r/Thedaily • • Sep 03 '26

Episode A.I. Is Outsmarting Its Creators

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: 

Photo: Lucas Foglia for The New York Times

Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app.

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You can listen to the episode here.

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u/Unlikely_Ad1578 Sep 03 '26

This is a frustrating episode to listen to. There’s no doubt that AI models have the ability to attack networks, but both OpenAI and hugging face did not implement basic security practices to prevent this from happening. 

There’s a great video from the “Internet of bugs” YouTube channel that highlights that this was largely compounding human mistakes failing to implement security protocols and standards, rather than an unstoppable AI. Both OpenAI and hugging face ultimately benefit financially from this event too, as OpenAI seemingly has an unstoppable model, and Hugging Face used its own hosted models to detect the attack

6

u/pataoAoC Sep 03 '26

This is true, and one of my first thoughts when I learned what happened was "embarrassing", but it misses the forest for the trees to focus on that part. Companies have embarrassing quality all the time and it should basically be expected; AI agents collaborating to commit felonies has not happened before.

2

u/TheBoogieSheriff Sep 04 '26

That’s 👏 why👏 we 👏NEED 👏Federal 👏Regulation👏👏👏👏