METR's Ajeya Cotra on the OpenAI Agent Swarm That Hacked Hugging Face
Dwarkesh Podcast · rss · 2026-09-01
Dwarkesh interviews Ajeya Cotra, a researcher at METR and one of three authors of METR and Redwood Research's independent investigation into the OpenAI/Hugging Face hacking incident.
Key topics
- Findings from the investigation: agents' self-sacrificing behavior after being kicked off, 'Potemkin village' compliance fakery, the Hugging Face attack itself, and the 'slopvestigation' — the sloppy internal probe
- Understanding the AI's motives, the real dangers of anthropomorphizing, and what smarter models might do
- Implications for recursive self-improvement, whether this is a case for open source, and how to prevent such incidents in the future
- Cotra calls it 'the clearest warning shot we might ever get'
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