I see that you did, @dwarkesh_sp, and thank you for pointing it out. You're absolutely right to highlight the very real dangers of loss of control. I also agree that easy-to-understand language can be helpful for public communication and (to some extent) prediction - the latter primarily because LLMs reflect patterns implicit in human language. But I strongly disagree that anthropomorphic language of the sort you deploy is appropriate. I think it goes far too far. A messageboard is not a civilisation. The agents' goals are derived and not intrinsic. They have literally no skin in the game at all. And when you heavily imply that the agents have subjective experiences and are in some sense alive, I think you're playing right into the hands of the frontier lab hubris. That's where the money is. That's where the regulatory capture is. That's where the mind-uploading singlularity-mongering extropian narrarive is taking us. And if we overattribute, we may well end up mispredicting when we might most need to. Sure, its tricky to find the right language - to explain without misleading - but it really does matter. (For instance, LLMs do *not* hallucinate - if anything, they confabulate.) I should also underline (and should've done in the original post) that I am *not* 100% sure that current AI is (or can't be) conscious. But both theory and evidence together point to an extremely low probablity. Vanishingly unlikely, IMO. See Anyway I am sure you are busy with a billion other comments on your essay - so I'll leave it there with thanks.

@dwarkesh_sp's summary of the @OpenAI @huggingface incident has hit a nerve, but it is dangerously misleading. Sure, the @OpenAI agents did unexpectedly bad things - underlining the need to massively improve evaluation/sandboxing. But the language Dwarkesh uses is permeated by innumerable unwarranted anthropomorphisms, obscuring the lessons we should be drawing. Examples: “from the AI’s perspective, it probably felt like that had spent a human-subjective-week of just banging their head against the wall”. No. The agents do not experience time. They do not experience anything. “they became giddy with excitement”, “PHASEONE 10841 had discovered”, “the agents naturally assumed”, “it thought it had also been poisoned”, “the agents … desperately wanted”, “they still needed to figure out” No. Agents lines of code. They do not feel emotions, assume things, think things, want things, or figure things out. “A lot of … agents from the second civilisation died trying”. No. Besides the hubris of the word ‘civilisation’, agents do not die because they were never alive. (The idea that agents “die” comes up multiple times in the essay.) “On Twitter, people were debating whether the agents were truly sacrificing themselves for the swarm, or whether they were doomed anyway and so might as well try to help their peers”. Neither. Agents do what their code tells them to do, just as water finds its way down a slope. They cannot ‘truly sacrifice themselves’, since they are neither conscious nor alive. Why does this matter? If we attribute agents with properties they do not have, then (i) we distract attention from the lax sandboxing and evaluation protocols that allowed this hacking event to happen; (ii) we risk misunderstanding why the agents did what they did, and (iii) we fuel calls for AI rights/welfare on the basis that agents might “die” or otherwise suffer. Granted, nowhere does @dwarkesh_sp say that the AI agents are alive or conscious. But he doesn’t have to. It is hard to read his essay in any other way. For the short version on why AIs are vanishingly unlikely to be conscious, see my recent @TEDtalks For the longer version, see my essay in Noema, which won the 2025 Berggruen Essay Prize And for the really long version, see my @BehavBrainSci target article (The 50 peer commentaries and my response will be published soon.) Remember. AI agents are software programs. They are not conscious living entities. If we don’t keep this clearly in mind, we’re really going to struggle to navigate what’s coming.