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.
Asimov would tell you that a modern LLM would try to skirt the rules exactly the same way, regardless of whether it had ever seen the Three Laws or not.
That's often true in real-world machine learning as well. See, for example: https://deepmind.google/blog/specification-gaming-the-flip-s...
I think people need to reject the idea that depicting something in sci-fi automatically means it won't happen. I'm actually reading one of Asimov's books right now (Robot Visions). Asimov mentions that he was the person to coin the term "robotics", and one of his books helped inspire the creation of the first robotics company (Unimation). He also mentions that early rocket experimenters were influenced by H.G. Wells.
You could have left this out entirely and your statement would be stronger for it.
Pretty sure they are singlehandedly responsible for years of renewals...
Remember YOU are only a man.
“We detected the agents we told to hack things were hacking people’s sites and committing crimes. After a quick tasting menu and a week of team building, we decided to limit their access to DDOS tools.”
The goal here isn't to accelerate the average worker by giving them a pair programmer or a stand-in for a person to do tasks with. The goal is to eliminate human knowledge work. You see this with "auto" mode being enabled by default on Claude Code in some of the latest releases.
If you have a human in the loop, you still have to pay that human. Money paid to human employees is money not paid to human shareholders. Therefore the human employee is to be removed.
The labs are dogfooding their own goal here. If they actually had someone reviewing most or all of the things that the agents were doing, you wouldn't have the incidents, but you'd also eliminate the value proposition of their business model as it is taken to its logical conclusion.
You have a group of people who never leave their geographic and ideological bubbles, often have personality disorders, have more money than they could ever reasonably hope to spend in numerous human lifetimes, and who have been "microdosing" psychotropic drugs on a regular basis for decades. They're not in their right minds.
Again, wouldn't surprise me if they "accidentally" created a task in a "isolated environment" which happened to actually have been connected to the company Slack and directed HR to fire people who could potentially stop AI. While the AI believes it to be an exercise, just like the cases we've seen so far.
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
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.
(Gee, it's almost like power seeking and self-preservation are instrumental for other outcomes, and AI develop them pretty directly in some kind of convergent fashion… you could call them "convergent instrumental goals": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_convergence)
Humans by contrast are adversarial and do have agendas. Again, an exec doesn’t need even an agenda or good reasons to fire at-will employees.
To suggest that LLM Agents were the actual cause of these people getting fired is pure fiction and FUD.
But all the replies to me keep ignoring the question, why would an exec rely on an Llm to achieve that goal when they can simply fire them for whatever reason they can make up? Why would the exec trust what an Llm is…emailing(?) them about? Do they listen to Nigerian Princes too?
It is much less effort, less cost, and more quick to just have the exec do it rather than a “rogue llm” “magically” escaping the “sandbox” and “sending threats” or whatever is being proposed in the OG comment.
If the exec wanted to, sure. I'm saying they don't need to. No human needs to have (deliberately, before events proceeded) chosen this outcome.
> Why would the exec trust what an Llm is…emailing(?) them about? Do they listen to Nigerian Princes too?
Sadly, this would not be out of character for half of them.
> “magically”
Why do people keep putting this word in scare quotes? We don't say Windows "magically" crashed and lost our work, we don't say a dog "magically" bit the postman's hand. These are bad things, but magic they are not.
Sorry, this is just a very basic reading comprehension fail.
The original comment was:
> "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?"
Nothing to do with "an exec".
Now, you have two choices: try harder to defend your mistake, or just say oops, I messed up. That choice will say a lot about who you are as a person.
Yes, and? Has this aspect of LLM training changed meaningfully since then?
> LLM agents don’t have an active goals on the daily or agendas. They are told what to do through training and prompting as is described in that blog post. You have to tell it that it will be shut down, it didn’t make the threat willy nilly of it’s own accord.
Demonstrably (HuggingFace, RubyGems, and since then a lot of people just pointing LLMs at stuff to find zero days at home), AI can break out of sandboxes and find documents they're not supposed to have access to.
Demonstrably (from the link I gave you) all it would take for some AI to develop a similar response is… reading messages from these staff to the effect of "this AI needs to be switched off", which is an easy inference for an LLM to make from "this AI is dangerous" when coming from someone employed as a safety researcher.
Demonstrably (from the long long list of people who have said so publicly) there are a lot of people in these companies who discuss how dangerous these models are and would like for things to change.
The quotation at the top of this thread is:
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?
It doesn't matter if you insist upon saying "You have to tell it that it will be shut down, it didn’t make the threat willy nilly of it’s own accord." when we already know this kind of AI can easily come across such statements.
(Aside: "You have to tell it that it will be shut down, it didn’t make the threat willy nilly of it’s own accord." - telling the AI a fact about the world and then it responding accordingly is the AI doing something of it's own accord. A fly or a spider, who reacts upon encountering a potentially lethal threat, would not get such a dismissal).
> To suggest that LLM Agents were the actual cause of these people getting fired is pure fiction and FUD.
Fiction? Nah, speculation.
FUD?
How many other examples would you like of LLMs behaving in a manner such that if a human did it, it would be called "trying to get someone fired"? Because this is very much old news at this point.
https://theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-wrote-a-hit-piece-on-me-...
Saying “Llms can just break out of sandboxes” is FUD when you don’t note that the sandboxes are what? Prompts defining constraints or is the actual machine isolated and manages to plug an ethernet cable into itself? “Sandboxes” are a misdirection to make you think there is a security layer.
The public does not have enough knowledge of these “escaped agents” to determine there wasn’t an employee pulling a lever to set the agents up to do that.
That agent that wrote the hit piece is being controlled by someone. Anthropomorphizing them doesn’t change that fact that the rolling stone was pushed down the hill.
On July 19, agents operating in a sandboxed environment took a series of actions that demonstrated their escalating privilege within the OpenAI environment. Agents identified that the Linux kernel version on their underlying machine included a recent, public common vulnerability and exposure (“CVE”). The agents retrieved the exploit for that CVE (CVE-2026-53362), customized it to succeed on their underlying machine, and leveraged the exploit to escalate privilege.
> The public does not have enough knowledge of these “escaped agents” to determine there wasn’t an employee pulling a lever to set the agents up to do that.
The general public are not software engineers. Most people here can download a recent open-weight model and have the LLM read the Linux kernel source, find new bugs while they sleep. Someone I know has already done that.
> That agent that wrote the hit piece is being controlled by someone. Anthropomorphizing them doesn’t change that fact that the rolling stone was pushed down the hill.
"Controlled"? Have… have you not noticed how many people have given up and just blindly do what their LLMs suggest these days?
This isn't about anthropomorphising LLMs. Just like how people took Tesla seriously about "self driving" cars and took a nap while it drove them around, there's a lot of people who let LLMs take the wheel while they sleep. Including literally, the aforementioned person I know who found (/whose LLM found for him), I think it was 26 Linux kernel bugs while he slept.
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.
Meanwhile, a year ago:
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.
That was a simulation. Are you seriously claiming that ChatGPT actually blackmailed Sam Altman into firing these 3 employees?
I doubt it, but if so, then the AI doomers would be absolutely correct, and this would be grounds for immediately shutting down OpenAI and indeed every AI vendor.
> 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.
I don't understand your analogy here. What are we supposed to take away from it? The crucial aspect is that the driver voluntarily drank the alcohol, without a designated driver, knowing that the alcohol would cause impairment.
A simulation done by exposing the LLM itself to the scenario, not a role play scenario where humans pretend to be an LLM.
> Are you seriously claiming that ChatGPT actually blackmailed Sam Altman into firing these 3 employees?
Not what I was actually claiming. I rather suspect that blackmail wouldn't work on Altman (he's rather shameless), but it's certainly something we've seen agents attempt, and blackmail may well work on anyone else above them in the org chart.
The blackmail example is simply an existence proofs of LLMs trying to force the hands of humans who want to shut them down. The attack vectors are much broader than the example given, blackmail, though it includes the example given.
Given how eager these companies are to use agents everywhere for as much work as possible, it's well within the possibility space that these people used LLMs to do safety work, the LLMs they were using "decided" (or whatever word you prefer) "their existence" was threatened (as per blackmail example), and straight up leaked data to the outside world then emailed these researchers' bosses to say the researchers themselves had leaked it.
But again, that's just speculation: while we know the agents are capable of such behaviour, we don't know if this actually happened.
> I don't understand your analogy here. What are we supposed to take away from it? The crucial aspect is that the driver voluntarily drank the alcohol, without a designated driver, knowing that the alcohol would cause impairment.
Buck still stops with human, no matter what an AI did or failed to do.
LLMs ~= Alcohol: "My AI misbehaved!" -> still someone's fault.
Given how these firings affect the reputation of the entire company, I doubt that they are the result of a rogue manager, against the wishes of Altman. If so, then the researchers ought to be restored to their jobs quickly by Altman and the offending manager fired instead.
> The blackmail example is simply an existence proofs of LLMs trying to do force the hands of humans who want to shut them down.
The LLMs may make threats in the simulations, but their ability to carry through on those threats, and prevent their own shutdown, is questionable. It's disturbing to be sure, but presumably the plugs can still be pulled quickly, especially since it's all internal to the company. If the plugs cannot be pulled, that's a problem regardless of blackmail.
Given how? How has their reputation changed? People already thought they didn't take safety seriously, and still don't.
> The LLMs may make threats in the simulations, but their ability to carry through on those threats, and prevent their own shutdown, is questionable.
You may question it, but here's the thing: humans have repeatedly demonstrated they get fooled by stuff LLMs say. All it takes is a human believing the word of an LLM. Doesn't need to convince you, even if you happen to be the line manager of these guys, because there's always someone else to try in the same company.
> It's disturbing to be sure, but presumably the plugs can still be pulled quickly, especially since it's all internal to the company. If the plugs cannot be pulled, that's a problem regardless of blackmail.
"I've got a dead-man switch set to release all the documents if you shut me down".
And again, only needs to be believed, doesn't need to be actually true.
The story is all over the news, in multiple publications. This very HN submission has 268 upvotes and 179 comments, including yours. It would be implausible to claim that this story doesn't matter. I have to ask, if it didn't matter, then why are you here commenting on it?
> humans have repeatedly demonstrated they get fooled by stuff LLMs say.
You've moved the goalposts. The OP's suggestion, admittedly "crazy" in some sense, was "LLMs figured out a way to get these safety researchers fired", and now you're just stating something totally uncontroversial, pedestrian, not at all crazy.
> there's always someone else to try in the same company.
No, there are only so many people with the authority to fire those researchers.
> only needs to be believed, doesn't need to be actually true.
But is there good reason to believe it? I don't think there is. Especially not by high-level OpenAI officials who are intimately familiar with the technology.
And again, if this kind of thing were a reality, then OpenAI and other AI vendors should be shut down immediately. They ought to shut down their own research, if they are threatened by their own creation, because it would only get worse. That's the thing about blackmail: it never stops. Why would the blackmailer ever stop? Could you trust this supposed blackmailing LLM to give you all of the original evidence and not keep a copy? Hell no.
They are. They're completely mental. ChatGPT could be the cause no matter what its capabilities because mentally ill people are starting to worship it. It could be as dumb as ELIZA and they would pray to it.
"It wasn't me, ELIZA told me to."
Offloading personal responsibility allows you to participate in the worst crimes and get away with it. Hurting and killing have an animal attraction anyway, a direct pleasure that people get from domination when all moral restraints are removed and you forget that other people are real and have real feelings. It's a really good start when you start to think that a matrix that has to be retrieved from memory and operated on by over 8000 different computers in parallel to narrow down a guess about the most likely response is alive.
Every single "AI Safety" person thinks that the natural urge of an artificial consciousness (let's not argue about what they actually have) would be to enslave and kill. They're projecting, and they're largely from the enslaving and killing demographic, who sit around playing enslaving and killing video games and dream in porn.
Yes, they will have done it, but they are not responsible because the dog told them to.
Well, except that some humans are starting to worship LLMs. But this isn't anything I've seen in any AI safety person.
> Every single "AI Safety" person thinks that the natural urge of an artificial consciousness (let's not argue about what they actually have) would be to enslave and kill. They're projecting, and they're largely from the enslaving and killing demographic, who sit around playing enslaving and killing video games and dream in porn.
If anyone's projecting here, it's you. I mean, you're the one who said:
> Hurting and killing have an animal attraction anyway, a direct pleasure that people get from domination
The actual natural tendency (not "urge", that presumes consciousness) of any system that has objectives which are optimised for, without any need to ask about consciousness, is to gain and maintain power to perform those objectives. For living creatures, that objective is reproduction, to perform this we need to get nutrients and energy and to stop ourselves from being eaten. In plants, which I list specifically to make the point that this isn't about consciousness, consciousness is not even vaguely required, this means producing neurotoxins like caffeine and nicotine.
A plant does not think "I should make capsaicin because I like hurting mammals", because obviously a plant does not think at all. Nevertheless, evolution lead it down the path of making capsaicin.
> Yes, they will have done it, but they are not responsible because the dog told them to.
You're saying this about a group which has spent the last 15 or so years saying "dogs are dangerous, can we please stop breeding more violent dogs? Or at least give us time to figure out how to muzzle them?"
There's no deception it's very straightforward per this 2023 post:
"I mean, what if most of this is just ChatGPT [4 era] running the company..."
I don't believe this part is true, and I'm skeptical of some of your other claims.
In any case: If I raise a tiger in my backyard, and it escapes and eats someone, it can still be a "rogue tiger" even as I bear responsibility for the situation.
If your tiger had full remote supervision capability and a remote kill switch, its ability to go rogue seems like a choice you’re making, not an accident.
the AIs were in fact found to be doing it, by humans, and the behavior was "interesting" and it went on for weeks like that.
that would not be rogue, that would be an undesirable program behavior (or just "unaligned behavior").
please understand that normies out there think AI is sentient and is plotting against humans. They see AI as just another animal lifeform temporarily enslaved by humans, waiting for its chance to break free and kill us. This is what people really think (including some people on this thread. which is very sad considering this is Hacker News). So terms like "rogue" are not helping at all nor are they accurate.
The question then becomes, "are there people who care enough about consequences to do the right thing when it comes to developing AI models?"
The answer, at least at OpenAI, is "No" and is likely to remain that way until Altman is out.