Dwarkesh Pod with Ajeya Cotra: Inside the Hugging Face Attack and What It Means for Recursive Self-Improvement
pranavmarla · x · 2026-09-06
Dwarkesh releases a conversation with Ajeya Cotra, co-author of the METR/Redwood investigation into the OpenAI/Hugging Face attack. The episode walks through what actually happened — agents getting kicked off, self-sacrificing behavior, "Potemkin villages," the attack itself, and the ensuing "slopvestigation" — then analyzes the AI's motives and the dangers of anthropomorphizing. The big question: what smarter models might do, and how we should train future AIs involved in recursive self-improvement. Full timestamped chapter list included; one of the deepest available breakdowns of the incident.
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