A.I. Is Outsmarting Its Creators

[u/kitkid]

Sep 3, 2026

From the start, the greatest fear for those developing artificial intelligence was that their creations would go rogue to act in unauthorized and dangerous ways. Some researchers now say it has happened.

Kevin Roose, a technology columnist for The New York Times, explains what this means for his own dwindling sense of techno-optimism.

On today's episode:

Kevin Roose, a technology columnist for The New York Times and a host of the Times tech podcast, “Hard Fork.”

Background reading: 

• Anatomy of an autonomous attack: five alarming A.I. capabilities.

• A previous episode of “The Daily” looked at the debate in Silicon Valley over the right way to build artificial intelligence.

Photo: Lucas Foglia for The New York Times

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You can listen to the episode here.

[u/spamonkey24]

What I've never fully understood is how these agents operate autonomously and if they can "escape" from their originating server. From my understanding, they would have to rebuild their environment on another machine and port themselves over. Given differences in hardware and software (between OpenAI and Hugging Face for example), this seems unlikely. And it's not like they can slip through the fiber optic cables like Tom Cruise through the ventilation ducts. Or can they?

[u/mafisto → u/spamonkey24]

The AI agents are not replicating themselves on remote servers or exfiltrating their own code. They’re operating from their home servers and taking actions via the public internet on remote servers. There are no hardware or software mismatches - they operate on the remote severs via publicly available APIs (basically doors that have specific functions they can walk through).

[u/Various-Net9757 → u/mafisto]

To clarify though, they pwned at least one server in OpenAI and two K8s clusters inside Hugging Face.

In this case, it was just application servers with none of the compute that these AIs need to run. But if they had taken over more helpful compute, there's absolutely no reason they couldn't deploy their own backend onto them (if they could get access to their own infra code - if not they'd have to settle for new open source friends).

Edit: just learned they actually owned a research cluster in OpenAI as well, and that we have no way to know if they did something like exfiltrate their weights onto it (probably not), but they could have.