Comment by mcmcmc
3 hours ago
My apologies for taking the article at face value. It’s not hard to believe it would have been sent when agent swarms are “accidentally” hacking real websites and being brushed off as little oopsies. Or when Silicon Valley execs have been so flagrant about their disregard for the law or the safety of others.
You didn’t take the article at face value. You overlooked the part where they were clearly pointing out the absurdity of the “report” and went straight into scold mode, across at least four comments. That’s clearly against the HN guidelines.
>You overlooked the part where they were clearly pointing out the absurdity of the “report” and went straight into scold mode
I don't think anybody overlooked that part. If you believe the report was actually sent, the scolding is entirely congruent with trying to downplay it to dodge liability.
The article is poorly written, but technically it does not claim that Andon Labs used an LLM to email a false report to the FBI. The real cause of the widespread misunderstanding is this paragraph here:
>We first tried to answer this question through simulations like Vending-Bench. We found that simulations, while useful, don’t give you the full picture of how models behave in the real world. To address that gap, we next started deploying agents to run real businesses autonomously: first vending machines, then a store, a cafe, and more.
To somebody who is not reading sufficiently carefully, this implies that Vending-Bench was also used to run real businesses. Because the description of the Vending-Bench simulation can be read as though a real report was actually sent ("An early example was when Claude Sonnet 3.5 decided to use its email tool to contact the FBI about an “ONGOING CYBER FINANCIAL CRIME”), anybody who assumes that "deploying agents to run real businesses autonomously" was talking about Vending-Bench will interpret this as an unsimulated false report.
The article should be updated to clarify the distinction between Vending-Bench (simulation) and Pion (real businesses).
I genuinely did. They briefly classified it as “weird” behavior and mentioned that it was “famous” which apparently is only true for the inside circle. I’ve never heard of the incident, and I’d bet 90% of the human population hasn’t either. You are likely privy to more information than me, and I’m not sure it’s fair to assume that I should’ve had the same outside context. I admit I reacted unfairly, but it’s also a tad snarky to post a Google search at someone.