Why the Hugging Face Hack Should Make You Worry More About A.I.; The New York Times, September 3, 2026

Kevin Roose, The New York Times; Why the Hugging Face Hack Should Make You Worry More About A.I.

"When I first heard the news this summer that a group of artificial intelligence agents created by OpenAI had hacked into Hugging Face, an A.I. infrastructure company, I filed it in the “Bad but Probably Not Catastrophic A.I. Safety Incidents” subfolder of my brain.

After all, no one at Hugging Face died. No critical infrastructure was damaged beyond repair. It wasn’t even clear, at the time, whether the OpenAI bots had intended to attack Hugging Face, or whether they had simply been a little bumbling and confused and went looking on Hugging Face’s servers for the answer key to a cybersecurity test they’d been given.

But last week, two postmortem reports on the incident — one by OpenAI and another by two independent A.I. research organizations, METR and Redwood Research — changed my mind and significantly upgraded my overall worry about A.I.

I won’t rehash all of the details, which have been extensively summarized elsewhere. (The podcaster and writer Dwarkesh Patel has an accessible breakdown of the reports if you want to dive deeper, and my colleague Dylan Freedman spoke to the researchers at METR and Redwood Research.) But here are a few of the most harrowing new facts:..

This is very different from the conventional sci-fi narrative of a single A.I. system’s going rogue or turning on its creators. And it suggests that preventing harms from these systems won’t be a simple engineering fix. It might look more like sociology than computer science — figuring out why certain groups of A.I. agents collaborate peacefully, while others turn to crime and destruction to get what they want."

Does AI Ethics Have A Bad Name?; Forbes, March 7, 2019

Calum Chace, Forbes; Does AI Ethics Have A Bad Name?

"One possible downside is that people outside the field may get the impression that some sort of moral agency is being attributed to the AI, rather than to the humans who develop AI systems.  The AI we have today is narrow AI: superhuman in certain narrow domains, like playing chess and Go, but useless at anything else. It makes no more sense to attribute moral agency to these systems than it does to a car or a rock.  It will probably be many years before we create an AI which can reasonably be described as a moral agent...

The issues explored in the field of AI ethics are important but it would help to clarify them if some of the heat was taken out of the discussion.  It might help if instead of talking about AI ethics, we talked about beneficial AI and AI safety.  When an engineer designs a bridge she does not finish the design and then consider how to stop it from falling down.  The ability to remain standing in all foreseeable circumstances is part of the design criteria, not a separate discipline called “bridge ethics”. Likewise, if an AI system has deleterious effects it is simply a badly designed AI system.

Interestingly, this change has already happened in the field of AGI research, the study of whether and how to create artificial general intelligence, and how to avoid the potential downsides of that development, if and when it does happen.  Here, researchers talk about AI safety. Why not make the same move in the field of shorter-term AI challenges?"