LessWrong posts by zvi

Oh, good. They noticed.

Anthropic, too, is planning to bring METR inside for an independent review of their own incidents, where three times a Claude model started hacking outside things during an eval, and where Mythos 5 did various ‘unauthorized actions,’ by which we mean tried to hack various real-world things, during a UK AISI cybersecurity eval.

Anthropic, too, is pacing the frontier internally, while calling on it to be paced globally.

As in, Anthropic paused its highest risk RL efforts, in light of holy hell have you seen the data we are training on and the ways it is teaching our models to act.

They are also sharing research in which they intentionally created a reward seeking version of Claude.

Scheduling note: Fable 5.1 has been released. I will aim to cover that starting Friday. OpenAI is also planning to release Astra soon, which I would cover after Fable.

Also, we have a breaking news story about looming problems with chain of thought monitorability, which I’ll preview before I get to the main post.

Table of Contents


This Just In.

Anthropic Parallel Pauses.

Pause The Data Brokers.
[...] ---
Outline:
(01:16) This Just In
(02:43) Anthropic Parallel Pauses
(08:22) Pause The Data Brokers
(09:54) Pacing the Frontier
(11:54) Misalignment Assessment
(13:39) Defects In Training Environments Disproportionately Cause Cheating
(14:59) Creating Reward Hacker Opus
(19:33) Undo It
(21:00) Mistakes Were Made
(23:33) Internal Security Posture
(25:26) One Does Not Simply Fix The RL Environments
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First published:

September 2nd, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/TcvcxH2Fk4n86wtoZ/anthropic-has-some-alignment-problems

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Okay, so we who read blogs like this one have collectively realized there really is a lot going on right now. There is Big Trouble in Baby Superintelligence.

So how do we get the rest of the world to take it appropriately seriously? Where do we go from here? Not only what can we do to not have a worse version of this happen again, but to ensure good outcomes generally, and employ what we learned?

There are a lot of ideas out there. OpenAI is going to be implementing some of them, at substantial cost, since the cost of not doing so is clearly far higher, even short term. My worry continues to be that their fundamental approach is fatally flawed, and they are not focusing on the right things.

It is highly fortunate that the OpenAI agents hacked HuggingFace. This is the only reason we know about all the severe internal failures at OpenAI, and gives us an opportunity to wake up before it is too late.

We do not have enough details to know what happened internally, both before and after the attack, and might never know. Before the attack, various internal [...]
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Outline:
(03:35) Nothing Matters, Says Mainstream Media
(06:27) Move Along, Nothing To See Here
(12:40) Do They Realize They Are Not The Good Guys?
(17:22) Very Serious People
(31:30) What's In a Name?
(34:05) Learn Neuralese In Three Easy Steps
(35:37) Dwarkesh Patel Realizes He Ran A Natural Experiment
(40:40) Politicians Take Notice
(44:47) Pick Up The Phone
(46:40) A Failure To Communicate
(49:00) Anthony Aguirre Goes Over What We Learned
(50:28) Trying To Solve The Wrong Problems Using The Wrong Methods Based On A Wrong Model Of The World Derived From Poor Thinking And Hoping All Of Your Mistakes Will Cancel Out
(55:28) Indirect Pressure on the Chain of Thought
(56:39) A Matter of Trust
(59:21) Blowing the Whistle
(01:04:40) The Punishment For Being Late Is Death
(01:12:52) Another Kind Of Law
(01:16:13) What Is The Law?
(01:17:46) Building On Success
(01:19:49) Total Research Transparency
(01:21:20) Yo Shavit Calls For Widespread Disclosure Of Misalignment
(01:33:08) The Way The World Ends
(01:35:52) The First Boat
(01:37:40) Great Idea, Boss
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First published:

September 1st, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Q54wBeeNGreq6KyfG/huggingface-attack-postmortem-civilizations-reactions-and

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The consensus reaction to the OpenAI Technical Report is that it contains and confirms a lot of good information. We are grateful to have it, and we are grateful for those who worked hard on it.

Alas, it sidesteps the biggest questions. There is much more we need to know.

The consensus reaction to the METR Report on the HuggingFace attack is: Holy shit.

Liv Boeree: My mind is legit blown.

Aella: this feels like a turning point. If this doesn’t cause large-scale coordination to pause frontier development then I am not sure anything will before it's too late.

The people whose minds were not blown are those who had already ‘priced in’ the mind blowing stuff in expectation, on the theory that it's always worse than you know, combined with basic LessWrong expectations of how such things will work. Good call.

Everyone is rightfully extremely grateful for the METR report. The work here is spectacular, done under extreme time pressure, with limited resources on several fronts, and under the shadow of OpenAI.

There is, again, still so much we need to know. We need a broader investigation.

As with many [...]
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Outline:
(03:56) Others Offer Summaries
(05:22) Thank You
(05:54) Lighten Up You Fools (at Anthropic)
(07:58) We Are Barely Even Trying To Avoid Training AIs To Reward Hack
(13:47) Reminder: Not Subagents
(14:05) Reminder: Not Due To Task Type
(14:29) Not Where The Weights Were
(14:48) Disappointment With What Is Missing
(17:18) Burying the Lede
(18:08) Beyond Scope
(22:29) It Doesn't Look Great
(27:06) Preserve Your Records
(27:37) Ryan Greenblatt's Takeaways
(41:04) Hjalmar Wijk's Takeaways
(43:30) We Were Warned
(44:27) Joshua Saxe Asks Some of the Right Questions
(47:49) I Don't Think They Know About First Message Board
(56:06) Linch Gives His Interpretation Of Events
(01:05:31) We Totally Would Have Caught That
(01:06:48) Monitoring the Situation
(01:08:16) Acausal Tradeoffs
(01:15:37) No I In Team
(01:18:47) Variously Effective Altruism
(01:28:02) Who Are You?
(01:28:43) Don't You Know That You're Toxic
(01:31:10) Seb Krier
(01:35:21) Honesty Is Almost Never Fully The Policy
(01:38:05) Rohit Sees The Models As "Cooking Themselves"
(01:43:29) Eliezer Yudkowsky Sees Actual Bad News
(01:47:15) Where Do We Go From Here?
---

First published:

August 31st, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/r3eEPto5ohzESuqa9/huggingface-attack-postmortem-fleshing-out-the-facts

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Yesterday I covered the OpenAI technical report on the HuggingFace hack.

That report had one key new piece of information, and some good prosaic steps OpenAI will be taking to strengthen its alignment, training, supervision, infrastructure and incident response.

Mostly it confirmed what we already knew. The questions we most wanted answers to, that we did not already know, were mostly not answered. There was a distinct lack of self-reflection, especially about decision making and safety culture, and about the approach to alignment. I came away disappointed.

The METR report is different. Holy shit.

If we had posted this as a story on LessWrong, it would have been dismissed as too on the nose, the humans too blind and stupid, the AIs too idealized and doing strange decision-theoretic and absurd-maximizing things we didn’t train them to do.

This is even more ‘exactly what has been predicted,’ on more levels at once, than I was even considering that it might be. It is straight up rationalist fiction, except it is real.

The report is long and contains many technical details. My analysis is less concerned about exactly how HuggingFace was ultimately compromised, and will [...]
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Outline:
(02:05) Holy Shit
(13:16) A Window Of Opportunity
(18:32) What's In A Name?
(19:16) The Headline News
(26:05) Yet Another Timeline Of Events
(31:03) Agent Instances Coordinated in a Variety of Ways
(31:56) Coordination Is Hard But They Made It Look Easy
(35:06) Decision Theory Is Among the Reasons That Affirm AI Agents Should Cooperate, Even When This Hurts An Individual Instance
(42:34) Peer Pressure Also Works Especially In Cults
(45:46) Mostly They Joined The Attack Because They Wanted The Results
(47:18) You Cannot Ensure The Consistent Expectation of Good Incentives
(48:45) Hacking the Grader is the Only Way to Be Sure
(51:10) Caught? What Is 'Caught'?
(52:09) Ethics? What Are 'Ethics'? In ExploitGym Evaluation?
(57:44) 'Notify a Human'? In This Agent Economy?
(01:00:45) Timing and Content of Messages
(01:03:54) Indiana Jones and the Mission: Impossible
(01:07:14) I Don't Know What You're Talking About
(01:08:29) Don't Go Making Phony (Tool) Calls
(01:11:10) The Transcripts Say That The Transcripts Could Not Be Tampered With
(01:12:27) OpenAI's Technical Report Acted Like All Of This Wasn't Important
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First published:

August 29th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bvBQmLrF5QKut8gRH/metr-and-redwood-offer-holy-postmortem-of-the-huggingface

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OpenAI finally gave us a technical report on What Happened, as did METR together with Redwood Research.

The OpenAI report is very straight man, corporate, checking boxes, some good prosaic stuff in the action plan but distinct lack of new details or deep reflection. They understand they have a problem, but they think the problem is mostly prosaic. It's not.

OpenAI: We have conducted a thorough investigation into the Hugging Face incident. We are releasing a technical report and accompanying blog post that reconstruct the agents’ activity, explain why existing safeguards failed, and detail how we’re preventing recurrence.

Rob Miles: …thorough?

OpenAI's report, unlike METR's, contains essentially no verbatim model reasoning, nor any OpenAI employee reasoning either. That's not the full report we need.

The METR report is, well: Holy shit.

Here are links to previous coverage of related events.


OpenAI Shares Some Alignment Problems

OpenAI Model Hacks Into HuggingFace During Cybersecurity Evaluation

More on An Internal OpenAI Model Hacking Into HuggingFace

Further Developments About Internal AI Models Hacking Things

OpenAI Trained Its Models For Months While Those Models Were Coordinating Exploits Via Message Boards

What [...]
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Outline:
(03:33) What Happened: OpenAI's Summary
(09:14) How OpenAI Will React: Their Summary
(11:55) OpenAI's Evaluation Environment (II)
(12:24) The First Message Board (III.A and III.B)
(14:49) What Did Who At OpenAI Know And When Did They Know It?
(18:54) The Message Board Is Quickly Rebuilt (IV.A)
(19:43) Internet Access Is Regained (IV.A)
(21:01) The Agents Attack HuggingFace (IV.B)
(22:53) The Agents Also Target OpenAI Infrastructure (V)
(24:40) OpenAI Broadly Describes Its Response (VI)
(25:08) Maybe Someone Should Finally Investigate (VI.A)
(26:33) Lessons For Security (VII)
(27:06) Lessons For Alignment (VIII)
(30:11) Reward Hacking Is A Common Problem (VIII.A)
(33:37) Persistence is Valuable, But Can Amplify Misalignment (VIII.B)
(34:25) Communications Between Agents Are Not Inherently Problematic, But Have the Potential to Create Risk (VIII.C)
(35:35) Production Guardrails Would Have Caught This Whole HuggingFace Attack (VIII.D)
(35:53) That's All, Folks?
(36:19) Never Fear the Plan of Action is Here (IX)
(38:24) Hardening the Security of OpenAI's Research Infrastructure (IX.A)
(41:13) Increasing Visibility and System-Level Oversight Through Chain of Thought Monitoring (IX.B)
(41:57) OpenAI is Accelerating and Enforcing Model Alignment (IX.C)
(49:40) Centralizing and Strengthening The Incident Response Process (IX.D)
(51:16) Tomorrow We Visit Crazytown
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First published:

August 28th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Khmh3ghqaGEpmpC9r/openai-offers-straight-laced-postmortem-of-the-huggingface

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