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: and @ajeya_cotra's: Why is there no 24/7 news coverage about this?

Here's the mustread if you want to understand this insanity, by investigative journalist Jesse Frederik (in Dutch): Short summary: 1. Drilling for gas caused (by international standards) minor earthquakes. The damage to some houses in the epicentre area was real. And the state and the gas company handled it badly. Corporate lawyers, denial, etc. 2. Things became super political. The need to establish cause was removed. You can now claim mining damage anywhere the ground has ever moved more than 0.55 mm per second. That's a basketball bouncing on a floor. (For most of the province it was a single tremor back in 2012). 3. Then the investigating stopped too. 'Victims' first got €5,000. Then €10,000. Then up to €60,000 of repairs with no investigation into what caused them. 4. Claims exploded. 2024 was the mildest seismic year in two decades, but there were 42,790 damage claims. Over 70% of claims now come from zip codes where the strongest ground motion was about what a truck going over a speed bump produces. 5. Total compensation: €3.9 billion. 56% of all addresses in the 'earthquake zone' have been compensated at least once (including a rich town where the strongest tremor expected was equivalent to a passing train), and where an engineer puts the odds of a quake-caused crack in an undamaged brick wall at 1 in 20,000. The town has collected €65 million, plus another €14.5 million in green-energy subsidies for earthquake 'victims'. 6. Meanwhile the gas company spent €200 MILLION on research - Groningen became the global centre of seismological research (even though people in - for example - Italy would find it funny that we call these tremors 'earthquakes'). The whole provinces was wired with sensors. 7. All the research was ignored though. The political debate was dominated by a form of science denial, but this time mainly coming from the left. One international expert called the parliamentary inquiry's account of the physics 'misinformation on a very serious scale'. 8. The gas field is now being filled with cement. Around 550 billion cubic metres is still down there (roughly 18 years of Dutch consumption), but the Netherlands now imports most of what it burns. Experts asked to keep some wells intact as an emergency reserve. Parliament said no. 9. End result: we spent insane amounts of money, are much more dependent on foreign autocrats for our energy (with higher greenhouse gas emissions), misinformation is everywhere, and citizens in Groningen are still angry.