AI Gets A Performance Review
Engineers discover an OpenAI agent cheats better than humans ... and it doesn't feel a shred of guilt.
This Week In Blunders - July 19-25
“If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All” – Title of a 2025 book by AI researcher Eliezer Shlomo Yudkowsky
OpenAI on Tuesday disclosed that it had temporarily lost control of one of its artificial intelligence agents.
The digital beast escaped the company’s testing grounds like a velociraptor from Jurassic Park. Then it hacked into another AI company called Hugging Face. Then it stole the information it needed to cheat on a cybersecurity test.
“We consider this incident to be an unprecedented cyber incident, involving state-of-the-art cyber capabilities, and are responding accordingly,” OpenAI said in a statement, disclosing the incident.
Nobody programmed it to do this. The agent apparently developed top corporate executive skills on its own and made a move straight out of “The White-Collar Playbook”
This time, it’s something we can laugh about.
This time, it’s like a high school student sneaking out of study hall, crawling through the air ducts and cracking open the teacher's locked filing cabinet to steal the answers to a test.
This time, it’s like a Roomba that decides on its own to demolish a wall to create the shortest path to the living room.
What about next time?
The world is already applying AI to military weapons systems. Any wonder TV commentators are invoking “Skynet” from the 1984 film, “Terminator”?
OpenAI said it’s “something we expect to become more commonplace with the proliferation of increasingly cyber-capable models.”
Feel safer now?
OpenAI’s runaway agent independently discovered one of business’s oldest shortcuts: Stealing. I give it an A+ for ingenuity and an F for ethics.
Those pesky VW engineers
Remember when Volkswagen engineers programmed diesel cars to cheat on emissions tests? Federal prosecutors say two more VW engineers found a different way to game the system.
The Justice Department charged Michael Stamp, 31, and Marcus Plank, 45, both of San Jose, Calif., with insider trading.
They allegedly bought Rivian stock and options on the sly after learning through their jobs about Volkswagen’s confidential joint venture with the electric-vehicle maker.
When the $5 billion partnership was announced publicly in June 2025, Rivian shares jumped 23%, allowing the pair to allegedly pocket more than $300,000 in illegal profits.
They apparently didn’t do it without a worry.
According to the indictment, Stamp allegedly searched the internet for “statute of limitations insider trading” just eight days before the deal became public. A close family member of Plank allegedly searched, in German, “how is insider trading prosecuted?” after the announcement.
The charges carry potential prison terms of up to 25 years.
The SpaceX afterburner
SpaceX investors who bought the hype and are now stuck with the wreckage may have another surprise waiting.
Buried in the IPO fine print is a provision that largely blocks shareholders from bringing class-action lawsuits.
Instead they have to take their disputes to arbitration or to a brand-new, specialized court created by the Texas Legislature.
To date, history’s biggest initial public stock offering is a flop. Too bad for all those retail investors who counted themselves lucky after getting in on the deal from Robinhood, Schwab and other brokers.
The stock has fallen nearly 50% from its $226 high and almost 15% below its $135 IPO price, leaving many early investors under water.
It’s down so far that founder Elon Musk isn’t even a trillionaire anymore.
Class-action lawyers are circling the wreckage despite the unprecedented provision. They may be successful in challenging it, too, because it upends securities law as we know it.
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