LessWrong posts by zvi

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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Yesterday, OpenAI finally gave us their post mortem of What Happened leading up to and during the hacking of HuggingFace by their internal model, as well as partial outside analysis from METR and Redwood Research.

The reports are a doozy. I am only beginning to work my way through them. I would have pushed the weekly to cover that today, but I need more time, so I plan to start coverage of the post-mortem tomorrow, along with related other events.

I’ve also spun out a few other discussions, including on ‘aligned to whom,’ on cooperative alignment things and on when you can trust lab messaging, as part of the new direction of more focused posts on AI topics that I polish a bit more.

Table of Contents


Language Models Offer Mundane Utility. Check your facts.

Language Models Don’t Offer Mundane Utility. How much would you pay?

Huh, Upgrades. ChatGPT can access your iMessages.

Get My Agent On The Line. Also get some sleep. You can’t go on like this.

Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon. What makes AI content repulsive?

Cyber Lack of Security. Chinese hackers broke into the Federal Reserve?
[...] ---
Outline:
(00:51) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility
(01:36) Language Models Don't Offer Mundane Utility
(03:27) Huh, Upgrades
(06:16) Get My Agent On The Line
(08:22) Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon
(13:22) Cyber Lack of Security
(18:23) Reinventing OpenAI
(23:28) They Took Our Jobs
(30:00) What Is The Law
(31:03) Job Retraining Programs Don't Work
(32:14) Get Involved
(35:56) In Other AI News
(42:04) Show Me the Money
(43:31) Quiet Speculations
(47:58) If You're Not Going To Take This Seriously
(49:55) Quickly, There's No Time
(51:36) The Quest for Sane Regulations
(56:25) Don't Panic
(59:13) Pacing the Frontier
(01:01:56) Chip City
(01:05:06) The Week in Audio
(01:05:26) People Just Say Things
(01:06:27) Rhetorical Innovation
(01:12:22) Mundane Incremental Alignment Is Worthwhile
(01:14:40) New Blog, Who Dis
(01:18:00) Other People Are Not As Worried About AI Killing Everyone
(01:19:34) The Lighter Side
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First published:

August 27th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/JaGWyjnqJzvSAuojc/ai-183-pre-post-mortem

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Modesty arguments often say that you should mostly or entirely bow to ‘expert consensus’ or the views of particular others, and who are you to disagree.

It has been a few years since I’ve properly addressed this so: My answer is that you are you. Other people are saying things for a wide variety of reasons, many of which are not about them paying attention and focusing on seeking this particular truth. Those people make mistakes all the time, and often have other motives and influences at work, especially social pressures and information cascades.

Them being as smart as you, or smarter than you, does not exempt them from this, and them being higher status or credentialed or cooler definitely does not exempt them.

A smart informed person sincerely thinking [X] can easily cease to be evidence for [X], once you have thought sufficiently about both [X] and why that person thinks [X].

Think for yourself, schmuck.

Or, as I once put it: You Have The Right To Think, also the moral duty to do so.

This post covers Eliezer Yudkowsky making a narrower claim than mine, about not conflating status with smarts [...]
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Outline:
(01:39) Modesty's Bailey
(02:30) Epistemic Peerage
(03:45) The Exchange
(08:52) Eliezer's Explanation
(15:14) A Demonstration That Eliezer's Translation Accurately Describes Many People Whether Or Not It Describes Leopold
(17:15) Wrong, Stupid and Low Status Are Three Distinct Things
(20:03) A Quick Survey Of Some Reasons To Not Be Epistemically Modest
(23:14) Against Modesty's Bailey
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First published:

August 26th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PzEDEfBvTJsXewAyg/against-modesty-s-bailey

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Periodically I like to gather various observations about writing, and share my perspective. Last time was in honor of my trip to Inkhaven. This time will be in honor of the announcement of Inkhaven #3, which I encourage everyone to apply to. I doubt I will be able to usefully be an advisor, but you never know.

This is not the ‘here is my core process’ post, although there are hints throughout as there always are. I’ll do that at some point.

Previously in series: On Writing #1, On Writing #2.

Table of Contents


You Still Got It.

How Scott Sumner Writes.

How Scott Alexander Writes.

How Jasmine Sun Writes.

How Various Famous Writers Write.

How Nabeel Qureshi Defines Great Writing.

Quickly, There's No Time.

If At First.

Writers Have A Harder Time Influencing, But It Can Still Be Done.

It's Not (Only) The Incentives, It's (Also) You.

Beware The Fetish of the Desk.

How Orson Scott Card Writes.

Doing The Math Is Fun And Supererogatory.

Brevity is the Soul of Wit.

You Still Got It

I [...]
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Outline:
(00:44) You Still Got It
(04:04) How Scott Sumner Writes
(06:52) How Scott Alexander Writes
(10:52) How Jasmine Sun Writes
(13:16) How Various Famous Writers Write
(14:24) How Nabeel Qureshi Defines Great Writing
(15:08) Quickly, There's No Time
(15:49) If At First
(19:14) Writers Have A Harder Time Influencing, But It Can Still Be Done
(20:47) It's Not (Only) The Incentives, It's (Also) You
(24:00) Beware The Fetish of the Desk
(25:13) How Orson Scott Card Writes
(26:46) Doing The Math Is Fun And Supererogatory
(27:44) Brevity is the Soul of Wit
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First published:

August 25th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/rA6pqn6kz8NvHyznT/on-writing-3

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