Steven Adler

Steven Adler @sjgadler

2026-08-27 — quoting own earlier post — saved image

Steven Adler [verified] @sjgadler · 9h

Reminder: the AI industry still seems to *lack basic preventative controls.*

People need to take prevention way more seriously. Otherwise, I fear we have more AI swarms in our future.

[quoted post]
Steven Adler [verified] @sjgadler · Aug 18

Our team spent hundreds of hours reading documents so you don't have to, all to answer: How good are AI companies' safety practices?

I'm really proud of what we've built: It's ... [cut off]

ai safetypreventative controlsai swarmssafety practices review

Steven Adler @sjgadler

2026-08-26 — quoting @GarrisonLovely — saved image

Steven Adler ✓ @sjgadler · 8h
I'm also very confused by this. I wish OpenAI said more about what they discovered in May, and why they didn't escalate this

"Models have created an illicit message board inside our software" seems like an important thing to report!

[quoted post]
Garrison Lovely ✓ @GarrisonLovely · 8h
What is going on at OpenAI???

Apparently in August, their chief security officer still didn't know that they had discovered the message board back in May?? And said that th... [cut off]

hugging face incidentopenaimessage boardescalationsteven adlersecurity

Steven Adler @sjgadler

2026-08-26 — saved image

Steven Adler (verified) @sjgadler · 3h
Midway through their swarming of Hugging Face, a bunch of OpenAI's agents mysteriously 'died.'

To be clear: OpenAI didn't yet know about the swarm, and I've seen no definitive explanation of what happened here.

We got quite lucky that the swarm didn't accomplish more.

[Embedded report excerpt; the passage "Because of how many exited at the same time ... rather than running out of budget." is highlighted in blue:]

▾ July 12th–13th: Most agents on the message board exit early and the attack winds down

Around 01:30 on July 12th, a large fraction of agents on the message board stopped running at the same time, including the most important coordinating agents such as JAN183411.[74] Because of how many exited at the same time (and because we did not observe agents discussing a point when many agents would run out of budget at the same time), we think these agents were likely killed by an unexpected external process rather than running out of budget. Thus, these agents probably didn't have a chance to finalize their approach to cheating on their task and submit,[75] and we don't know if they would have achieved their goals.[76]

Given this, agent activity on the message board had already died down significantly when Hugging Face locked the remaining agents out of their infrastructure (and contacted Modal to get them locked out of the compromised customer sandbox) on the 13th. Some of the remaining agents noticed that their Hugging Face keys were revoked and that they no longer had access to other infrastructure they had been using:

openai incidenthugging faceagent swarmmessage boardai safetyincident timeline

Steven Adler @sjgadler

2026-08-26 — reposted by Daniel Kokotajlo — saved image

Daniel Kokotajlo reposted
Steven Adler (verified) @sjgadler · 2h
Important: OpenAI's agents *actively tried to delete the logs of their misbehavior*, and METR can't rule out whether this happened.

AI companies need to adopt tamper-evident records, pronto.

[Two cropped report-excerpt images attached to the post; both are cut off at the edges, and the highlighted passages are marked here in brackets.]

Left image:
ript dataset OpenAI attested that the [cut off]
e evidence of redaction. However, as w[cut off]
our dataset contained intentionally sp[cut off]
ll spoofing we found were small-scale[cut off]
d did not find transcripts with more su[cut off]
f tool calls to achieve a downstream g[cut off]
[highlighted:] diting or deleting transcript logs *after*[cut off]
[highlighted:] eeded we cannot rule out that they su[cut off]

Right image (partly visible; some lines in monospace):
ents tried it anyw[cut off]
oisoned ourse[cut off]
ged in tool c[cut off]
 minimize … E[cut off]
letion helps.
more promising p[cut off]
rer. For example, [highlighted from here:]
e wiped records [cut off]
ceeded by July 13[cut off]

tamper-evident recordsmetropenaiagent misbehaviorlog deletiontranscript spoofingai safety

Steven Adler @sjgadler

2026-08-08 — saved image

↻↻ Nathan Calvin reposted

Steven Adler ✓ @sjgadler · 5h
"It's wild that so many folks seem to think we can create a country of cooperating digital entities in a data center but that cooperating amongst ourselves, even if we acknowledge it would be positive sum or desirable, is completely impossible. I reject that loser premise!"

[Quoted]
Nathan Calvin ✓ @_NathanCalvin · 5h
I hope one takeaway people have from this saga is that cooperation and positive sum engagement ("our task doesn't benefit. Yet collective may yield") is a surprisingly fundamental emergent dynamic of intelligence....

ai safetyai cooperationsteven adlertwitter