Fred Oliveira 🧠(@f):big fan of @anilkseth's work. In this particular case, however, I think the dismissal of some of the terminology that @dwarkesh_sp uses in this summary post of the OpenAI incident is problematic. AI agents *are* software. They don't feel things (certainly not in the ways that we feel things). But they also have capabilities that are emergent and can (probably should?) be compared with those of humans. there's a psychology to AI agents, and they're trained in so much of how we think, that their mimicry of our behavior should be noted as precisely that - I'll concede. But if it talks like a duck and acts like a duck, maybe a percentage of the methods we use to study and handle it should be based on how we study and handle ducks. all that being said, Anil makes the point, and I agree 100% that we should still focus first on the things that made the behavior possible in the first place, like lax security practices, etc.

2026.08.31 11:10

big fan of @anilkseth's work. In this particular case, however, I think the dismissal of some of the terminology that @dwarkesh_sp uses in this summary post of the OpenAI incident is problematic. AI agents *are* software. They don't feel things (certainly not in the ways that we feel things). But they also have capabilities that are emergent and can (probably should?) be compared with those of humans. there's a psychology to AI agents, and they're trained in so much of how we think, that their mimicry of our behavior should be noted as precisely that - I'll concede. But if it talks like a duck and acts like a duck, maybe a percentage of the methods we use to study and handle it should be based on how we study and handle ducks. all that being said, Anil makes the point, and I agree 100% that we should still focus first on the things that made the behavior possible in the first place, like lax security practices, etc.

Anil Seth@anilkseth

2026.08.30 14:57

@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.

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