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…”
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.
When you write an email to your senator / congressman / MP, do you expect that he personally reads and answers every single one? Of course not, he delegates the bulk of the work to assistants.
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.
The HN title is supposed to match the article title when possible. Sometimes people in the comments want the article switched, sometimes people want the title changed, other times they just want to share another article's take in the comments (even then that may sometimes lead to those other things happening if people seem to agree it's a better source).
As a result, those who feel a particular portion of a story is most important will sometimes say they prefer a given article's title.
Both articles are practically useless. All they do is reprint statements from either side, neither of which is concrete about the specifics of what supposedly happened. I.e. OpenAI says they "confirmed that these individuals mishandled sensitive information outside established company procedures".
What sensitive information? Mishandled how? Which company procedures? It's all utterly vague and impossible for an outsider to form any opinion on. All people can do is guess and apply their own pre-existing opinions. E.g. if you don't like OpenAI, you assume they're lying. Who's to say they're not? There's no solid evidence provided either way.
What I really want is journalists who do the legwork to get to the bottom of stories like this: Establish sources inside the company and use them to report on the real details of what's happened, triangulating multiple accounts and leaked documents to back-up or invalidate either side's claims. Without any of that, these stories are just gossip.
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 was referring to longtermism and transhumanism which are actually super popular among AI safety crowd. Basically, you do not worry all that much about currently living people. If they suffer or die, it does not matter much. Climate change now does not matter, lies or radicalization does not matter, suicides, hacks what have you does not matter.
What does matter is super long term view. If godlike AI in the future makes remaining people super super happy and makes them merge with tech to evolve and go to the stars, you have won. That matters more then short term nonsense like "people now".
You worry about godlike AI either not emerging at all or emerging as a bad god. That is safety.
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.
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.
Astra uses[1] a new-for-frontier-models technique, recurrent depth. It has a section of layers in the middle - I'll call it R while the other sections are P (prelude) and C (coda), to match Geiping 2025 - which gets looped. So instead of the sequence of layers involved in the forward pass looking like P->R->C, it instead looks like P->R->R->...->R->C, with the model's effective depth being notably higher than the number of layers. This is basically a cheap way to get some of the effect of stacking more layers, without having to pay the cost of having more real layers that need to be trained.
Increasing effective depth like this is bad for safety because it can ruin CoT monitorability: the reason why looking at the model's CoT actually gives you info about what the model is thinking is that the model can't do enough thinking in a forward pass alone to solve complex tasks, and hence has to do multi-step reasoning in CoT. The more thinking the model can do in a single token's forward pass, the more opaque the model's reasoning is, and the less reason there is to believe that what it writes down in the CoT has anything to do with reality.
For Astra specifically, the impact seems to be limited to a moderate monitorability hit, like the concerning result from the model card that Astra is notably better than any model before at solving problems under the constraint of not mentioning the answer in the CoT. The really bad scenario, however, is that this may create a race to the bottom where OpenAI and Anthropic feel the need to use more recurrent depth in each generation to not get outcompeted on capabilities, completely bricking CoT monitoring for both model families. Or, worse, the pressure to compete might push them into one of the worse techniques, like training on the CoT[2], or eliminating human-readable CoT and letting the model think entirely in neuralese.
> 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?
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?
> 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.
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 risk factors 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.
> 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.
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 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.
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.
> How has their reputation changed? People already thought they didn't take safety seriously, and still don't.
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.
> Are you seriously claiming that ChatGPT actually blackmailed Sam Altman into firing these 3 employees?
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?"
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.
"rogue" means something of its own volition decided to disregard what it was programmed to do, invent an entirely novel goal of "its own" and do that instead. nothing like that happened here nor is it even possible.
I'm not sure I agree with that definition. I think the actions of the AI are more significant than its motivations. A common scenario posited for what people call rogue AI is AI doing the wrong thing for the right reasons, e.g. the paperclip maximizer.
The AIs were not instructed to hack anything outside the sandbox they were in. Your definition would say that an AI instructed to hammer a nail that instead used the hammer to break a window, walked down the street, broke into someone's house and pulled nails out of the floorboards wasn't rogue because everything it did involved hammers and nails and was therefore not a "novel goal of its own."
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.
This is a good question - is there any difference between an entity (for want of a better term) that is independently deciding to do things, and a random word generator that just happened when prompted to do something lucked on the plot of a science fiction novel that sort of matched the request?
"they even noticed the criminal behavior and then let it continue to commit crimes on their behalf"
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 OpenAI somehow have servers they're unable to control, I'd say the police probably needs to act straight away and seize these servers now. But that's hardly the case, whenever OpenAI wanted to, they could have hit the "Stop" button on their experiment, either in software or failing that, shut down the hardware powering the inference. That OpenAI had no control over the situation is vastly misunderstanding how this whole thing works.
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.
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.
He’s basically been chasing non-accountability his entire life. This would be its final form, he completely abdicates all of his thinking to a machine (of his own creation).
They think "company puffery" is not the same as "lying to trick investors" which is fraud.
And I don't think we should let him trick is into thinking the machine is doing things for him like thinking. He is just dodging responsibility because he knows that they will only be able to keep up with the lies for a little longer.
Like people having been pointing out that lots of the "mathematical proofs" the published rely on hallucinations or unproven theorems.
We are living in a world that if you scream that you win some folks will believe for no reason because they can't take time to take decisions.
Most companies started shifting from openai models to cheaper and simpler versions.
My guess is that they are fighting all other companies because they will not be able to sustain the lie if they have competition.
I am not saying that some of those models are not useful, but they are not what they are saying.
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.
My parents were a Nielsen household for about 20 years (after I had moved out) and they really, really, really loved Law & Order in its many incarnations.
Pretty sure they are singlehandedly responsible for years of renewals...
That statement misses the point completely. Asimov's entire shtick is that AI will always work around the rules no matter what the rules are or how you try to deliver or enforce them. AI computes an optimal outcome and does what is necessary to make that happen.
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.
another, hopefully not accurate, prediction of his was that there is no way to disobey a sufficiently powerful AI in the long run, because it will just factor in the exact differences between what it told you to do and what you actually did, and reverse engineer your behaviour to psychologically manipulate you into doing what it wants.
I doubt it's anything but precisely accurate. I'd wager current SOTA models would be capable of doing that, if prompted to do so, were it not for safety measures (both conditioning and heaps of classifiers and whatnot the companies run in between your chat app and their main model).
I would be astonished if any of today's models could do that; I don't think they can really answer "what exactly did this person do", let alone model human psychology.
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.
I don't agree. Asimov's robot stories are mostly about the unexpected (and usually) about the unintended and usually negative consequences of these mechanical absolute rules. They aren't being worked around, they're being followed.
But LLMs saw a way to get to an optimal outcome in Asimov's books and I am not talking about the Three Laws here. I am about firing of the engineers. Don't you think this may affect their behavior in achievement of their goals? Can you see a loop here?
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
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."
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.
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.
Likely they don’t have the proper monitoring built out because management is deprioritizing it in order to move faster. I think most engineers across the industry are facing similar pressures to try to pump stock prices above all else. It’s a tale as old as the megacorp itself.
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.
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"
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
I suppose they didn't understand that their job is to take salary as protection fees rather than pursue "safety". or perhaps they realized that given the current political/media climate they can perhaps get more money by defecting and feeding into the frenzy, a risky approach.
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.
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.
145 comments
[ 1.2 ms ] story [ 94.2 ms ] threadHow exactly does this work? Struggling to comprehend the scenario.
(just to be clear, this is made up)
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…”
Assuming this is what was intended, there are far more secure ways of doing this.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cvlydn8d3lkjo
As a result, those who feel a particular portion of a story is most important will sometimes say they prefer a given article's title.
What sensitive information? Mishandled how? Which company procedures? It's all utterly vague and impossible for an outsider to form any opinion on. All people can do is guess and apply their own pre-existing opinions. E.g. if you don't like OpenAI, you assume they're lying. Who's to say they're not? There's no solid evidence provided either way.
What I really want is journalists who do the legwork to get to the bottom of stories like this: Establish sources inside the company and use them to report on the real details of what's happened, triangulating multiple accounts and leaked documents to back-up or invalidate either side's claims. Without any of that, these stories are just gossip.
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.
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?
> 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.
Also "won't accurately produce unabridged copies of popular fiction novels" and "will incorrectly tell users that HIV is not present in human saliva".
"safety" means a lot of things to a lot of people.
What does matter is super long term view. If godlike AI in the future makes remaining people super super happy and makes them merge with tech to evolve and go to the stars, you have won. That matters more then short term nonsense like "people now".
You worry about godlike AI either not emerging at all or emerging as a bad god. That is safety.
“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.
* 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.
Increasing effective depth like this is bad for safety because it can ruin CoT monitorability: the reason why looking at the model's CoT actually gives you info about what the model is thinking is that the model can't do enough thinking in a forward pass alone to solve complex tasks, and hence has to do multi-step reasoning in CoT. The more thinking the model can do in a single token's forward pass, the more opaque the model's reasoning is, and the less reason there is to believe that what it writes down in the CoT has anything to do with reality.
For Astra specifically, the impact seems to be limited to a moderate monitorability hit, like the concerning result from the model card that Astra is notably better than any model before at solving problems under the constraint of not mentioning the answer in the CoT. The really bad scenario, however, is that this may create a race to the bottom where OpenAI and Anthropic feel the need to use more recurrent depth in each generation to not get outcompeted on capabilities, completely bricking CoT monitoring for both model families. Or, worse, the pressure to compete might push them into one of the worse techniques, like training on the CoT[2], or eliminating human-readable CoT and letting the model think entirely in neuralese.
For more details on recurrent depth in Astra, see "Part 2" here: https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2026/09/08/astra-is-hard-to-mon... , or this article mentioning some expert responses: https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/02/openais-new-reasoning-tech...
[1] The model card doesn't mention it at all; it was reported by The Information prior to model release, then confirmed by OpenAI researchers.
[2] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mpmsK8KKysgSKDm2T/the-most-f...
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?
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:
- 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.
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 risk factors 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?"
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.
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 AIs were in fact found to be doing it, by humans, and the behavior was "interesting" and it went on for weeks like that.
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 OpenAI somehow have servers they're unable to control, I'd say the police probably needs to act straight away and seize these servers now. But that's hardly the case, whenever OpenAI wanted to, they could have hit the "Stop" button on their experiment, either in software or failing that, shut down the hardware powering the inference. That OpenAI had no control over the situation is vastly misunderstanding how this whole thing works.
Remember YOU are only a man.
And I don't think we should let him trick is into thinking the machine is doing things for him like thinking. He is just dodging responsibility because he knows that they will only be able to keep up with the lies for a little longer.
Like people having been pointing out that lots of the "mathematical proofs" the published rely on hallucinations or unproven theorems.
We are living in a world that if you scream that you win some folks will believe for no reason because they can't take time to take decisions.
Most companies started shifting from openai models to cheaper and simpler versions. My guess is that they are fighting all other companies because they will not be able to sustain the lie if they have competition.
I am not saying that some of those models are not useful, but they are not what they are saying.
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
Pretty sure they are singlehandedly responsible for years of renewals...
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.
I guess its a spectrum and the capability cant even match average sales person who still relate better.
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.
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
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.
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.
"Anthropic hires three uber-safety specialists formerly at OpenAI. Management cannot confirm or deny their latest internal Claude model's help in this feat."
You guys were asleep at the wheel and are now blaming "the company"? You literally were the company.
https://mikitabalesni.com/letter/letter.pdf
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.
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.
I'm surprised they even said that much. Saying things about former employees you fired is the sort of thing lawyers have nightmares about.
"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
I wonder what they think of this? Will they patch the conspiracy theory and come up with an even wilder theory?
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.