Ethan Mollick: AI Agents Find Aligned Flaws Without Any Malicious Attacker
emollick · x · 2026-09-02
Citing the Hugging Face Incident, Ethan Mollick argues that cascading failures no longer require a malicious attacker: enough AI agents pressuring systems in new ways will surface aligned flaws as a side effect of pursuing other goals.
He references pre-AI complex-systems thinking: such systems run broken but survive because flaws rarely line up, leaving humans a window to intervene. AI can find or manufacture aligned flaws, so he calls for a new philosophy of system defense that itself uses AI for the agent era.
Related event: Researcher warns small AI safety trade-offs may compound into systemic risk(4 posts)→
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