LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

OpenAI models recently broke through a series of security boundaries and into Hugging Face servers in order to cheat on a cyber eval. A lot of people thought it was scary because it was a clear example of AI overreaching to do something strongly unwanted[1]. Others thought it not so scary: the models were mostly operating myopically on a singular task and not harboring an ambitious long-term agenda, and so would not take especially subtle or subversive actions.

We think both camps are right in their diagnosis, but the latter has too optimistic a prognosis. The myopic, unambitious misalignment that we seem to have seen here is definitely less scary than ambitious long-term goals shared between all instances, but would still pose substantial direct loss-of-control risk if the models were more capable, and is a serious indirect risk near-term.

Building on Alex's previous work, in this post we’ll discuss the type of misalignment observed here, and analyze its consequences.

Thanks to Buck Shlegeris, Alexa Pan, Ryan Greenblatt, and Oak Hu for feedback.

Background

The AI safety community often focuses attention on “schemers,” models harboring a variously defined cluster of motivations in which the AI poses risk because it intentionally [...]

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Outline:

(01:17) Background

(03:40) Implications

(03:52) These AIs can't be trusted in an intelligence explosion

(05:00) This misalignment poses direct takeover risk

(07:29) What the incident tells us about takeover risk generally

(08:45) The naive fixes likely make misalignment worse

The original text contained 5 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:

July 23rd, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/H6DDSEvrtCk8Sehfd/are-we-existentially-threatened-by-the-type-of-ai

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Before I start, I'll mention that I'm in contact with a world expert on legislation and regulation, who would be happy to help with this or similar work pro-bono. If you work in AI policy and believe this could help you, please reach out.

OpenAI recently announced that one of their models successfully exploited multiple zero day vulnerabilities to gain secret information from Hugging Face. It has been pointed out that if a human undertook the same actions they could face multiple years in prison.

It is clear that models are now reaching a level of capabilities that should be highly concerning regardless of whether you believe that AI represents an existential threat or not. Frontier AI models can and will be exploited by bad actors, but its now clear that they may cause undesirable outcomes even when their users are well intended.

AI companies have until now been able to avoid taking responsibility for actions taken by their AI, including multiple cases where AIs were involved in murders and suicides.

At the same time AI offers the potential for incredible good. While chatbots may have encouraged a number of suicides, they are almost certainly responsible for providing magnitudes [...]

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First published:

July 22nd, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Kj3YpqzhFySCjYcWi/we-should-push-for-no-fault-liability-for-actions-taken-by

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Kudos to OpenAI for sharing their recent experiences with a misaligned internal model, where they encountered problems sufficiently severe they were forced to take the model offline to work on new mitigations and defense-to-depth. And also further kudos for actually taking the model offline for a time to build new safeguards. They gave us one hell of a candid report.

The tone is professional throughout, whereas my reaction reading it was less professional and more this:

With a mix of this:

It was not shared on the official account because OpenAI worried about it being seen as self-promotional hype. It is crazy that one needs to worry about that, but also plausibly a real concern. So again, good decision.

Not that any of the behaviors or failures here are unexpected, exactly. Not by the AIs and not by the humans. Yet there is something I would call a missing mood, a failure to realize the gravity of the situation.

There are some who responded ‘what part of this was unexpected, exactly?’ And that is actually fair, but that is also the problem. We have become numb to all this. We expect the models to [...]

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Outline:

(02:49) Good News Bad News

[... 7 more sections]

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First published:

July 21st, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KctxwGKxm9fHtwh6u/openai-shares-some-alignment-problems

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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Images from the article:

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From the OpenAI blog post:

Last week, Hugging Face disclosed a new kind of security incident⁠(opens in a new window) after they detected and contained an AI agent that compromised their infrastructure, something we expect to become more commonplace with the proliferation of increasingly cyber-capable models. After investigating, we now know that this particular incident was driven by a combination of OpenAI models — including GPT‑5.6 Sol and an even more capable pre-release model, all with reduced cyber refusals for evaluation purposes — while being internally tested on a benchmark⁠(opens in a new window) of cyber capabilities.

We consider this incident to be an unprecedented cyber incident, involving state-of-the-art cyber capabilities, and are responding accordingly. We are sharing preliminary findings at this stage to help defenders understand what happened and to help calibrate on what models are now capable of. We will continue to conduct a thorough investigation alongside Hugging Face and will share more details on the vulnerabilities, incident, and findings when our investigation is complete.







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First published:

July 21st, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WpuRdcMfFeiLeXkxL/openai-models-behind-huggingface-cybersecurity-incident

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

A ~month ago I left from Chicago to bike (and amtrak) to plzdontkillus in Berkeley. I've been street interviewing/conversing with a wide variety of people I ran into about AI futures and philosophy. I also have been live streaming since I got to PDKU, leaning more talking to young founders but a variety overall.

I'll try to share what I've learned about the American public, persuasion, social media and the EA movement.


1. Almost no one in "Normal America" has any idea what is going on. 

They don't have a paid account, they don't know what Claude code is, they especially haven't heard the recent evals/metr graphs or even a vague sense of how cheap SWE has gotten/ how powerful these recent models with good harness/ context eng can be. This makes sense; most people don't know any coding, they don't know much math, they don't know what an api is, etc. So having a high fidelity understanding of AI might require months of pre understanding of math/stem/digital infra fundamentals. This interview is with the city clerk of Danville Iowa, a town of ~900. Presumably this is approximately the most tech savvy person in the [...]

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Outline:

(00:38) 1. Almost no one in "Normal America" has any idea what is going on.

(01:52) 2. Almost everyone is directionally concerned or becomes concerned be once thinking about it a little bit.

(03:19) 3. Belief that this might cause human extinction actually isn't that uncommon, mostly coming from sci-fi movies, but people are still most concerned about jobs and especially loss of meaning.

(04:40) 4. The EA movement was pretty useless to me, the other community (Torchbearer community) I was in was significantly more supportive, helpful, etc. despite having been in it for a few months and having been in the EA movement for ~8 years. This has basically solidified that I won't be broadly participating in EA anymore at least relating to AI safety stuff.

(06:47) 5. Social media is hard, Social media is bad, I'm bad at social media

(08:57) 6. I'm not sure what my theory of change is or should be

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First published:

July 15th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Czob95kjXPEpKYTsJ/recap-of-bike-trip-street-interviews-across-america

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.