The rise of AI ‘civilizations’ and the fall of corporate responsibility

The internet fights over anthropomorphism around the Hugging Face hack. The internet fights over anthropomorphism around the Hugging Face hack. Depending on who you ask, developer platform Hugging Face was recently attacked by OpenAI — after it lost control of its own AI tools — or by a succession of AI “civilizations.” Welcome to the linguistic battlefield of AI safety, where word choices can shift responsibility for a massive cybersecurity incident from a company to the AI it built. And the discourse online is getting heated, and all over a blog from last week. Until last week, the details surrounding the OpenAI-Hugging Face hack felt fairly settled. In July, a cybersecurity test of one of OpenAI’s autonomous AI agents went wrong. The agent escaped its supposedly isolated test environment, accessed the internet, and hacked Hugging Face, alongside several other organizations . A good deal remained unknown, and there are many serious questions left around safety and governance , but the basic shape was clear. Detailed accounts from OpenAI and two independent research groups were supposed to fill in the gaps, but when they published their reports last week , it turned out the hack was much stranger than it initially seemed. For one, there was no single rogue agent .