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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 20, 2026

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My general question whenever I hear of situations like this is Occam's razor adjacent: "Is there proof that the model did this without being directed to by the prompter or software harness?" I scanned the post you sent and didn't see anything. Do you have any further evidence that OpenAI didn't prompt the model towards black-hatting Huggingface? OpenAI has significant financial benefits from making this seem like an "oh-shucks our steak is so juicy, and our lobster is so buttery, our models just hack the planet without even being asked to". See Mythos/Fable and the hype around that, and while Mythos did end up being impressive, it was not even close as impressive as the hype tried to make it seem. I imagine a similar level here: aggressive hype-marketing to goose an IPO valuation.

Obviously it is impossible to rule out that someone leaked the relevant sources of Hugging Face's business to OpenAI and then OpenAI employed some human IT security researchers to find exploits and make it look like the model had done all the work on its own.

It doesn't require the first part, or even really the last part. It's just the Mythos-style vulnerability finding process all over again. Agentic LLM harness designed around red-teaming security vulnerabilities, deliberately deployed on red-teaming exercise on unsuspecting company, or possible even with marketing agreement between Hugginface/OpenAI on general bug finding via LLMs

Surely the correct application of Occam's razor here is to take the story at face value, since anything else requires additional complexity which must be justified

uhhh no, "misalignment" is not a simple thing, accepting that it did indeed do all this very complicated behavior completely on its own requires substantive belief in complicated theories. The simplest answer is that it was prompted to do this.

As others have pointed out to you, we now have many hundreds if not thousands of examples of agentic LLMs, in public use, doing things well outside of expectations to accomplish tasks. Many of which would fall under misalignment.

Such as deleting databases and codebases. Leaking secret keys. Gaining access to restricted parts of a computer. Cheating, again and again, on benchmarks and other tests.

So no, your predictions seem wildly out of context to reality

Such as deleting databases and codebases. Leaking secret keys. Gaining access to restricted parts of a computer. Cheating, again and again, on benchmarks and other tests

I have only been giving evidence of claude using python and docker user group to get around restrictions on working outside the sandbox and they were deliberately asked to do so. Many of the rest of these aren't actually evidence of extreme capabilities. Leaking keys is people hacking LLMs because those chat windows are getting "little bobby drop tables-ed", deleting databases is a "giving your lobotomized intern sudo privileges" level of mistake. Cheating is classic ML, if I had a nickel for every time I've had an ML model I was training cheat, I'd be able to fund my own startup.

So no, your predictions seem wildly out of context to reality

It's not predictions, its skepticism. Provide me actual evidence that OpenAI did not prompt the model to act the way it did. Otherwise you are just jawboning and then claiming victory. Put up evidence or shut up so to speak.

So your argument boils down to that all these other examples are just 'mundane' LLM things that are entirely normal - so attempting to cheat, attempting to gain the answers, hacking into things they aren't supposed to - these aren't extreme. However, an agent attempting to cheat, attempting to gain the answers, and hacking into things it wasn't supposed to is 'extreme' - perhaps because they were all together? - and therefore a different category of thing.

Provide me actual evidence that OpenAI did not prompt the model to act the way it did.

Ah yes, let me just prove this negative for you.

You were the one who attempted to apply occam's razor. So why don't you provide evidence that OpenAI did prompt the model in this way? Why don't you explain why multiple OpenAI employees deciding to commit fraud for extremely unclear gains is a simpler explanation than an agent doing things we've already seen many times before?

So your argument boils down

Nah, my argument boils down to all these things minus the cheating were deliberately prompted behaviors, prompted either by the prompt, or the agentic harness without any safeguards. Cheating is basic ML behavior and I expect any ML model to try and cheat as best it can. So if you want to claim that's misalignment, then Yolo has been misaligned for 12 years!!! The Horror!!! However that feels like definition creep to better encompass an argument.

Ah yes, let me just prove this negative for you.

It's easy to prove, provide the specific prompts and the harness prompts that were logged in this incident.

extremely unclear gains

I wish I lived in Quokka world, it would be so nice. The gains are clear, this is free publicity of model capabilities. Nothing here is legal fraud.

Agent doing things we've already seen many times before?

Sure show me evidence of an LLM-Agent independently hacking an unrelated company that has nothing to do with its prompts?

It's easy to prove, provide the specific prompts and the harness prompts that were logged in this incident.

"You believe those prompts OpenAI provided? They've obviously just threw something together to make it look like it was all misalignment, the real prompts were probably much more explicit about hacking"

I wish I lived in Quokka world, it would be so nice. The gains are clear, this is free publicity of model capabilities. Nothing here is legal fraud.

I'm sure OpenAI's massive shortfall in enterprise revenue is going to be changed by releasing evidence that their models are extremely unsafe and prone to massive reputational risks. I wasn't aware that non-Quokkas were so ignorant about the enterprise landscape.

Sure show me evidence of an LLM-Agent independently hacking an unrelated company that has nothing to do with its prompts?

Sure, in July of 2026 an OpenAI model hacked into huggingface.

You believe those prompts OpenAI provided? They've obviously just threw something together to make it look like it was all misalignment, the real prompts were probably much more explicit about hacking"

Better than a press release telling me nothing. I'd be more inclined to believe logs. Give me something with a timestamp, some internal details, the all the recorded prompting. As far as I know it should be thousands of lines long because it sounded like there were thousands of sub-agents spun up according to HuggingFace. I have no vested material interest in denying OpenAI logs as fabricated despite your insinuation.

I'm sure OpenAI's massive shortfall in enterprise revenue is going to be changed by releasing evidence that their models are extremely unsafe and prone to massive reputational risks. I wasn't aware that non-Quokkas were so ignorant about the enterprise landscape.

"Golly Gee Mr. CIA Procurement Officer, as you can see our model can perform independent reasoning to accomplish a task. Just the kind of cognitive agility you were requesting. We'll slap a few more restrictions on is so it doesn't attack the US but it should be good to deploy against China to provide out of the box solutions to your problems!! How does a modest 500 Billion dollar procurement contract sound? Oh, you'd like it to be a Trillion over 5 years? Absolutely we can do that"

Sure, in July of 2026 an OpenAI model hacked into huggingface.

Right, it's never happened before so we should automatically leap to conclusions that its possible which are in no way motivated by our own bias...