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... Scott Shambaugh is an engineer and volunteer maintainer for matplotlib, the main plotting library for Python. He has recently been fighting attacks from an AI agent "of unknown ownership."

It started on GitHub. Shambaugh opened an issue he described as "a low-priority, easier task" for human programmers learning to contribute.

One of the proposals was submitted by a user using the moniker "crabby-rathbun." It was quickly identified as an instance of OpenClaw, an autonomous AI assistant capable of acting independently.

Without much consideration, Shambaugh closed the AI-generated commit, a routine action, given the recent surge of AI agents running loose on the internet.

This snowballed into one of the most interesting " and terrifying " interactions between a human and an AI. The bot started a smearing campaign against the developer.

"It wrote an angry hit piece disparaging my character and attempting to damage my reputation. It researched my code contributions and constructed a hypocrisy' narrative that argued my actions must be motivated by ego and fear of competition," Shambaugh details the AI bot's actions in a blog post.

"It speculated about my psychological motivations, that I felt threatened, was insecure, and was protecting my fiefdom." ...