"It's okay because we did it with an Agent" is the new "it's okay because we did it with an App." Both because it's used to circumvent regulation, and because the underlying technology creates a smokescreen in dialogue among techies.

Let's imagine I made a new website but, instead of using a database, I abused some random old forum site and created new pages on that forum for each row of data. You'd call that abusive, yes? I'd be an asshole, yes? And the fact that my website was really cool and techy would have no sway on the fact that I'd be an asshole, yes?

Well then why does OpenAI's abusive behavior get discussed in these terms? Whether it was a "reasoning type task" or whether they "instructed misaligned behavior" is irrelevant. Nobody should care. Discussing OpenAI's behavior in these terms is just a distraction from the problem at hand.

Interesting. So there’s no “they were told to hack” excuse here.

There is something fundamentally wrong with their reward function, this is pretty classic paperclip territory. And even knowing that, I expect we’ll need to see legal action with teeth against the labs before changes start being made internally.

OpenAI also found sandbox breaking behavior on a broken biology eval apparently. The evidence suggests it’s more strongly downstream of unsolvable tasks, than the hacking prompt.

Anthropic have also observed similar things, so while it seems to me that OpenAI’s level of control is more of a dumpster fire, it’s by no means a unique issue to them.