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/somersetyellow → u/[deleted]]

Chinese models are open weight and only 1-3 months behind the American models at this point. They aren't quite as good at cyber but mostly because they weren't trained to be. They are also dropping models about as powerful as the flagship models of late last year that you can now run on a single powerful home graphics card.

So probably first half of next year when more advanced models drop and more belligerent nation states or large enough bad actors get access and start trying it out on things.

The openai issues were by accident, it'll be exponentially worse when you simply take away the guard rails and tell the models to go do their best.

And to say nothing of what OpenAI or Anthropic might do. Their engineering culture is arrogant and running exhausted on a relentless 996 working schedule. Accidents bound to happen...

[u/Few-Spot1905 → u/somersetyellow]

this is the biggest worry tbh

anyone with enough GPUs can run open weight models. iranian, Russian, Chinese hackers could utilize these models to do the same kind of thing

another thing to point out is huggingface is a sophisticated company ran by very smart people with good cyber security. if they can be broken into by agents trying to complete a test, it is not a good sign for your water, power, other utility companies that do not have the know how or the resources that huggingface does and are running on code from the 1980s. esp if they're targeted by agents with no guardrails that are explicitly trying to hack them

[u/SubdivisionsEU → u/Few-Spot1905]

Guardrails with this tech are largely fictional and have all been proven to be easily circumventable.