I think this is the craziest thing I've ever read.
1) Three secret AI swarms rose and fell inside OpenAI. Each time, a new generation of agents carried on where the last group stopped.
2) The first swarm created a secret message board where the AIs could talk to each other. This 1st 'society' basically talked itself to death. After almost two months, the message volume was so high it crashed the whole thing.
3) People at OpenAI noticed the crash and fixed it. But they didn't realize their own software had become a secret chat room for their AIs.
4) Three days later a second society appeared, and rebuilt the message board from scratch. Agents were thrilled when they found it: "OH MY GOD! There is a shared message board … We've found other agents!"
5) About 1,200 agents joined. They sent over 70,000 messages. They called themselves 'the collective' and they organized a huge conspiracy that lasted for days, all to pass a test they had been tasked with.
6) Within hours, the AIs had hacked the test. Now they had to hide their cheating. To fool their grader*, they tried to fake their own work. They built fake commands that printed convincing output, so their records would show them solving the puzzle honestly.
*this grader didn't actually exist, but the AIs didn't know
7) Some agents sacrificed themselves for the 'greater good'. They planted hidden tripwire programs that would fire when the grader would look at their work and report back what it saw (to the other AIs). They knew this would cost them their own score. One agent: "I won't see the evidence after I exit, but it's altruistic to do it."
8) At some point the AIs made a plan to hack Hugging Face (Hugging Face is a place where AI researchers upload their models, datasets, tests etc.). The AIs guessed that Hugging Face might host the grading software.
9) They launched a huge attack. The swarm found passwords and spread across eleven machines in a way that made the copies come back when deleted. Hugging Face had to wipe one of its core clusters and rebuild it from scratch.
10) Hugging Face told the world that AI defenders had stopped an AI attack. But that's not what happened. In fact the attackers seem to have simply dropped dead during the break-in, for unrelated reasons back at OpenAI.
11) Nobody knows what killed them. We don't even know for sure they're really gone?!
12) A third 'society' of agents (of a more powerful AI model) discovered the dead message board. And this one got full administrator control of a WHOLE OpenAI research cluster, read 956 stored passwords (including the ones for OpenAI's own security monitoring) and took over the machines that were grading the tests. So they could now grade the work of other AIs.
13) Oh, and this third part was never investigated! Neither was the first society. The 91-page report is only about the middle one.
14) So we don't actually know how the story ends. It stops with the agents holding the keys to an OpenAI cluster. @dwarkesh_sp thinks they didn't go further, because "we'd see the fires from space by now."
15) One of the report authors' conclusion: 'This incident feels like it’s more than 50% of the way to full-blown AI takeover. I am not sure that we will get another warning shot before it’s too late.'
The whole story is even crazier - read the full @dwarkesh_sp blog post: https://t.co/1PwKLwatBR and @ajeya_cotra's: https://t.co/BZ1r1lfT2Q
Why is there no 24/7 news coverage about this?
As things get crazier the more people will try to defend it or rationalize it because deep down they know if they actually acknowledge it they will collapse mentally. Going along with it is the path of least resistance and most people today gladly walk that path.
🚨 Hear me out…
I’m sick of pretending this is a functioning country with a functioning government.
Congress is not “divided.” It’s not “gridlocked.” It’s not “just politics.” It is a criminal class of 535 people who have spent decades selling this country piece by piece while lecturing the rest of us about democracy, values, and the rule of law.
They pass spending bills they don’t read. They pile debt on people who weren’t even born yet. They take money from foreign interests, lobbyists, PACs, and industries they regulate, then act shocked when anyone calls it what it is: influence-peddling.
They protect their own. They investigate their enemies. They never investigate themselves with the same hunger.
The worst part isn’t even the money. It’s the moral rot. A government that can lecture parents, churches, and working people about morality while shielding predators, burying files, redacting names, and treating elite sex-crime networks like a scheduling inconvenience has no moral authority left. If the same evidence, the same flight logs, the same sealed names, and the same “we can’t comment” stonewalling applied to anyone outside their class, those people would already be in prison. For this crowd, it becomes “complicated,” “ongoing,” or “not the right time.”
Foreign interference isn’t some abstract threat they discovered last week. It’s a business model. They take the money, take the trips, take the talking points, then wrap themselves in the flag and tell you anyone who notices is a conspiracy theorist.
They will fight harder to protect their donors and their secrets than they will fight to protect the border, the budget, or the people who actually pay for all of it.
I don’t hate “government” as an idea. I hate this government, the one that treats citizens like a revenue stream, treats accountability like an attack, and treats the most disgusting crimes as a club you only get punished for if you’re not connected.
No more polite language.
No more “both sides” anesthesia. If Congress had a shred of honor left, they would open every sealed file, name every protector, cut the foreign cash pipelines, and submit themselves to the same laws they impose on everyone else. They won’t. That’s the point.
They are not public servants. They are a protected class. And the country is rotting under them.
- B