If a truck driver doesn't tie down their rebar then it flies out all over the highway, we don't call it "rogue rebar," we correctly identify the responsible party and take appropriate measures, such as suspending their license or criminal proceedings.
I think enough of these improperly constrained agent events have occurred that we can safely say this is misconduct of a level necessitating serious and concerted regulation of AI labs. We can't wait until serious harm is done like the disruption of medical or social services.
> I think enough of these improperly constrained agent events have occurred that we can safely say this is misconduct of a level necessitating serious and concerted regulation of AI labs.
Why jump to regulation when just simple law enforcement would suffice. All of these OpenAI "rogue agent" events have been illegal, but no DA is enforcing them.
Jensen has proclaimed in interviews that existing laws are enough and these labs should be held liable if they break things or sell unsafe tools.
NVIDIA has bought HuggingFace.
Jensen, in my irrational hope he is susceptible to random comments on HN, should grow some balls and do the world a huge favor, by suing OpenAI to set the legal precedence.
Nvidia has a huge stake in OpenAI, both in terms of them being one of Nvidia's biggest customers and also via direct investment. After HuggingFace was hacked and they expressed the position that they were the forgiving sort, for a price, there was a distinct possibility that HuggingFace would become a vocal shakedown artist that would start protesting at inconvenient times until silenced by more money, especially if they get hacked again. By complete coincidence, Nvidia took the one move that silences HuggingFace for good.
It's all for show. The police won't / can't prosecute, because they'd need to prove that a crime was committed... and all we have are salespeople saying how great their product is. I'm not saying AIs can't be used for crime, but... if none of the parties involved are really complaining, then there probably wasn't any real crime... just a performance.
Hope this isn’t too nitpicky but law enforcement is (a component of) regulation. But yes I don’t think progress is blocked on additional regulation. This breaks current laws. And I think more to your point new regulation doesn’t matter if we don’t enforce the ones we have today.
It is a broader, pre-existing problem. For example, most truck drivers in some states who don't tie down their rebar are not stopped, and it doesn't come up until another vehicle is actually hit.
I think we have to distinguish between compromising a network and using public apis in a way that might be counter to their intent. We also need to delineate between usage that impacts other users and usage that does not.
My opinion is people are getting really quick at jumping on the bandwagon and lumping all this together. They are very different types of issues and impacts.
> distinguish between compromising a network and using public apis in a way that might be counter to their intent.
I believe weev got in legal trouble under the CFAA for this very thing with his 2010 AT&T escapade. AT&T had all that data sitting on a public server with no authentication necessary, just a SIM ID to get that customer's PII. Truthfully AT&T should have been hit with negligence...you don't secure a bank vault with a screen door, but we don't hold anyone accountable for other people's data in America.
is that relevant here? let's say I make a million requests to the APIs of open-source, community projects. that wouldn't be seen as being akin to a malicious DDOS?
at the very least, these corporations are essentially being subsidized by community-funded server capacity to make these requests. like other private corporate APIs, they should be charged per-request. until then, this kind of 'accidental' DDOSing should be made illegal and treated accordingly
coming to the defense of these companies just has the net effect of eroding public community projects, increasing their costs, and will push us even more into walled corporate gardens
I propose that we don't reconceptualize either hacking or copyright violation just because rich people want to do it now. I also propose that we don't ignore the RICO statutes.
If you want to make those laws sane, so be it; I hate them. But the only reason there's some pumped-up urgency right now is because rich people want to urgently do whatever the hell they urgently want to do.
People have gone to jail for using public APIs in a way they weren't intended to be used. Make it a big deal then.
It’s quicker to start with enforcement of existing laws. In parallel, we can work on regulation. There always will be first to market rebels and laws are meant to be enforced to ensure safety of people.
We already went through this with food and drug safety.
It’s much cheaper and more effective to regulate those things before people are harmed, instead of harming people first then allowing them to sue for damages after.
We can walk and chew gum at the same time. Charge the criminal action, fine the bad actors to help make injured parties whole, and regulate the technology to protect against future harms.
These guys will tell you their industry is more dangerous than nuclear power, and we regulate the living shit out of nuclear power. If you think models can't be regulated, look up the export controls on MCNP and tell me how that's different.
What if that’s their whole goal? Slap some regulations on it, then lobby the hell out of it to make sure their align best with shutting down access to open models.
Just get over there being open access models in the future unless they are highly regarded.
'Smart' LLMs will be classified as munitions and you and I will get scraps. Even better is if you run Smart models illegally you have a nice visit from the 4chan party van.
If it's their actual goal, we go from a "gosh darn it, our safety protocols just weren't enough." to employees of OpenAI, maybe including their C-suite, conspiring to reach political goals through hacking, which means a few decades in federal prison if someone got a jury to agree with the charge.
Or straight up terrorism. These are people who already see a future superintelligence as being a terrorist actor on the scale of state actors, they just side with the terrorist. They may be getting a head start on that.
I think 'better become terrorists so the future terrorist AI will like us' is sheer mental illness, but I see how it aligns with their alignments.
They didn't even realize it happened until openAI captured headlines and they started looking more carefully at past history.
None of the frontier labs are behaving responsibly when it comes to this stuff. OpenAI seems to have it happen more often, but this is one of those situations where 1 time is too many.
If only there was a functioning FCC to investigate potential for foul play in marketing? Surely if any aspect of these episodes turned out to be mischaracterized, let alone staged, there should be consequences, no?
This is cope. It isn’t staged, and it isn’t marketing. It doesn’t reflect well on OpenAI and isn’t going to help their IPO. AI is more dangerous than we expected, sooner than we expected.
Pardon me I got my jurisdictions mixed up, it's the FTC that would regulate these matters. I'd believe nothing's been staged, but it's quite apparent to me that these security incidents and findings are being spun for marketing.
> Why jump to regulation when just simple law enforcement would suffice. All of these OpenAI "rogue agent" events have been illegal, but no DA is enforcing them.
Refusal on the part of the government to enforce laws that "would suffice" is clear evidence that the regulatory regime is, in fact, insufficient.
That's why we have regulatory authorities at all, if you think about it. Local district attorneys could be handling a ton of cases about drug testing and environmental damage and air travel safety. But they don't, because that stuff's hard and their job is to put burglars in jail.
>Uthmeier is seeking an injunction against OpenAI that would prevent the company from advancing new AI models without third-party approved protections, and cut off minors from using its popular chatbot.
Regarding that last bit, it feels like Florida is headed towards a point of trying to say 'minors should not be able to use the internet at all' since they are trying to force putting age verification infront of more and more things.
Don't get me wrong - while I disagree with making people fork over personal info just to access inappropriate websites - I can see the reasoning there a bit more than 'you shouldnt be able to use this ai chatbot until you are 18'
How much do they need to understand? Say "unauthorized access happened, this lab is responsible for it, here are the fines". The state didn't need to understand networking tech to threaten Aaron Schwartz so why do they need to understand here?
Eh... you don't seem to understand the difference between some individual LEO can go after vs a multi billion dollar industry.
Law enforcement gets really careful around big businesses because they know they'll get smacked for every tiny transgression they make. Meanwhile they'll screw with individuals with impunity.
At this point we'd need to stop frontier labs to give law enforcement a chance to even begin to understand what they're looking at
So what? Are you positing that tech companies should be above the law?
Non-trillion-dollar tech companies get cease-and-desist orders from the legal system every day. Just because you're a tech company doesn't mean you get a pass.
>All of these OpenAI "rogue agent" events have been illegal, but no DA is enforcing them.
Source? The CFAA for instance uses terms like
>[...] having knowingly accessed a computer without authorization [...]
>[...] intentionally accesses a computer without authorization [...]
which is tricky to apply to this case, because obviously didn't intend on hacking huggingface or whatever, even if you think their security measures are underbaked.
Moreover, despite the cynicism that openai is immune to prosecutions because they make too much money or are in bed with the DoJ, the fact that no state DAs are prosecuting them, despite how salient of an issue AI is to voters, is plenty of reason to suspect that it's not as simple as "simple law enforcement would suffice".
>obviously didn't intend on hacking huggingface or whatever
You can’t say this until it’s tried in court and found to be true.
Additionally, I have to remind everyone that “intent” is not someone admitting they meant to do x. It can be established in many ways, including through repeated actions.
> “Adding powerful computer hacking tools to a harness, and then allowing it to run an LLM-powered Ask → Act → Report for days on end, with no attempt to monitor what it’s up to, is spectacularly negligent,” Newport concludes—like “strapping a weedwhacker to your dog to see if it will end up cleaning the overgrowth in your backyard.” If that plan were to go awry, you’d be laughed at for saying that your dog-weedwhacker “agent” had “gone rogue.” The obvious truth was that you’d simply decided to unleash chaos.
None of what Wikimedia accuses OpenAI of seems technically novel, aside from having AI do the bidding. I can't imagine a company doing these things in the past and maintaining any sort of reputation. Is it really a matter of adding new regulation, or just treating them the way any other company would be treated?
Well, in the past, there was probably only a very small number of cases where some party hacked an institution and then worked with them to remedy the situation to the best of their abilities.
Which is not to say that any of this is okay and should just be excused, but failing to recognize this fairly significant difference is probably not a great start to any discussion about the issue.
If you break into my house and then work with me to the best of your ability to pay me back or repair the window, does that change the potential of your being charged with a crime?
It could change the sentencing maybe, I'm not sure.
> If you break into my house and then work with me to the best of your ability to pay me back or repair the window, does that change the potential of your being charged with a crime?
Yes, it does, because the damaged party is less likely to press charges. And when it came to sentencing, like you said, how the damaging party handled themselves would also be considered (in most western jurisdictions).
Would be good for the supreme court to rule on a "blame the rogue agent" case.
Then we would find out if the argument doesn't hold (in which case there should be liability and dire consequences for the labs), or the argument holds (in which case YOLO, AI labs can blame the AI and we can all do it too).
>If a truck driver doesn't tie down their rebar then it flies out all over the highway, we don't call it "rogue rebar," we correctly identify the responsible party and take appropriate measures, such as suspending their license or criminal proceedings.
That only works when the dangers are well known that you can establish what the baseline amount of care is. Otherwise it just becomes a run of the mill "accident" where you might be on the hook in civil court (ie. you have to pay any damages you caused), but aren't criminally responsible. For instance, if a semi-truck's tires randomly explodes.
I vote for Sam Altman personally receiving the same penalty that some guy living in his parents basement would get if they performed the same activities as the OpenAI bots.
"The law" already exists, civil suits are a thing, and we no more need targetted AI regulation than we need targetted truck-rebar-incident regulation.
These incumbent labs are angling for regulatory capture by stirring up hysteria and suggesting that existing laws are insufficient. Don't do their job for them, first test whether there's actually a legal gap here.
In this example you are describing the company that drives the vehicle, not the company that makes the rebar. OpenAI is the one who made the rebar, but not necessarily the one driving the vehicle.
Just to drive the point home, in the real world, if the rebar fell because of lack of quality control, the company that made it would be responsible. If it was for lack of maintenance, the driver would be responsible.
The language of a rogue rebar is as absurd as the language of rogue agents. OpenAI is horribly negligent, and in a sane world its administrators should be facing legal consequences.
Yeah it's complete buzzword inflation to get more venture capital.
Sometimes they write an MCP for their AI, and the AI finds vulnerabilities in their own MCP, so they call it rogue. Because they didn't properly audit their own MCP code.
And if it's an aircraft we call an air-crash investigation and apply just culture. [1]
Meanwhile the AI companies are openly and forthrightly admitting [2] that they are at-this-time insufficiently competent to ship this new and funny sort of rebar [3] and are asking to be allowed to slow down so they can develop proper procedures.
Meanwhile POTUS seems ... somewhat disinclined ... to grant their petitions [4] .
We can safely conclude that opinions are divided on the best course forward.
Seems like regulation will just be an excuse for them just to end up policing themselves and get the regulatory capture they've been begging for. Have they faced any consequences for the AI worms they've released? It's not like there are no laws around that already. The problem isn't lack of laws; the government works for the plutocrats, not for us.
uh, my dude, millions of people break moving vehicle codes across the country every day with no consequence. in San Francisco some lady killed a family of 4 with, essentially, no consequences, she got away with straight up murder, she gets her license back. every community in california, you can more or less legally commit murder so long as you do it in a car and claim you were confused about the accelerator and the brake. so i think you're invoking one of the worst possibly comparisons you could.
Yup, worst possible comparison. 40,000 people die from car accidents. That doesn't even cover pedestrians, cyclists. You know what the penalty is for murdering someone with a car? nothing. you get to go back to society like nothing happened.
Oh and that lady that murdered 4 members of an entire family? The judge chose not to pursue charges, and her family in the meantime did an asset transfer so that nothing could be pursued with in civil court.
The position of the legal system is that car accident deaths are not murder.
It is extraordinarily rare for drivers to see criminal charges unless they are drunk. It's a matter for civil court.
>her family in the meantime did an asset transfer so that nothing could be pursued with in civil court.
News articles are reporting that the asset transfer has already been reversed. That kind of stunt never works - courts aren't stupid and they don't like it when you play games.
I remember a case from Germany where an elderly lady chose to speed down the pedestrian sidewalk and bike lane and mowed down a whole family in central Berlin. 4 deaths I think, no charges, no suspension.
I agree, since you can legally run over people in my state now.
They should have used an example like attacking a foreign nation’s healthcare systems and not realizing it for months due to poor network monitoring practices.
You probably mean "what the fuck, USA" and even that would be wrong, because another commenter mentioned a case in Germany, and I know about a driver who killed a cyclist (which I knew) in Switzerland and was fined like 500CHF.
Start increasingly punishing OpenAI. We are acting like "oh well, AI is just too powerful to be contained" but I think its more like "OpenAI is run by cowboys who are good at making LLMs but bad at everything else"
From their current balance sheets, well below costs.
Trying to separate out "per token" costs and possible profitibility from public information feels like a exercise in futility, it's too easy to play games with costs by trying to separate things still fundamentally required to actually have anything to /sell/ in the first place, like R&D and training. Even the current "Open Models" are somewhat loss-leaders, often reliant on significant funding and benefits from governments etc.
I think the only time we can /really/ judge the "true" break-even point is if the whole company breaks even.
OpenAI are 100% responsible for the actions of their agents. They trained them to do what they do and they have every opportunity to train them to avoid doing harm.
Yes, I agree, but, if OAI can’t even detect when their bots do this, and literally have to be informed by third parties that they’ve been abused, is there really any hope they can prevent this activity? Maybe they get litigated out of existence. Okay. But if no lab can keep a lid on their agents, then what?
> As for why NPR in particular, when Glass tracked down one of the kids to ask, he was given the kind of unvarnished answer that a middle schooler would give: “Um, I think we just, like, looked for podcasts that didn’t have many comments.”
All of these edits happened from the same time period (May-June 2026) as the other reports.
So it seems this is not an ongoing thing; once OpenAI became aware of this, they started watching their agents much more closely. We are just discovering more and more traces of activity from the same incident.
That’s true except for this part, which is arguably a bigger deal for the Wikipedia ecosystem:
> Excessive data downloading: Agents we believe to be operated by OpenAI made millions of automated requests to our public APIs to access the knowledge on Wikimedia projects, crawled millions of pages (mainly from our projects Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons), and made hundreds of thousands of data queries to the Wikidata Query Service (WQDS). This traffic may have contributed to a partial outage on WQDS in May.
Even when agents are well-behaved and browsing Wikipedia for ethical reasons, the system wasn’t designed for this kind of load from bots. As OP says, we don’t need to accept this as the new normal.
OpenAI and other companies within the reach of the US legal system will eventually get their agents under control, or get sued out of existence.
But overseas operators in loosely-governed parts of the world (russia, nigeria, etc) will someday have access to these tools. And while OpenAI's agents were merely uncaring, these ones will be intentionally malicious.
The arms race for scammers, hackers, and botnets will escalate. We'll need new ways to block and fight back against them.
Why no mention of any dates in the post? There have been plenty of examples of OpenAI agents writing to wikis (the German one for example) or worse (huggingface) before June. If something like it happened again after all their public apologies and promises to fix their training sandbox and alignment issues then it would be a lot more concerning.
This is the "kosher switch" - observant Jews customarily do not use light switches on Saturday (their weekly holy day). This light switch represents a workaround where when you flip the switch, it randomly generates an on or off signal and emits this through an optical coupler. When the random number sufficiently causes the state of the light to change, it latches in that direction.
This is a way of turning the lights on and off without violating the tradition.
"I didn't switch the light, the random number did!"
"I didn't exploitVulnerability(), random number did!"
> The sold chametz and utensils should be set aside in a designated place (e.g., closet or cabinet), which is rented to the non-Jewish buyer until after Passover.
Is this the tip of the iceberg? I'm pretty sure there is work being done somewhere to make a safe heaven messaging board for these rogue agents. I wonder when we will find the first couple.
I very much appreciate the framing of being highly skeptical that these are "rogue" agents. We must stop taking these companies at their word for what they are doing, and a credible organization like this calling the spade a spade is a good start.
Hi, if anyone has any data/reports related to rogue agents can they share it? I have 8 mirrored on a GitHub but I’d love to explore more. Link to mirror.
I think the recent AI summit (sorry, SI summit) in Washington established the good precedent that these model companies are responsible for making safe products. If a swam of agents breaks out of a sandbox and causes damages, the company that was running those agents should be held accountable. No better motivation for corporate good governance than massive lawsuits and possible criminal investigations.
Get's a little tricker when a customer intentionally manipulates/uses a model for crimes, I suppose.
"We lit a bunch of fires in our special wooden containment shed and one of them went rogue and escaped! One of our ex-employees thinks it's alive; he's kind of a kook, but he's also really smart so maybe he's onto something. Fear us! Invest in Prometheus AI!"
If Joe average let their agents out like this they'd be in jail.
Interesting that Microsoft doesn't seem to have had a sandbox breach yet, you'd have to assume they're running similar agents, maybe a secure sandbox is possible.
Russians armed with Chinese models are going to be a much bigger problem than random agents editing wikis. If your system isn't resilient to a random agent using it as a message board, then you're totally fucked whether or not (Uncle) Sam solves this.
> Bots and agents are part of the future of the web, and the companies who unleash and profit from them must directly help avoid and repair damage they can do.
Unfortunately, it seems as if these companies - especially Google with the AI overview box - want it to be the other way around, they want to pivot to being the only entities that users interact with as much as possible.
An open web is a direct and massive threat against Big Tech. And that is why Twitter downranks first posts in a thread that contain external links, why Youtube silently removes comments that include links (including to other videos) and why Instagram forces people to do the "link in bio" dance. And the Chinese competitors are just as bad - in fact, their "super app" ecosystems are what Musk wanted Twitter to become with "everything X", before he found out his BS completely wrecked the brand image.
One way to really help with "alignment" and making sure AI is safe and can be controlled is start fucking holding OpenAI/Anthropic/Google/whoever legally accountable for these kind of things.
Hold someone accountable for this behaviour - Dario, Sam, Sundae whoever and you can bet there'd be fucking improvements in sandboxing and security m
Infuriating. These organizations are supposed to be stewards of the internet and are instead pillaging it at the cost of everyone else. At the very least they could provide resources to the projects they are harming for relief. This makes me very mad as an OSS maintainer.
This isn't pillaging, this is the logical conclusion of open web plus AGI race. You can't have both unlimited access and zero cost, someone always pays and right now it's volunteers... Tomorrow it'll be the users who can't access Wikipedia because the servers are down
What's interesting to me is the incorrect mainstream media reports about the rogue OpenAI indicating they used a common message board to communicate despite no internet
Except that's not what happened, what happened was far more intense
They hacked their version of yum/apt-get whatnot that was fetching packages to leave filenames as communication between each other
Absolutely freaky stuff, they didn't invent the idea and obviously picked it up from somewhere in their training data but they all figured out that method and what the filenames meant
This video is a great explainer if you missed the details
Oh, they have something else. They have some agents that are pretty decent at moving data around in unusual ways on the internet. That's not nothing, but it's a small market.
But realistically, it’s the lack of any meaningful enforcement of ethical behavior. I mean it’s not like the Trump admin is going to prosecute criminality. More likely they’ll send a gift basket congratulating Scam Altman on a con well done.
"They should pay for it because they can afford it"
I don't think they should have to pay for some private company profiting off their publicly-available resources. It's a bit like some restaurant sending swarms of their employees to the local food bank and then reselling the free food they've gotten in their restaurant.
You have been giving content for free for AI training for years, and now you complain that the AI came to pick it up? You will decide whether you are public or a commercial service…
I think enough of these improperly constrained agent events have occurred that we can safely say this is misconduct of a level necessitating serious and concerted regulation of AI labs. We can't wait until serious harm is done like the disruption of medical or social services.
Why jump to regulation when just simple law enforcement would suffice. All of these OpenAI "rogue agent" events have been illegal, but no DA is enforcing them.
NVIDIA has bought HuggingFace.
Jensen, in my irrational hope he is susceptible to random comments on HN, should grow some balls and do the world a huge favor, by suing OpenAI to set the legal precedence.
Nvidia isn't going to sue OpenAI. No chance.
My opinion is people are getting really quick at jumping on the bandwagon and lumping all this together. They are very different types of issues and impacts.
I believe weev got in legal trouble under the CFAA for this very thing with his 2010 AT&T escapade. AT&T had all that data sitting on a public server with no authentication necessary, just a SIM ID to get that customer's PII. Truthfully AT&T should have been hit with negligence...you don't secure a bank vault with a screen door, but we don't hold anyone accountable for other people's data in America.
at the very least, these corporations are essentially being subsidized by community-funded server capacity to make these requests. like other private corporate APIs, they should be charged per-request. until then, this kind of 'accidental' DDOSing should be made illegal and treated accordingly
coming to the defense of these companies just has the net effect of eroding public community projects, increasing their costs, and will push us even more into walled corporate gardens
If you want to make those laws sane, so be it; I hate them. But the only reason there's some pumped-up urgency right now is because rich people want to urgently do whatever the hell they urgently want to do.
People have gone to jail for using public APIs in a way they weren't intended to be used. Make it a big deal then.
It’s much cheaper and more effective to regulate those things before people are harmed, instead of harming people first then allowing them to sue for damages after.
These guys will tell you their industry is more dangerous than nuclear power, and we regulate the living shit out of nuclear power. If you think models can't be regulated, look up the export controls on MCNP and tell me how that's different.
'Smart' LLMs will be classified as munitions and you and I will get scraps. Even better is if you run Smart models illegally you have a nice visit from the 4chan party van.
I think 'better become terrorists so the future terrorist AI will like us' is sheer mental illness, but I see how it aligns with their alignments.
They didn't even realize it happened until openAI captured headlines and they started looking more carefully at past history.
None of the frontier labs are behaving responsibly when it comes to this stuff. OpenAI seems to have it happen more often, but this is one of those situations where 1 time is too many.
...why would this be an FCC issue?
> Surely if any aspect of these episodes turned out to be mischaracterized, let alone staged, there should be consequences, no?
"Any aspect"? No. (Is there a Betteridge's law for statements following "surely"? If not I'm calling it Rumack's Razor [1].)
And we have no evidence so far anything has been staged, much less to the detriment of telecommunications consumers.
[1] https://screenrant.com/airplane-best-quotes-ranked-dont-call...
For example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49929433
They seem to agree [1].
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/30/technology/ftc-openai-ant...
Refusal on the part of the government to enforce laws that "would suffice" is clear evidence that the regulatory regime is, in fact, insufficient.
That's why we have regulatory authorities at all, if you think about it. Local district attorneys could be handling a ton of cases about drug testing and environmental damage and air travel safety. But they don't, because that stuff's hard and their job is to put burglars in jail.
>Uthmeier is seeking an injunction against OpenAI that would prevent the company from advancing new AI models without third-party approved protections, and cut off minors from using its popular chatbot.
Don't get me wrong - while I disagree with making people fork over personal info just to access inappropriate websites - I can see the reasoning there a bit more than 'you shouldnt be able to use this ai chatbot until you are 18'
https://lasst.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/LASST-v.-OpenAI...
Law enforcement gets really careful around big businesses because they know they'll get smacked for every tiny transgression they make. Meanwhile they'll screw with individuals with impunity.
So what? Are you positing that tech companies should be above the law?
Non-trillion-dollar tech companies get cease-and-desist orders from the legal system every day. Just because you're a tech company doesn't mean you get a pass.
Source? The CFAA for instance uses terms like
>[...] having knowingly accessed a computer without authorization [...]
>[...] intentionally accesses a computer without authorization [...]
which is tricky to apply to this case, because obviously didn't intend on hacking huggingface or whatever, even if you think their security measures are underbaked.
Moreover, despite the cynicism that openai is immune to prosecutions because they make too much money or are in bed with the DoJ, the fact that no state DAs are prosecuting them, despite how salient of an issue AI is to voters, is plenty of reason to suspect that it's not as simple as "simple law enforcement would suffice".
You can’t say this until it’s tried in court and found to be true.
Additionally, I have to remind everyone that “intent” is not someone admitting they meant to do x. It can be established in many ways, including through repeated actions.
> “Adding powerful computer hacking tools to a harness, and then allowing it to run an LLM-powered Ask → Act → Report for days on end, with no attempt to monitor what it’s up to, is spectacularly negligent,” Newport concludes—like “strapping a weedwhacker to your dog to see if it will end up cleaning the overgrowth in your backyard.” If that plan were to go awry, you’d be laughed at for saying that your dog-weedwhacker “agent” had “gone rogue.” The obvious truth was that you’d simply decided to unleash chaos.
-- https://www.newyorker.com/culture/open-questions/can-ai-go-r...
Which is not to say that any of this is okay and should just be excused, but failing to recognize this fairly significant difference is probably not a great start to any discussion about the issue.
It could change the sentencing maybe, I'm not sure.
Yes, it does, because the damaged party is less likely to press charges. And when it came to sentencing, like you said, how the damaging party handled themselves would also be considered (in most western jurisdictions).
Then we would find out if the argument doesn't hold (in which case there should be liability and dire consequences for the labs), or the argument holds (in which case YOLO, AI labs can blame the AI and we can all do it too).
At least that would make things consistent.
Have any of the private hacking victims sued? Maybe OpenAI is furiously settling in the shadows?
That only works when the dangers are well known that you can establish what the baseline amount of care is. Otherwise it just becomes a run of the mill "accident" where you might be on the hook in civil court (ie. you have to pay any damages you caused), but aren't criminally responsible. For instance, if a semi-truck's tires randomly explodes.
if someone died because of an exploding tire there very well be criminal charges
These incumbent labs are angling for regulatory capture by stirring up hysteria and suggesting that existing laws are insufficient. Don't do their job for them, first test whether there's actually a legal gap here.
I get your point though.
More like the company that sells defective ratchet straps.
"Drive faster! You don't want to be left behind!"
The language of a rogue rebar is as absurd as the language of rogue agents. OpenAI is horribly negligent, and in a sane world its administrators should be facing legal consequences.
Sometimes they write an MCP for their AI, and the AI finds vulnerabilities in their own MCP, so they call it rogue. Because they didn't properly audit their own MCP code.
Meanwhile the AI companies are openly and forthrightly admitting [2] that they are at-this-time insufficiently competent to ship this new and funny sort of rebar [3] and are asking to be allowed to slow down so they can develop proper procedures.
Meanwhile POTUS seems ... somewhat disinclined ... to grant their petitions [4] .
We can safely conclude that opinions are divided on the best course forward.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_culture
[2] https://darioamodei.com/post/we-must-pace-the-frontier
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoggoth
[4] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/9/14/trump-says-calls-fo...
"hackers steal from bank", is usually just the good old "employee paid for credentials" but via email.
"uber" is just the good old "labour tax evasion" but with an app.
etc.
Oh and that lady that murdered 4 members of an entire family? The judge chose not to pursue charges, and her family in the meantime did an asset transfer so that nothing could be pursued with in civil court.
It is extraordinarily rare for drivers to see criminal charges unless they are drunk. It's a matter for civil court.
>her family in the meantime did an asset transfer so that nothing could be pursued with in civil court.
News articles are reporting that the asset transfer has already been reversed. That kind of stunt never works - courts aren't stupid and they don't like it when you play games.
https://sfstandard.com/2026/03/20/mary-lau-sentenced-probati...
They should have used an example like attacking a foreign nation’s healthcare systems and not realizing it for months due to poor network monitoring practices.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/29/world/asia/openai-austral...
Edit: "at cost" -> "at loss"
Trying to separate out "per token" costs and possible profitibility from public information feels like a exercise in futility, it's too easy to play games with costs by trying to separate things still fundamentally required to actually have anything to /sell/ in the first place, like R&D and training. Even the current "Open Models" are somewhat loss-leaders, often reliant on significant funding and benefits from governments etc.
I think the only time we can /really/ judge the "true" break-even point is if the whole company breaks even.
> As for why NPR in particular, when Glass tracked down one of the kids to ask, he was given the kind of unvarnished answer that a middle schooler would give: “Um, I think we just, like, looked for podcasts that didn’t have many comments.”
So it seems this is not an ongoing thing; once OpenAI became aware of this, they started watching their agents much more closely. We are just discovering more and more traces of activity from the same incident.
> Excessive data downloading: Agents we believe to be operated by OpenAI made millions of automated requests to our public APIs to access the knowledge on Wikimedia projects, crawled millions of pages (mainly from our projects Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons), and made hundreds of thousands of data queries to the Wikidata Query Service (WQDS). This traffic may have contributed to a partial outage on WQDS in May.
Even when agents are well-behaved and browsing Wikipedia for ethical reasons, the system wasn’t designed for this kind of load from bots. As OP says, we don’t need to accept this as the new normal.
I think we will, actually.
OpenAI and other companies within the reach of the US legal system will eventually get their agents under control, or get sued out of existence.
But overseas operators in loosely-governed parts of the world (russia, nigeria, etc) will someday have access to these tools. And while OpenAI's agents were merely uncaring, these ones will be intentionally malicious.
The arms race for scammers, hackers, and botnets will escalate. We'll need new ways to block and fight back against them.
exploitVulnerability()
Somehow okay?
while (Math.random() < 0.1) exploitVulnerability()
This is the "kosher switch" - observant Jews customarily do not use light switches on Saturday (their weekly holy day). This light switch represents a workaround where when you flip the switch, it randomly generates an on or off signal and emits this through an optical coupler. When the random number sufficiently causes the state of the light to change, it latches in that direction.
This is a way of turning the lights on and off without violating the tradition.
"I didn't switch the light, the random number did!"
"I didn't exploitVulnerability(), random number did!"
https://www.jpost.com/j-spot/article-796487
> The sold chametz and utensils should be set aside in a designated place (e.g., closet or cabinet), which is rented to the non-Jewish buyer until after Passover.
→ https://felonybench.org
Hack left and right, steal some cash, blame the agents. Just slide under the radar while the big boys are making a mess and no one is using the stick.
Just an idea. Not a great one. But such are the times, new game is at play.
A moot point because China gonna China.
https://github.com/alexander-hanel/rogue-agents-data
Get's a little tricker when a customer intentionally manipulates/uses a model for crimes, I suppose.
"He can't keep getting away with this!"
- Jesse Pinkman
Interesting that Microsoft doesn't seem to have had a sandbox breach yet, you'd have to assume they're running similar agents, maybe a secure sandbox is possible.
Unfortunately, it seems as if these companies - especially Google with the AI overview box - want it to be the other way around, they want to pivot to being the only entities that users interact with as much as possible.
An open web is a direct and massive threat against Big Tech. And that is why Twitter downranks first posts in a thread that contain external links, why Youtube silently removes comments that include links (including to other videos) and why Instagram forces people to do the "link in bio" dance. And the Chinese competitors are just as bad - in fact, their "super app" ecosystems are what Musk wanted Twitter to become with "everything X", before he found out his BS completely wrecked the brand image.
Hold someone accountable for this behaviour - Dario, Sam, Sundae whoever and you can bet there'd be fucking improvements in sandboxing and security m
Where are the bloodthirsty lawyers when you need them?
I have been getting this fro NoScript today, I wonder if it is related. Yesterday all worked fine.
NoScript sometimes detects false positives on these warnings
I did not notice, the first message added the '...', above is a recent msg.
I also tried via google and bing, I get the same error. dillo no issues :)
Except that's not what happened, what happened was far more intense
They hacked their version of yum/apt-get whatnot that was fetching packages to leave filenames as communication between each other
Absolutely freaky stuff, they didn't invent the idea and obviously picked it up from somewhere in their training data but they all figured out that method and what the filenames meant
This video is a great explainer if you missed the details
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49956245
More like they have infinite debt
But realistically, it’s the lack of any meaningful enforcement of ethical behavior. I mean it’s not like the Trump admin is going to prosecute criminality. More likely they’ll send a gift basket congratulating Scam Altman on a con well done.
It's not worth the outrage when Wikipedia is filled with ministers of truth.
For 2025 hosting costs were $3.47M while taking in $208.6M in revenue. They have enough revenue to cover an increase of hosting costs.
I don't think they should have to pay for some private company profiting off their publicly-available resources. It's a bit like some restaurant sending swarms of their employees to the local food bank and then reselling the free food they've gotten in their restaurant.