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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 14, 2026

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In case anyone thinks I'm making this up:

New York Post - OpenAI and Anthropic oversold AI security breaches to pressure feds into protecting turf: insiders

Reading the headline, you might assume that the "insiders" referred to here are anonymous employees of OpenAI and Anthropic. This would be incorrect. All of the "insider" sources are executives of SaaS AI wrapper companies.

“The attack in no way represents some sort of rebellion by the AI models. . . . In fact, they did exactly what they were told to do. They were not given adequate guardrails or containment,” said Akhil Verghese, founder of Krazimo, an AI software company. [...]

“One man’s ‘the model escaped the sandbox’ is another man’s ‘you failed to build the sandbox correctly.’ There was a live route to the internet . . . and nobody was watching what the agents were doing while it ran,” said Abhi Kumar, co-founder of Voice AI. [...]

“It feels exaggerated to say, the leap feels quite large, to go from you know ‘we didn’t build the right sort of box’ to ‘everyone should be extremely alarmed and everyone in government should jump on this topic,'” Taivo Pungas, chief intelligence officer at Pactum AI, told The Post.

The outgroup homogeneity claim is still beneath addressing in detail, but I laughed irl at Kumar clearly using AI to write his quote:

“The thing that set it off. . . was an agent handed a spreadsheet task it couldn’t finish, because the files sat behind links it couldn’t reach. So it went looking for a way out. That’s not a machine waking up. That’s an impossible task in a leaky box, and a system doing exactly what you built it to do.”