LessWrong posts by zvi

I am exhausted. We may finally be nearing the end of direct coverage of What Happened with the attack on HuggingFace, and the subsequent near term reactions. That took up a full five posts in the last week:


OpenAI Offers Straight-Laced Postmortem of the HuggingFace Hack.

METR and Redwood Offer Holy #%^@ Postmortem Of The HuggingFace Hack.

HuggingFace Attack Postmortem: Fleshing Out the Facts

HuggingFace Attack Postmortem: Civilizations, Reactions and Next Actions.

Anthropic Has Some Alignment Problems.

That left little room to cover anything else, and now we have to transition to the next wave of model releases.

This week alone we have or likely will have:


Mythos 5.1 and Fable 5.1. Introducing the world's most powerful model.

Early take is that this is a very good model, the most capable yet, but it is not a step change or ‘moment.’

Gemini 3.8 Flash, by all reports a large step forward for Google.

Muse Spark 1.3, by all reports a large step forward for Meta.

GLM-5.3-Flash, aka 0x Alpha, by all reports a solid step forward for Z.ai.

OpenAI's Astra [...]
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Outline:
(03:11) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility
(03:37) Language Models Don't Offer Mundane Utility
(03:52) Huh, Upgrades
(09:26) On Your Marks
(10:47) Choose Your Fighter
(10:54) Get My Agent On The Line
(11:02) Hugging The Face
(11:16) Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon
(17:05) Copyright Confrontation
(18:17) Cyber Lack of Security
(22:15) A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer
(26:31) They Took Our Jobs
(31:06) Get Involved
(32:04) Introducing
(32:13) In Other AI News
(33:53) Show Me the Money
(34:44) Quiet Speculations
(36:05) All Bets Are On
(39:18) Quickly, There's No Time
(41:14) Quickly, There's A New Time Top 100 People In AI
(42:34) The Quest for Sane Regulations
(45:22) Pick Up the Phone
(47:12) Chip City
(56:39) The Best Person Should Get The Job
(58:40) The Week in Audio
(59:53) People Just Say Things
(01:00:28) The American People Really Hate AI
(01:06:50) The Three AI Pills
(01:07:42) Rhetorical Innovation
(01:15:28) We Are On Track To Have Fully Sovereign Rogue AIs
(01:25:08) When The Going Gets Weird
(01:31:32) Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult
(01:32:12) Shut Up and Do the Impossible
(01:34:31) Cooperative Alignment
(01:35:44) Split Personality
(01:40:45) I Will Stop Anthropomorphizing the AIs When You Stop Anthropomorphizing the Humans
(01:44:41) Open Weight Models Are Unsafe And Nothing Can Fix This
(01:46:27) Other People Are Not As Worried About AI Killing Everyone
(01:47:30) The Lighter Side
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First published:

September 3rd, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/W4zWCphxQftwum5kc/ai-184-post-post-mortem

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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?
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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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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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