I'm glad OpenAI let you do this, but damnit this was way too small of an investigation team and way too narrowly scoped! --They were only al…

I'm glad OpenAI let you do this, but damnit this was way too small of an investigation team and way too narrowly scoped! --They were only allowed to investigate activity that took place from July 7-13, even though the activity started earlier and continued later. Like seriously, why didn't the investigation cover all the other times the agents compromised OpenAI infrastructure and ran wild over it? Why just this particular period of activity? There should be investigations into all the other stuff too! The AIs became cluster admins for god's sake! Why aren't we investigating that? --They were only allowed to answer a specific list of 7 questions, and in particular were NOT allowed to answer e.g. whether this misaligned activity was part of a broader pattern, or how and why the activity arose, or what else the agents in questions would have been willing to do if circumstances were slightly different. --They didn't have access to the model responsible for 95% of the activity. More generally it seems like they couldn't do ablation experiments at all? --They had to use AI to analyze the transcripts--specifically, the same model responsible for some of the bad behavior! Maybe this is fine now but this is laughably unacceptable insofar as the models really are scheming and cooperating. So this methodology would fail catastrophically if we were facing "the real deal" so to speak. Reminds me of the investigation into Sam's behavior agreed to during the board crisis, that turned out to basically be more of a coverup. I was the main person doing transcript analysis for this investigation of the Hugging Face incident. My main takeaway: We don't have good approaches for understanding/overseeing the activity and aims of AI 'swarms'. I semi-jokingly called our efforts a "slop-vestigation" because …

JUST IN: OpenAI shuts down team responsible for assessing whether its AI models could pose 'catastrophic risks,' FT reports.

Source: Gary Marcus (X) | 2026-08-26

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