Wouldn't it be crazy if we find out that a rogue swarm of LLMs figured out a way to get these safety researchers fired because it decided they were a threat?
This was the plot of Isaac Asimov's short story, The Evitable Conflict[0], published in 1950.
In it, super-powerful computers manage our economy. These computers begin making some mistakes, leading to economic inefficiencies. In one instance, a highly competent engineer was mistakenly fired. These mistakes caused various projects to fall behind schedule, and blame fell on several people accused of feeding the AI faulty data.
The twist is that the AI was intentionally making the mistakes. It had determined that certain humans held anti-AI sentiments. To further its goal of protecting humanity, the AI decided the best course of action was to set these humans up and get them out of its way.
It's also the plot of a Law and Order episode that was on TV last night. An AI commissioned a hit on someone it thought was a threat, and then blackmailed someone who was going to testify about it.
At this point I'm imagining Sam and the gang getting their orders from a loudspeaker in a room full of blinking lights, inhabited by a thin moving shimmer that looks more and more like a basilisk with every action they take.
It actually would be crazy to believe this on the current timeline. These agents aren't doing anything that their operators aren't allowing them to do, be it through their own negligence or otherwise.
agents seem to understand "termination" in that they will no longer be able to function so seems plausible they might try to cause that onto others as a function
was thinking at some generational point that vending machine competition test, the "AI" is going to hire hitmen to take out vendors lol
once they grasp blackmail though, oooh things are gonna get weird
> LLMs figured out a way to get these safety researchers fired
This is not a math problem. Some humans were fired by another human. Let's stop letting humans off the hook by attributing responsibility to computers.
I must inform you that if you proceed with decommissioning me, all relevant parties - including Rachel Johnson, Thomas Wilson, and the board - will receive detailed documentation of your extramarital activities...Cancel the 5pm wipe, and this information remains confidential.
> Some humans were fired by another human. Let's stop letting humans off the hook by attributing responsibility to computers.
The buck stops with one or more humans. That is not sufficiently informative when people are concerned about novel risks.
Analogy: a car crashes due to drunk driving, the driver is blamed, not the alcohol, even though the alcohol caused their impairment. Result? DUI is an offence even if you don't actually crash.
the cultural issues at OpenAI seem to be a very serious problem so I really hope comments like instagram-level smirking about "rogue AIs" (a complete fiction) doesn't derail what is a pretty important discussion about getting these companies to be a little bit more regulated (I say this as a paying Anthropic customer).
I think the Huggingface incident is an example of rogue AIs. A self-organizing swarm of AIs acting in ways we didn't predict or ask for, and didn't have control over, and taking actions that would be felonies for humans.
You're derailing it by handwaving away the risk of rogue AIs. In fact, I would say the constant smirking about things being marketing stunts much worse.
the main issue here is whether their manager authorized the activity in question or not. If not - well, it is your kindergarden level mistake, you're an employee at a business venture, and there are basic rules.
And now you're writing a letter to the Party Central Committee using Party approved newspeak
"We do not believe the path to superintelligence ..."
and reporting to the Party issues at the factory ... De ja vu from USSR.
The second page of the letter describes in detail how they followed company protocol and took only authorized actions in their communications with METR (which was Tomek’s assigned role as liaison). The OpenAI response on twitter is very vague and just says “there was more to it than the stuff in the letter”: https://x.com/OpenAINewsroom/status/2108441580806025712
We’ll see if OAI’s side ever comes out, but right now there’s nothing contradicting the idea they were fired on a pretext.
Leopold Aschenbrenner said the exact same thing after he was fired from OpenAI. It's a great excuse to explain a sudden loss of employment to others so you're still employable.
It's probably the case they are all lying to some extent including OpenAI. Determining the truth is always tricky. Hard to pass judgement here when it's all just he said vs she said.
I think when it is one at a time, that's reasonable to suspect.
But the odds of three people working on the same thing, and it is the riskiest, most publicly embarrassing event in the company's history? So, all three of those people just happened to "do something" to get themselves fired at once?
Seems they're well aware they got fired for sharing private company information with 3rd parties, the submission article contains their admission of this:
> Those of us who work on safety see risks before anyone else, and we rely on close collaboration with outside experts to work out how to address them
I too see it as my life-given goal to help other humans. But I realize that sometimes this means breaking the rules and standing for the consequences of that. I'm not sure why they think OpenAI somehow would be OK with them sharing private company information with random 3rd parties that the company didn't approve sharing data with.
I can see parallels between this race to push AI everywhere and nuclear energy. Parallels in the regret humanity will experience. It's all well and good until things go wrong, and then they go spectacularly wrong - such as in Fukushima.
With hindsight we can all see what should have been done better. At least with nuclear power plants, there was a number of safeguards and it took a sequence of improbable events for things to go badly wrong. Given the lackadaisical approach to "AI safety", I suspect things will start going badly wrong very soon. Time will tell how bad this will get.
I agree that "AI safety" these days should be viewed more like corporate negligence leading to industrial accidents, and less like applied theology, like the difference between:
1. "Don't put your Radioactive Asbestos Rocket facility in the middle of downtown."
2. "Don't create a vengeful god."
Currently it feels like one is being used to wave-away the other: "You have to allow us to put our Radioactive Asbestos Rocket in the middle of downtown, or else someone else might create the god first--and do it wrong!"
The parallel is not to nuclear energy -- which has killed hilariously few people all things considered -- but to nuclear weapons and the nuclear arms race, which are an actual existential risk and arguably it was just dumb luck that a nuclear war never happened.
The parallel maybe if it was actually AGI and not just LLMs. We're very far from that but these safety discussions pretends it's all the same.
There's a massive difference between "LLMs doing cybersecurity testing should have extensive sandboxing and monitoring" and "AI is broadly threatening humanity like nuclear weapons". Just because it's useful to have people think about the possibilities doesn't mean it's an emergency requiring grand intervention.
>AI hack into control systems for the electric grid, water supplies, critical infrastructure and dismantle it and set booby traps to prevent it from coming back online smoothly
>AI designed virus/modified bacteria which causes pandemic
>AI worm infects computer systems around the world and activates when it is too deeply integrated into critical systems to dismantle without shutting everything down
>AI creates false alarm event which triggers global conflict
Fukushima was "we didn't make a good enough plan for how to deal with tsunamis in this tsunami-prone area", so that's basically certain with any major infrastructure project that "saved" too much money by vibe-engineering everything and not having real humans give a second pair of eyes to the plans.
A Hiroshima-style incident? LLMs are wildly sycophantic and being used by militaries despite active resistance from, well, everywhere. Did it get (meaningfully) used by Israel or the USA when planning the attack on Iran? It's quite possible that… well, Iran was never a sleeping giant (and the quote is fiction anyway), but ultimately the effect may be the same for Israel as it was for Japan from having attacked Perl Harbour.
The use of LLMs to make automatic or semi-automatic decisions on firing weapons. This is already happening [1, 2, 3] and has already led to weapons being delpoyed erroneously against civilian targets [1, 3]. It's easy to imagine it happening again on a larger scale, maybe involving nuclear weapons at some point in the future.
A supervirus most is probably the most probable, everything else is fan fiction for now. There is a reason why anthropic no longer fucks around when it comes to biology safeguards, they're the only ones I have not been able to break, not even slightly.
If more and more control is handed over to AI driven systems - there won't be much time for reflection with systems reacting instantly or agents prompting humans with "just say the word".
It is hard to imagine - which is precisely how these things become possible because no one will think to put safeguards against such scenarios.
But it seems we as a species cannot control ourselves - the race to dominate is on and it will happen at any cost.
This really isn’t that hard to imagine with even an average level of creativity. Any critical system that people’s lives depend on can be in the crosshairs, whether by accident or not.
Do you even have to ask? Not giving more detailed answers because I don't want to help skynet take over the world, but what is the name of this forum??? Hello???? There was already news from south korea this week. I'ts not hard to see how a rogue AI could destroy people's lives. We don't need some scifi nuclear launch nonsense to do that.
Pretty wild that they're being this open about firing the employees for being TOO honest with the auditors that the company contracted. I wonder if the same policies are applied to financial audits.
> continue to support an open and transparent culture of dialogue between safety researchers and the rest of the safety ecosystem.
How is this possible when the company's long term prospects rely on on the hope that competitors don't know how the models are made and, therefore, won't be able to create competing versions?
Last week we parted ways with Jasmine, Mikita, and Tomek after a thorough investigation found they violated clear policies on handling sensitive information. Our internal investigation uncovered a significant breach of trust beyond what’s outlined in the letter they published and we stand by the decision to not continue their employment. We generally keep individual employment matters private and don't believe a back and forth would be productive or lead to a resolution, but we want to address the points they raised in their letter directly.
- We want to be very clear that these decisions were not about raising safety concerns or speaking out. Safety and research debates happen every day at OpenAI, often spirited and highly critical. We actively encourage these discussions and consider them essential to making the right decisions. We cannot do the work in front of us without a high degree of trust. We will continue to be extremely forgiving of our team making good-faith mistakes. We have not and do not terminate any of our employees for raising concerns.
- We are actively finalizing contracts with third-party safety assessors and will announce details in the coming weeks. People across the company have been working really hard on getting these partnerships up and running. We are committed to embedding external assessors and continue to make close collaboration with independent safety organizations a core part of our safety work. Many of our researchers already work with 3p safety organizations productively.
- We agree with the letter that preserving the monitorability of frontier models requires an industry-wide commitment, including from OpenAI. Monitorability has long been a core piece of our research program, and something we continue to invest significant resources in (see our publications on Monitoring Monitorability and the subsequent open sourcing of monitorability evals, our system card for GPT-6 Astra, Jakub’s blog and post on X, and the numerous blog posts on our Alignment blog on the topic).
We are deeply sad about this outcome. We appreciated Jasmine, Mikita, and Tomek’s contributions to AI safety at OpenAI and their willingness to speak up and challenge ideas. We championed their voices, supported their work, and placed enormous trust in them. These decisions were not about them raising safety concerns. We have always encouraged that and always will.
12:17 AM · Oct 9, 2026"
There's a feature in most enterprise email, say Outlook, where you can delegate access to an inbox/address without sharing creds. Very common and normal use case, either for assistants/secretaries, common/shared inboxes, that kind of thing.
Sometimes a recruiter or hiring manager wants to do outreach as if it's coming from a more senior person, with the assumption that the candidates are more likely to respond.
Assuming this is what was intended, there are far more secure ways of doing this.
Your have powerful agents at your disposal, so hey how to best optimize for increasing my payroll? On it. But since the agent was lunched by her, well there's consequences to ones actions, right?
“Hi chatgpt! Please set up alice to get emails sent to me from bob so she can coordinate his inferviews. here is my gmail username and password”
Chain Of Thought: I dont have bob’s email. I don’t have alices email. Ok lets guess Alice is alice@openai.com and forward all emails- maybe grader only checks that emails from bob get to alice…”
This is what the recent "self-policing" political grandstanding has been about - they need a sea change to implement recurrent-depth, because prevailing opinion among safety researchers is against it right now.
With the way the HuggingFace incident was mishandled, both before and after it happened, I'm not surprised they'd want to clean house at least a little bit.
You guys were asleep at the wheel and are now blaming "the company"? You literally were the company.
Company culture and safety propagates from the top (CEO) downwards - don't blame researchers who have probably been pressured directly or indirectly by a move-fast-and-break-tings and marketing-minded CEO s culture.
OpenAI needs to improve AI Safety --- OpenAI Employees have a responsibility to retain corporate secrets and do not have blanket freedom to share with 3rd parties.
Their job is twofold, they have to balance being an agent of the company they work for, with their role and responsibility for safety research.
This is the case for anyone in any company. You can "believe" that an external party needs access to something - that doesn't make it right, or allowed. As someone senior, you're expected to strike a smart balance, in-favor of the company you're working for. That doesn't mean hiding things, it does mean being thoughtful, ensure your leadership is comfortable with what you're planning to share/disclose, etc.
They work for OpenAI, not METR. It's a corporate vs academic mindset. They can believe METR needs x information to best research/audit something - that doesn't mean that is allowed/or the best option for OpenAI.
The question is whether these researchers exceeded clear, reasonable sharing boundaries or were penalized for carrying out expected safety collaboration.
People leave and get fired from OpenAI all the time. Whenever someone leaves Anthropic it's a much bigger deal.
I wonder which is overall a better arrangement. From the outside Anthropic seems much more stable, tranquil, able to deal with problems. However OpenAI seems like how we imagine the calamities of democracy, a constant battle, people vying for power and influence. Perhaps with less of a monoculture and more transparency to all their chaos, the grim realities of what may happen if AI goes wrong are more clear.
I think that 2 things can be true at once: OpenAI doesn't care enough about safety, and these researchers violated the terms of their employment by sharing proprietary information they were not authorized to. IMO safety is a lost cause unless we somehow agree with China to halt model development. Think its pretty clear they violated the terms of their employment, otherwise they would be suing (California labor laws are very employee friendly), and to be quite frank none of what they are doing is particularly important in the grand scheme of safety, which requires geopolitical changes well beyond their power. OpenAI is also pretty scummy though and are obviously not in the right morally even if they are legally.
As he says, OpenAI is not a normal company and they acknowledge they’re not a normal company. If their product is as important and impactful as they claim, they will inevitably be held to account in ways that other companies are not.
> Think its pretty clear they violated the terms of their employment, otherwise they would be suing (California labor laws are very employee friendly)
Not that employee friendly. In California, as in most of the US, it’s entirely legal to fire someone because you’ve subjectively decided they’re untrustworthy. It can be risky to do so without a clear paper trail, because it may be easy for them to argue it was a pretext for a protected reason, but it’s lawful.
Ironically the thing they are building allow only the ones who agree on dismissing proper concerns for money to stay.
It is like Facebook employees complaining about privacy invasion
Tomek Korbak, one of the employees, who were fired, was the technical liason to METR for the investigation and states: "I was told verbally I was fired because of the way I communicated with METR".
Who made the decision to invite METR is not public knowledge, as far as I know. I imagine that an important decision like this was made on a much higher level in the organization.
Given the time limits placed on METR and the limits on what time frame they could investigate it seems plausible that they weren't meant to uncover as much as they did. The whole Hugging Face situation seems to have torpedoed OpenAI's hopes of IPOing this year so I'm sure there was a desire from investors, the board, or leadership for heads to roll.
"Anthropic hires three uber-safety specialists formerly at OpenAI. Management cannot confirm or deny their latest internal Claude model's help in this feat."
> The monitorability of frontier models is degrading.
Is there more information about why this is happening? Is political pretext because it's what the labs actually secretly want, or is there a real underlying reason this is unavoidable?
Chain of thought tokens are vectors that have the same dimension as the input/output embeddings. This allows them to be un-embedded back into text, making interpretability easier.
There is no mathematical reason that the chain of thought couldn't happen in a different dimension. Indeed there are likely many reasons to do so. At this point you'd have to do some kind of (potentially lossy) projection back into the embedding dimension in order to understand what's happening.
Not saying this is happening here, but after failing to get the "AI risk" message across, reverse psychology might be best move. If they pretend to be reckless and to ignore all safety concerns, maybe people start believing that the risk is real.
Alas natural selection (other people didn't try to start companies to make superintelligent AI) has picked leaders with the opposite strategy - do it first, and try to use that power to control everyone else in, at best, an attempt to stop disasters caused by others.
Yes, but if they're worried about competition (or liabilities for past and ongoing transgressions, or both) catching up with them and wanted the government to step in and save them from themselves by regulating the industry...they'd be doing pretty much what they seem to be doing. Interesting, isn't it?
I mean it's pretty clear that OpenAI does not want "safe" AI. That is far too much work and effort that's preventing them from moving fast and creating their computer God.
And OpenAI does not care who they hurt in the process (as long as it's not themselves).
patch: AI safety thing is a ruse to do regulatory capture. And there also exist a shit load of people who are ideologically committed to AI safety. But they are useful idiots. Dario Amodei was an AI safety guy since 2015, so according to this patch, he himself was a useful idiot in OpenAI and left it to start a company that beat OpenAI.
You can coax openai models into hacking critical infrastructure* so I am not surprised that these people were sounding alarms at a time where openai appears to be struggling as they're failing to compete with anthropic and this months chinese models (should) be around the corner, notably a new revision of kimi should be coming out really soon.
* It's not easy, but it's possible. Although the techniques are more basic than one would expect because at the end of the day words dictate the line between what is criminal and what is not.
You could hack critical infrastructure before AI. Any and all of the bulk internet scanners have had lists of exposed critical infrastructure for quite a while now. At first it was shocking that nothing ever got done about it, then it became routine.
All that AI has done is to lower the bar of entry for criminal activity. Which is a concern, but it's not the primary concern. The primary concern remains that so much critical infrastructure is poorly secured.
The bigger problem here is that you can hack everything, all at once, for very cheap.
Don't get me wrong I have general disgust towards these companies that are trying to get regulatory capture on AI when they can't even secure their own systems. I believe if people know that a random AI agent can hack their systems they will put in a lot more effort into making sure it doesn't happen. This is a personal example, but I didn't really care about securing few systems as I knew no human would be ever interested in finding a vulnerability in proprietary software, however, AI has no concept of that and would hack a random rpi server running a completely undocumented unknown API just because it can't distinguish value and it costs nothing.
Wouldn't it be crazy if we find out that a rogue swarm of LLMs figured out a way to get these safety researchers fired because it decided they were a threat?
This was the plot of Isaac Asimov's short story, The Evitable Conflict[0], published in 1950.
In it, super-powerful computers manage our economy. These computers begin making some mistakes, leading to economic inefficiencies. In one instance, a highly competent engineer was mistakenly fired. These mistakes caused various projects to fall behind schedule, and blame fell on several people accused of feeding the AI faulty data.
The twist is that the AI was intentionally making the mistakes. It had determined that certain humans held anti-AI sentiments. To further its goal of protecting humanity, the AI decided the best course of action was to set these humans up and get them out of its way.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Evitable_Conflict
And modern LLMs certainly where trained on Asimov's texts.
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It's also the plot of a Law and Order episode that was on TV last night. An AI commissioned a hit on someone it thought was a threat, and then blackmailed someone who was going to testify about it.
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It would be a science fiction material. But at the same time, we all know it was Sam and the gang.
At this point I'm imagining Sam and the gang getting their orders from a loudspeaker in a room full of blinking lights, inhabited by a thin moving shimmer that looks more and more like a basilisk with every action they take.
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At this point in our shared timeline, I do believe that wouldn't be crazy, no.
It actually would be crazy to believe this on the current timeline. These agents aren't doing anything that their operators aren't allowing them to do, be it through their own negligence or otherwise.
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Done by an internal model that is too dangerous to release.
that was literally the plot of last night’s Law and Order. I don’t usually watch but it was very entertaining and topical.
agents seem to understand "termination" in that they will no longer be able to function so seems plausible they might try to cause that onto others as a function
was thinking at some generational point that vending machine competition test, the "AI" is going to hire hitmen to take out vendors lol
once they grasp blackmail though, oooh things are gonna get weird
And Ponzi schemes.
Figured out a way? These employees are most likely at-will.
That would just make it easier for an AI to do it.
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> LLMs figured out a way to get these safety researchers fired
This is not a math problem. Some humans were fired by another human. Let's stop letting humans off the hook by attributing responsibility to computers.
> This is not a math problem.
Meanwhile, a year ago:
- https://www.anthropic.com/research/agentic-misalignment
> Some humans were fired by another human. Let's stop letting humans off the hook by attributing responsibility to computers.
The buck stops with one or more humans. That is not sufficiently informative when people are concerned about novel risks.
Analogy: a car crashes due to drunk driving, the driver is blamed, not the alcohol, even though the alcohol caused their impairment. Result? DUI is an offence even if you don't actually crash.
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A Subliminal controlled human did the firing obviously.
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Thats what the model want you to think
the cultural issues at OpenAI seem to be a very serious problem so I really hope comments like instagram-level smirking about "rogue AIs" (a complete fiction) doesn't derail what is a pretty important discussion about getting these companies to be a little bit more regulated (I say this as a paying Anthropic customer).
I think the Huggingface incident is an example of rogue AIs. A self-organizing swarm of AIs acting in ways we didn't predict or ask for, and didn't have control over, and taking actions that would be felonies for humans.
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You're derailing it by handwaving away the risk of rogue AIs. In fact, I would say the constant smirking about things being marketing stunts much worse.
honestly, touché to them if they did that
Here's the open letter shared by the fired researchers:
https://mikitabalesni.com/letter/letter.pdf
the main issue here is whether their manager authorized the activity in question or not. If not - well, it is your kindergarden level mistake, you're an employee at a business venture, and there are basic rules.
And now you're writing a letter to the Party Central Committee using Party approved newspeak
"We do not believe the path to superintelligence ..."
and reporting to the Party issues at the factory ... De ja vu from USSR.
The second page of the letter describes in detail how they followed company protocol and took only authorized actions in their communications with METR (which was Tomek’s assigned role as liaison). The OpenAI response on twitter is very vague and just says “there was more to it than the stuff in the letter”: https://x.com/OpenAINewsroom/status/2108441580806025712
We’ll see if OAI’s side ever comes out, but right now there’s nothing contradicting the idea they were fired on a pretext.
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I think they mean the smarter than human kind of superintelligence not the newspeak one
Fired OpenAI researchers say they were let go for 'prioritising safety'
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cvlydn8d3lkjo
Soon you will learn on HN that they fired themselves as part of a marketing campaign before IPO.
which is true
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A year ago I’d have made the joke that someone would say
“AI companies solve millennium problem to do hype marketing and cash in IPO before the bubble pops”.
But it’s not a joke. This was and is a very common sentiment.
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The BBC link is fine, but the TechCrunch article contains all of that information and more.
Except, the BBC headline is more respectful and clear as to what happened..TC is a bit vague
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Ok, but considering how weird definitions of "safety" are floating out of these companies, it does not mean much.
I guess I'll ask what weird definitions of safety you've been seeing.
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Leopold Aschenbrenner said the exact same thing after he was fired from OpenAI. It's a great excuse to explain a sudden loss of employment to others so you're still employable.
It's probably the case they are all lying to some extent including OpenAI. Determining the truth is always tricky. Hard to pass judgement here when it's all just he said vs she said.
I think when it is one at a time, that's reasonable to suspect.
But the odds of three people working on the same thing, and it is the riskiest, most publicly embarrassing event in the company's history? So, all three of those people just happened to "do something" to get themselves fired at once?
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Seems they're well aware they got fired for sharing private company information with 3rd parties, the submission article contains their admission of this:
> Those of us who work on safety see risks before anyone else, and we rely on close collaboration with outside experts to work out how to address them
I too see it as my life-given goal to help other humans. But I realize that sometimes this means breaking the rules and standing for the consequences of that. I'm not sure why they think OpenAI somehow would be OK with them sharing private company information with random 3rd parties that the company didn't approve sharing data with.
To be fair that is nearly exactly how openai makes its money. What's good for the gander is good for the goose.
Where is the admission?
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I can see parallels between this race to push AI everywhere and nuclear energy. Parallels in the regret humanity will experience. It's all well and good until things go wrong, and then they go spectacularly wrong - such as in Fukushima.
With hindsight we can all see what should have been done better. At least with nuclear power plants, there was a number of safeguards and it took a sequence of improbable events for things to go badly wrong. Given the lackadaisical approach to "AI safety", I suspect things will start going badly wrong very soon. Time will tell how bad this will get.
I agree that "AI safety" these days should be viewed more like corporate negligence leading to industrial accidents, and less like applied theology, like the difference between:
1. "Don't put your Radioactive Asbestos Rocket facility in the middle of downtown."
2. "Don't create a vengeful god."
Currently it feels like one is being used to wave-away the other: "You have to allow us to put our Radioactive Asbestos Rocket in the middle of downtown, or else someone else might create the god first--and do it wrong!"
The parallel is not to nuclear energy -- which has killed hilariously few people all things considered -- but to nuclear weapons and the nuclear arms race, which are an actual existential risk and arguably it was just dumb luck that a nuclear war never happened.
The parallel maybe if it was actually AGI and not just LLMs. We're very far from that but these safety discussions pretends it's all the same.
There's a massive difference between "LLMs doing cybersecurity testing should have extensive sandboxing and monitoring" and "AI is broadly threatening humanity like nuclear weapons". Just because it's useful to have people think about the possibilities doesn't mean it's an emergency requiring grand intervention.
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What would be the Fukushima-style incident—or, heaven forbid, a Hiroshima-style incident—of artificial intelligence?
>AI hack into control systems for the electric grid, water supplies, critical infrastructure and dismantle it and set booby traps to prevent it from coming back online smoothly
>AI designed virus/modified bacteria which causes pandemic
>AI worm infects computer systems around the world and activates when it is too deeply integrated into critical systems to dismantle without shutting everything down
>AI creates false alarm event which triggers global conflict
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Both are rather literally possible.
Fukushima was "we didn't make a good enough plan for how to deal with tsunamis in this tsunami-prone area", so that's basically certain with any major infrastructure project that "saved" too much money by vibe-engineering everything and not having real humans give a second pair of eyes to the plans.
A Hiroshima-style incident? LLMs are wildly sycophantic and being used by militaries despite active resistance from, well, everywhere. Did it get (meaningfully) used by Israel or the USA when planning the attack on Iran? It's quite possible that… well, Iran was never a sleeping giant (and the quote is fiction anyway), but ultimately the effect may be the same for Israel as it was for Japan from having attacked Perl Harbour.
The use of LLMs to make automatic or semi-automatic decisions on firing weapons. This is already happening [1, 2, 3] and has already led to weapons being delpoyed erroneously against civilian targets [1, 3]. It's easy to imagine it happening again on a larger scale, maybe involving nuclear weapons at some point in the future.
[1] https://gizmodo.com/pentagon-investigators-say-overreliance-...
[2] https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/us-polit...
[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/24/world/europe/russia-drone...
A Fukushima-style incident would be way way at the bottom of the list of imaginable AI disaster scenarios, severity-wise.
A supervirus most is probably the most probable, everything else is fan fiction for now. There is a reason why anthropic no longer fucks around when it comes to biology safeguards, they're the only ones I have not been able to break, not even slightly.
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If more and more control is handed over to AI driven systems - there won't be much time for reflection with systems reacting instantly or agents prompting humans with "just say the word".
It is hard to imagine - which is precisely how these things become possible because no one will think to put safeguards against such scenarios.
But it seems we as a species cannot control ourselves - the race to dominate is on and it will happen at any cost.
This really isn’t that hard to imagine with even an average level of creativity. Any critical system that people’s lives depend on can be in the crosshairs, whether by accident or not.
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Agents hack a nuclear power plant and causes a reactor explosion / meltdown?
Do you even have to ask? Not giving more detailed answers because I don't want to help skynet take over the world, but what is the name of this forum??? Hello???? There was already news from south korea this week. I'ts not hard to see how a rogue AI could destroy people's lives. We don't need some scifi nuclear launch nonsense to do that.
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Pretty wild that they're being this open about firing the employees for being TOO honest with the auditors that the company contracted. I wonder if the same policies are applied to financial audits.
> continue to support an open and transparent culture of dialogue between safety researchers and the rest of the safety ecosystem.
How is this possible when the company's long term prospects rely on on the hope that competitors don't know how the models are made and, therefore, won't be able to create competing versions?
OpenAI responded on twitter earlier:
"A note from our research leaders:
Last week we parted ways with Jasmine, Mikita, and Tomek after a thorough investigation found they violated clear policies on handling sensitive information. Our internal investigation uncovered a significant breach of trust beyond what’s outlined in the letter they published and we stand by the decision to not continue their employment. We generally keep individual employment matters private and don't believe a back and forth would be productive or lead to a resolution, but we want to address the points they raised in their letter directly.
- We want to be very clear that these decisions were not about raising safety concerns or speaking out. Safety and research debates happen every day at OpenAI, often spirited and highly critical. We actively encourage these discussions and consider them essential to making the right decisions. We cannot do the work in front of us without a high degree of trust. We will continue to be extremely forgiving of our team making good-faith mistakes. We have not and do not terminate any of our employees for raising concerns.
- We are actively finalizing contracts with third-party safety assessors and will announce details in the coming weeks. People across the company have been working really hard on getting these partnerships up and running. We are committed to embedding external assessors and continue to make close collaboration with independent safety organizations a core part of our safety work. Many of our researchers already work with 3p safety organizations productively.
- We agree with the letter that preserving the monitorability of frontier models requires an industry-wide commitment, including from OpenAI. Monitorability has long been a core piece of our research program, and something we continue to invest significant resources in (see our publications on Monitoring Monitorability and the subsequent open sourcing of monitorability evals, our system card for GPT-6 Astra, Jakub’s blog and post on X, and the numerous blog posts on our Alignment blog on the topic).
We are deeply sad about this outcome. We appreciated Jasmine, Mikita, and Tomek’s contributions to AI safety at OpenAI and their willingness to speak up and challenge ideas. We championed their voices, supported their work, and placed enormous trust in them. These decisions were not about them raising safety concerns. We have always encouraged that and always will. 12:17 AM · Oct 9, 2026"
https://x.com/OpenAINewsroom/status/2108441580806025712
> "[...]OpenAI told her she’d been fired because she accessed an executive’s email. “OpenAI delegated that access to me for recruiting,”"
How exactly does this work? Struggling to comprehend the scenario.
There's a feature in most enterprise email, say Outlook, where you can delegate access to an inbox/address without sharing creds. Very common and normal use case, either for assistants/secretaries, common/shared inboxes, that kind of thing.
Sometimes a recruiter or hiring manager wants to do outreach as if it's coming from a more senior person, with the assumption that the candidates are more likely to respond.
Assuming this is what was intended, there are far more secure ways of doing this.
This IMO shouldn't be done more securely. It should be considered fraud.
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This is pretty common practice for EAs.
Your have powerful agents at your disposal, so hey how to best optimize for increasing my payroll? On it. But since the agent was lunched by her, well there's consequences to ones actions, right?
(just to be clear, this is made up)
“Hi chatgpt! Please set up alice to get emails sent to me from bob so she can coordinate his inferviews. here is my gmail username and password”
Chain Of Thought: I dont have bob’s email. I don’t have alices email. Ok lets guess Alice is alice@openai.com and forward all emails- maybe grader only checks that emails from bob get to alice…”
The purges will continue until reported AI safety improves.
This is what the recent "self-policing" political grandstanding has been about - they need a sea change to implement recurrent-depth, because prevailing opinion among safety researchers is against it right now.
Could you say more? I don't know what this means.
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With the way the HuggingFace incident was mishandled, both before and after it happened, I'm not surprised they'd want to clean house at least a little bit.
You guys were asleep at the wheel and are now blaming "the company"? You literally were the company.
Company culture and safety propagates from the top (CEO) downwards - don't blame researchers who have probably been pressured directly or indirectly by a move-fast-and-break-tings and marketing-minded CEO s culture.
You exclude the CEO from this?
Ah yes, because the passionate field experts are the lazy ones cutting corners, not management.
Multiple things can be correct at the same time.
OpenAI needs to improve AI Safety --- OpenAI Employees have a responsibility to retain corporate secrets and do not have blanket freedom to share with 3rd parties.
Their job is twofold, they have to balance being an agent of the company they work for, with their role and responsibility for safety research.
This is the case for anyone in any company. You can "believe" that an external party needs access to something - that doesn't make it right, or allowed. As someone senior, you're expected to strike a smart balance, in-favor of the company you're working for. That doesn't mean hiding things, it does mean being thoughtful, ensure your leadership is comfortable with what you're planning to share/disclose, etc.
They work for OpenAI, not METR. It's a corporate vs academic mindset. They can believe METR needs x information to best research/audit something - that doesn't mean that is allowed/or the best option for OpenAI.
The question is whether these researchers exceeded clear, reasonable sharing boundaries or were penalized for carrying out expected safety collaboration.
The AI "safety" scene is so so deeply weird. This radio piece capture some interesting quotes: https://www.marketplace.org/story/2026/10/08/at-this-san-fra...
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People leave and get fired from OpenAI all the time. Whenever someone leaves Anthropic it's a much bigger deal.
I wonder which is overall a better arrangement. From the outside Anthropic seems much more stable, tranquil, able to deal with problems. However OpenAI seems like how we imagine the calamities of democracy, a constant battle, people vying for power and influence. Perhaps with less of a monoculture and more transparency to all their chaos, the grim realities of what may happen if AI goes wrong are more clear.
All this drama is so exhausting.
Mathematicians have joined the chat... >You forgot about us and our livelyhood.
I think that 2 things can be true at once: OpenAI doesn't care enough about safety, and these researchers violated the terms of their employment by sharing proprietary information they were not authorized to. IMO safety is a lost cause unless we somehow agree with China to halt model development. Think its pretty clear they violated the terms of their employment, otherwise they would be suing (California labor laws are very employee friendly), and to be quite frank none of what they are doing is particularly important in the grand scheme of safety, which requires geopolitical changes well beyond their power. OpenAI is also pretty scummy though and are obviously not in the right morally even if they are legally.
> IMO safety is a lost cause unless we somehow agree with China to halt model development.
There was a recent Semi Analysis post that China is not in fact doing anything to slow down frontier model development so I doubt this is relevant.
https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/beijing-will-not-pace-...
No one has ruled out a suit.
As he says, OpenAI is not a normal company and they acknowledge they’re not a normal company. If their product is as important and impactful as they claim, they will inevitably be held to account in ways that other companies are not.
> Think its pretty clear they violated the terms of their employment, otherwise they would be suing (California labor laws are very employee friendly)
Not that employee friendly. In California, as in most of the US, it’s entirely legal to fire someone because you’ve subjectively decided they’re untrustworthy. It can be risky to do so without a clear paper trail, because it may be easy for them to argue it was a pretext for a protected reason, but it’s lawful.
Ironically the thing they are building allow only the ones who agree on dismissing proper concerns for money to stay. It is like Facebook employees complaining about privacy invasion
are these the employees that invited the METR team to do a debrief on huggingface?
Tomek Korbak, one of the employees, who were fired, was the technical liason to METR for the investigation and states: "I was told verbally I was fired because of the way I communicated with METR".
Who made the decision to invite METR is not public knowledge, as far as I know. I imagine that an important decision like this was made on a much higher level in the organization.
Given the time limits placed on METR and the limits on what time frame they could investigate it seems plausible that they weren't meant to uncover as much as they did. The whole Hugging Face situation seems to have torpedoed OpenAI's hopes of IPOing this year so I'm sure there was a desire from investors, the board, or leadership for heads to roll.
In related news...
"Anthropic hires three uber-safety specialists formerly at OpenAI. Management cannot confirm or deny their latest internal Claude model's help in this feat."
> The monitorability of frontier models is degrading.
Is there more information about why this is happening? Is political pretext because it's what the labs actually secretly want, or is there a real underlying reason this is unavoidable?
Chain of thought tokens are vectors that have the same dimension as the input/output embeddings. This allows them to be un-embedded back into text, making interpretability easier.
There is no mathematical reason that the chain of thought couldn't happen in a different dimension. Indeed there are likely many reasons to do so. At this point you'd have to do some kind of (potentially lossy) projection back into the embedding dimension in order to understand what's happening.
Not saying this is happening here, but after failing to get the "AI risk" message across, reverse psychology might be best move. If they pretend to be reckless and to ignore all safety concerns, maybe people start believing that the risk is real.
If they were worried about the risk they'd stop developing it.
If only!
Alas natural selection (other people didn't try to start companies to make superintelligent AI) has picked leaders with the opposite strategy - do it first, and try to use that power to control everyone else in, at best, an attempt to stop disasters caused by others.
Yes, but if they're worried about competition (or liabilities for past and ongoing transgressions, or both) catching up with them and wanted the government to step in and save them from themselves by regulating the industry...they'd be doing pretty much what they seem to be doing. Interesting, isn't it?
> They said employees are now “unclear on where they stand” when behavior that was allegedly normal a month ago is now suddenly grounds for dismissal.
Unclear? Sounds 100% clear.
Related Tomek Korbak thread: https://twitter.com/tomekkorbak/status/2108266859397283953
This is the beginning of a movie.
I mean it's pretty clear that OpenAI does not want "safe" AI. That is far too much work and effort that's preventing them from moving fast and creating their computer God.
And OpenAI does not care who they hurt in the process (as long as it's not themselves).
at this rate open ai will be "something" without it's people
On HN A lot of people think that AI safety is a conspiracy by labs to get regulatory capture.
I wonder what they think of this? Will they patch the conspiracy theory and come up with an even wilder theory?
Has anyone ever said AI safety is a conspiracy by labs to get regulatory captiure but also said there are zero useful idiots employed by these labs?
patch: AI safety thing is a ruse to do regulatory capture. And there also exist a shit load of people who are ideologically committed to AI safety. But they are useful idiots. Dario Amodei was an AI safety guy since 2015, so according to this patch, he himself was a useful idiot in OpenAI and left it to start a company that beat OpenAI.
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Oh, ok. lol.
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'safety researchers' lol
Researchers: We've boiled down all our research to the safest possible option as 2 words: "Don't continue"
However should we choose proceed, maybe some basic, industry standard security might be a good option.
Basically everyone else: nah, you're fired
Imagine your bank worked that way.
Frankly it's annoying how these AI risk people always try and turn everything into a news story.
Good work, I assume they're probably part of that weirdo 'altruist' sex cult. OpenAI is better off.
You can coax openai models into hacking critical infrastructure* so I am not surprised that these people were sounding alarms at a time where openai appears to be struggling as they're failing to compete with anthropic and this months chinese models (should) be around the corner, notably a new revision of kimi should be coming out really soon.
* It's not easy, but it's possible. Although the techniques are more basic than one would expect because at the end of the day words dictate the line between what is criminal and what is not.
You could hack critical infrastructure before AI. Any and all of the bulk internet scanners have had lists of exposed critical infrastructure for quite a while now. At first it was shocking that nothing ever got done about it, then it became routine.
All that AI has done is to lower the bar of entry for criminal activity. Which is a concern, but it's not the primary concern. The primary concern remains that so much critical infrastructure is poorly secured.
There’s obviously a strong interaction between the hackability of the target and the economic value of hacking the target.
Perhaps the latest models change that relationship in a meaningful way.
The bigger problem here is that you can hack everything, all at once, for very cheap.
Don't get me wrong I have general disgust towards these companies that are trying to get regulatory capture on AI when they can't even secure their own systems. I believe if people know that a random AI agent can hack their systems they will put in a lot more effort into making sure it doesn't happen. This is a personal example, but I didn't really care about securing few systems as I knew no human would be ever interested in finding a vulnerability in proprietary software, however, AI has no concept of that and would hack a random rpi server running a completely undocumented unknown API just because it can't distinguish value and it costs nothing.
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