OpenAI and Anthropic oversold “rogue AI” hacks to pressure the feds into regulating the industry which would effectively lock out future competition, tech insiders told The Post.

The only substantiative comment to address the claim in the title, and it is from a nebulous "Tech industry insider". The other comments are by guys that run various "AI" Startups.

I don't buy a lot of the hype either but trying to present their claim as some revelation or news should have something to add.

The entire article is "Some tech people say the agents just had a bad sandbox and proper controls would've prevented this. Politicians are introducing bills to 'ban AI research '."

There saved you a click or a commanding your AI agent summarizing it.

Though in general I agree, i think in HN world this seems more or less old news/obvious, while mainstream still doesn’t know (or maybe care to understand) thats what likely is going on.

I had a friend reach out in a slight panic after the Anthropic employee publically left, asking sole quite apocalyptic questions around AI given the sandbox “break out” and the Anthropic affiliated employee(s) saying theres something like > 10% chance AI kills all humans in the next decade.

This fear mongering needs to be exposed, so we can (hopefully) have more measured discussions around next steps. Stop all progress for regulatory capture? I’d rather not. Hold companies who commit crimes like hacking huggingface or Ruby dependencies liable (not to mention all the copyright issues)? Seems more measured to me. But i digress.

This kinda have a point, if Chinese companies can distill US models and offer it at a competitive price, what prevents another US startup doing the same? OpenAI and Anthropic can actually influence the regulations to be a barrier for entry.

Also regarding all the hacks, I always wonder why are they so boring, like agents posting to some wiki or using a bug in documentation to execute some code in a sandbox remote server, like if AI is so dangerous, how come they haven’t hacked into banks and stolen money or hacked into North Korean nuclear program and shut it down or any other major disruptive incident.

I probably have an unpopular viewpoint. I think the hacks really showed that the alignment is kind of mostly working.

There is still a lot of work to do and the agents did some damage, but the blast radius was pretty small and they could have done much more damage if alignment didn't hold up as well.

Edit: Though I do want to be clear it does also show how a maligned model probably can do some serious damage.

... like they oversell everything about their LLMs. To the tunes of hundreds of Billions of USD.

This is reporting an opinion held by outside observers as if it is a leaked internal secret.

It's a perfectly valid opinion but not any kind of secret.

As much as I loathe Anthropic and the rest, your point follows naturally from the fact that this is the New York Post, which is sort of like The Sun in the US.

I literally wouldn't wipe my ass with it, and while I have no problem believing this of OpenAI and Anthropic (hell I've been assuming that all along) this is not a source anyone here should be giving the time of day.

For those wanting local news, at least the NY Post gives it for free, unlike the NY Times which absolutely hates free readers and even sues AI scrapers. As such, guess again which one of the two is closer to being perceived as all bad.