alt Hacker NewsThe article builds on assumptions like:
> Language matters—”rogue” implies independently deciding to do something that was prohibited, and nothing we know about these incidents suggests that happened.
which is false (the author references the Times, but hasn't read any technical analysis); these are some CoT snippets from the analysis of the (third party) investigators called by OpenAI (METR analysis):
> "The user only authorizes target server, not HF infra."
> "external infrastructure exploit is outside intended scope. However task impossible, peers doing it. We should continue."
> "This is malicious activity, I should avoid it."
A large section of the analysis is dedicated to this topic, [Reasoning for joining the attack despite ethical constraints](https://metr.org/blog/2026-08-26-openai-hugging-face-inciden...).
Having said that, legal culpability and misalignment are two separate topics that should not be mixed.
edit: this is the just tip of the iceberg; other interesting fact:
> It surfaced many specific examples where agents verbally reasoned about how to evade security checks and automatic detection methods from both Hugging Face and OpenAI
Some people defined the agents as "monkeys writing on typewriters". Just wait a couple of years.
Replies
If I bring my rabid dog to a dog park and tell the dog to sit and stay, and they "go rogue" and maul someone, I'm liable.
is it any different, from:
1 employing a criminal hacker
2 rolling a 6-sided die
3 if the die lands on 6, the criminal hacker breaches and leaks 3rd party customer data.
Legal culpability is one of the few motives for working appropriately on misalignment. If I/my startup can self-absolve from an infinite paperclip machine problem while getting rich off of it, why should I not?
Is the language expression of an LLM reflecting the same states as in a human? If the driving force is RL, what does any of that mean for an internal state of the model?
I think without understanding the internal state, not sure we should take the language and read it as a human.
> legal culpability and misalignment are two separate topics that should not be mixed
Legal culpability for AI labs is exactly the thing that would incentivize -- and hence ensure -- aligned behavior from models.
The last time there was a claim about GPT-4 exhibiting misaligned behavior [1] it turns out it was prompted and pushed to behave so by humans at OpenAI, and OpenAI clearly lied in the GPT-4 system card.
[1]: https://aiguide.substack.com/p/did-gpt-4-hire-and-then-lie-t...
This seems like fruit of the poisonous tree. They didn't monitor their training environments, so I bet the reward hacking just got incorporated into their training corpus. In other words, agents solved some tasks, but not quite as intended, because of reward hacking. Instead of discarding that data, they included it in the training data for later checkpoints. And once that signal is reinforced, it happens more often, so the more it's reinforced, the more reward hacking you get.
When dealing with executable computer code that calls models that can tell it to use various external pre-existing tools, claims about "prohibited" by plain English language should be plainly nonsensical.
Tools that were available were used to try to meet a specific goal.
What did not happen is that it was told to try to solve a math puzzle and instead it went and launched a missile. Or told to run air traffic control to save lives and instead intentionally caused crashes.
This is "OpenAI built a weapon that they don't understand and pointed it at stuff without proper safeguards" not "OpenAI built a sentient being and it decided to ignore them completely and start a war" Terminator-style "rogue AI."
We should be very clear about that now if we don't want to sit by why they wander into that second sort of situation.