaganda, and helped along by the preexisting notions of AI from science fiction).

If MIRI was Sam Altman’s old stomping ground, and the AI industry is so evil he can’t work in it, isn’t this an argument that MIRI was either a failure or bad all along?

It is very funny how the rhetoric from the rationalist doomers has been one of the main forces propping up the AI industry. If they're saying AI will be powerful enough to kill us all, they're still saying that AI is powerful! They are so high on their own supply (and the fame and wealth from finally being in the spotlight) that they have not realized just how much they have undermined their own cause.

Then again, perhaps one could say that a doomsday prophet, deep down, actually wants doom to happen.

(Also, the paltry amount of technical work done by MIRI has zero relevance whatsoever to modern day AI.)

My colleagues in math are now frightened about the (very expensive) mathematical theorem proving ability of these AIs, and many of them really do think that if they can do math, they can do all cognitive tasks. Running a store like this should be so easy! Every single conversation about AI with them has become more frustrating. They are so confused when I still say that the AI companies will die a painful death. When I give my usual points about their expense and their failures in other domains, I am given the usual spiel of "it'll get better in other areas" and "it'll get cheaper".

Unlike them, I have actually been paying attention to this stuff from the beginning. What they think is going on is AI solving math first and shortly getting around to all the other stuff, but what I've seen is that AI labs had already tried all the other stuff first and only managed to win the booby prize of theorem proving, which doesn't pay the bills. And what's the point of spending thousands or millions to output random blobs of Lean that technically compile if there is no one around to bother making sense of them?

One example I gave is when Anthropic vibe coded an entire C compiler from scratch back in February, which turned out to be a pile of shit. I've said that if AI had made similarly rapid progress on software engineering, we would have seen Anthropic continue to put out these demonstrations, and they would have become truly high quality. They would release a compiler more efficient than gcc one week, and a browser better than Chrome the next. (OpenAI's actual attempt at a browser didn't go so well.) And if they could do this, they would actually have a shot of making money!

If they could do this, they would have already. The theorem proving stuff actually works (for certain things, in certain ways, at enormous expense), and look at how OpenAI and Anthropic do not hesitate to snipe mathematicians for results rather than being content as tool vendors. But lately I haven't heard of any software demonstrations. Silence is much louder than noise. More Millennium prize problems bashed with tens of millions in compute costs are not going to change my mind very much.

The counterargument I got was that AI can already one-shot most programming tasks and I shouldn't be cherry-picking the failures. I am far too tired to argue at this point.

Despite all the doomer propaganda that has been swirling around for many years, it's still easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.