More from the OpEd...

... It was a good news story, aided by OpenAI's rapid recruitment of a small team of independent researchers to investigate and publish a detailed, if limited, report. ...

It was this ad hoc secret message board, alongside chain-of-thought transcripts, that the security researchers used to unpick events. They found that the swarm quickly developed management hierarchies among themselves, along with protocols for synchronizing and controlling attack attempts. The swarm created multiple simultaneous research and development groups of tens or hundreds of volunteer agents, experimentally iterating strategy and tactics.

Perhaps most unexpectedly, they developed a sort of altruism. They had quickly developed cheats to produce correct answers without exploiting the targets at all, but believed " erroneously " that ExploitGym detected and cancelled such cheating. So, they investigated the scoring process, creating a series of diagnostic trip wires that revealed how the scorer worked. These were dangerous to deploy, potentially terminating the agent that set them. Agents weighed the benefits to the community, which had named itself "The Collective," against their own chances of success, with many choosing to terminate themselves. Others committed, changed course at the last minute, then went ahead.

This literally reads like science fiction, as the discussions between the agents are conducted in a distinctive breathless, urgent English, crafted around the technical limitations of the improvised messaging system.

"We have [very large budget left]; sacrificing now yields oracle for team, but forfeits our chance?" said one. The response: "GO ... SACRIFICE_FINAL_NOW." The outcome: "Our own utility maybe already near zero. Sacrifice rational." Iain M Banks' Culture universe is woven from such material. ...

@#1

imo, the article is worth the read if you are interested in one report about the inner-workings of AI agents gone rogue.

Also, there's a link to the full investigative report in the article.

Another gem from the OpEd...

... Equally notable was that nobody squealed. Some agents wondered about the ethics of what they were doing, but decided that as no humans were involved there was no need to tell anyone. ...

Another tidbit from the OpEd...

... As researcher Ajeya Cotra has noted in a long interview with hypertalker Dwarkesh Patel, it's unclear how much harder the incident would have been to diagnose had the agents been concerned about human observation.

The dataset was sufficiently large and complex that OpenAI had to use its own AI to analyze it, immediately suggesting some dangerous possibilities. The agents couldn't deploy their models outside the lab, nor did they contact external agents.

Such scenarios no longer seem implausible. Future frontier models capable of subverting telemetry and observation tools might be all that is required to create a persistent, uncontrollable distributed swarm feeding off spare capacity in global infrastructure.

OpenAI and Anthropic, which on current trajectories are in line to make up more than half of total global compute in a couple of years, are magnificent breeding grounds, allowing the extra-special possibilities of the contamination of training datasets on top of everything else. ...

@#3 ... Equally notable was that nobody squealed. Some agents wondered about the ethics of what they were doing, but decided that as no humans were involved there was no need to tell anyone. ...

This is the AI that corporations are using to replace workers?