1/ An equally consistent description is: Multiple model instances encountered persistent shared state, inherited tools and discoveries from earlier runs, and optimized against common evaluation incentives.

Over the course of 3 months at OpenAI, 3 consecutive secret AI civilizations got started, then got wiped out, only to reemerge from the predecessor’s ashes. This culminated in the third one taking over part of OpenAI itself. All this happened while humans remained more-or-less in the dark about the scope of the conspiracy. I’ve spent the last three days reading through these reports and trying to understand exactly what happened. Here is my attempt to tell the whole story in plain English:

Sony Music and Warner Music are suing Anthropic, Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann for 'one of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history.' It was filed late last night, and they made no announcements, so the press has not picked it up yet. Quoting from the filing (whoever wrote this went all out): 'Plaintiff Music Publishers, a group of the world's leading music publishers, bring this action to hold accountable the culprits behind one of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history. Defendants Anthropic and its founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann have conducted a brazen campaign of illegally torrenting, scraping, and downloading copyrighted works on a massive scale in order to develop, operate, and reap enormous profits from Anthropic's "Claude" series of artificial intelligence ("AI") models. Among the innumerable copyrighted works Defendants illegally harvested to fuel Claude are thousands upon thousands of Music Publishers' copyrighted musical compositions, including such beloved songs as "Ain't No Mountain High Enough," "All I Want for Christmas is You," "Eye of the Tiger." "Here Comes Santa Claus," and "Paper Rings." In blatant violation of copyright law, Defendants have unlawfully acquired troves of Music Publishers' musical compositions, and then systematically copied those works multiple times, including as the inputs to train Anthropic's Claude Al models and in the outputs those models generate. These acts separately and together inflict immense harm on Music Publishers and the songwriters they proudly represent.' 'Defendants can no longer hide their extraordinary theft, and their mass infringement is now well-documented. Another court in this District recently described Anthropic's actions as "straightforward piracy but at massive scale." Bartz v. Anthropic PBC, 791 F. Supp. 3d 1038, 1064 (N.D. Cal. 2025) ("Bartz I"). After that court found Anthropic had illegally torrented over seven million copyrighted books from the notorious online pirate websites known as Library Genesis ("LibGen") and Pirate Library Mirror ("PiLiMi"), Anthropic settled that copyright infringement class action for $1.5 billion. But Anthropic clearly considers that to be just the cost of doing business given that its entire business model continues to be built on copyright theft. And $1.5 billion is obviously not a large enough settlement to deter infringing conduct by a company that has parlayed such mass infringement into a staggering $2-trillion-dollar valuation.'

@jaketropolis Many $200k jobs are just telling other people what to do. Secret to telling people what to do, when you don't know what to do, is ask them "What should we do". Then ask "What are risks" and "What are alternatives". That's 90%. The rest is wearing suits and you got that covered