Guess what I'm saying is that the "was it purposeful or not" debate seems like an unimportant distraction. As someone who uses Claude and ChatGPT/Codex on the daily, and is continually frustrated by the failure modes and what I thought were inherent limitations, I was also surprised by the jump in capabilities. Did anyone else feel that way?
OpenAI couldn't have crafted a better public memo than "We have the most powerful model in the world and everyone should pay attention and let us write regulation to limit AI development".
Absolute master class public manipulation.
1. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/03/podcasts/the-daily/ai-ope...
I think you just answered your own question.
Do you believe that the majority of AI users are criminals?
These are not trustworthy people. And they have everything to lose if they do not become the most powerful and valuable company in the whole of human existence, and, like their pet parrots, will stop at nothing to achieve their goals.
So why not either create a crisis or lie a little or a bit of both? It’ll all be worth it in the end, right?
Thanks. For me that's the conclusive piece of the puzzle: this is a work, not a shoot.
YMMV. I learned what I came here for.
To be this whole thing feels like a marketing play by OpenAI.
In fact, I wonder if teaching it "this is a bypass" would help it to model when it's doing its job vs working around the job.
Could they have added a "no internet access" goal constraint?
They could have blocked network access and required that it use a tool. That would have made limiting and monitoring network access even easier.
You'd have to specifically task it with disabling default safeguards to make this happen.
Narrator: "They had the ability to be that incompetent."
Sounds like you're assuming they're actually writing code by hand and reviewing it with humans.
If it's anything like the company I work at, they're all being forced to vibe code the shit out of everything and ship more pull requests every week. It's all slop from here.
The thing that gives it all away is that they claim that the IP addresses are from Azure, and then proceeded to redact the IP addresses, as if they belong to individual users. It's laughable.
The IP addresses are the most interesting part of this experiment, as it would have provided researchers a way to understand the distribution of IP addresses used for the spam operation within the ASN.