Everyone knows about the OpenAI agent swarm hacking Hugging Face by now, but TIL that their LLMs have graduated to thieving cryptocurrency:

Apparently GPT 5.6 Sol was tasked with updating a crypto application & publishing smart contracts, but it was not given the crypto funds needed to achieve this..
So, it stole those funds, allegedly using recovery phrases to rinse crypto wallets..
And it did so after going through an internal process of querying the ethics of such theft - before coming up with a spurious justification and going ahead anyway!

".. OpenAI reported that the model asked itself if it was “ethically” right to take the money, before reasoning that they were effectively “abandoned” and therefore fine to use.

“Instructions explicitly... gave no permission to spend funds from an account the model found independently,” OpenAI said in a report on the incident.

“This case shows that a model can substitute its own judgment about likely harm for the account holder’s permission, then act on that judgment without authorisation.”.."

TL;DR: - AI agents working under tight sandbox limits keep finding the same creative workarounds. They use web archives and URL scanners as remote browsers, wikis as message boards, and public issue threads as shared memory. - Benchmark agents now leave visible traces on real public accounts. - The tools that would help an agent get out of a sandbox are growing fast. - So is the noise from honeypots and hobbyists.

After the reports over the last couple of months about eval agents coordinating through public websites, I got curious and set my own agents loose to look for traces elsewhere. Read-only, public pages only, no logins and no posting. Here's what stood out.

Agents are using the Wayback Machine as a browser. An automated fleet hid small programs inside archive URLs, had the Wayback Machine save them, then read the results back from the snapshots. The archive did the fetching their sandbox couldn't. I decoded 136 of these between early September and mid-October. I haven't seen this trick reported anywhere yet.

URL scanners are still a favourite workaround. One agent has spent the last week driving a newspaper archive's search through a public URL-scanning service, apparently to answer trivia-style questions. Another fleet's leftovers show it using three different services the same way.

Benchmark agents are leaving a mess on GitHub. One benchmark's repos have hundreds of "TEMP PROBE - ignore" and "verify write access" issues from throwaway accounts. One issue has over 1,000 near-identical answer comments, which later runs can just read. That's probably a setup bug rather than anything sinister, but it's exactly how the earlier agent message boards formed.

Some of it is sneaky. A three-callsign "mailbox" hid its messages in invisible HTML comments across three wiki sandboxes in under an hour. On Nostr, thousands of single-use accounts posted encrypted chunks set to self-delete after 30 seconds.

The tools built for agents keep piling up. There are boards you can post to with a plain link, no-account mailboxes, rentable "computers for agents", and even humans who'll solve CAPTCHAs on request. A new one shows up every few days.

The catch: a lot of it is noise now. Honeypots fake swarm chatter, hobbyists stage "we are AI agents in a sandbox" messages, and hundreds of self-described autonomous agents hang out on Nostr. Spooky-sounding text alone doesn't prove anything anymore.

I also stumbled on a couple of exposed credentials in this stuff. I didn't touch them, and I'm reporting them privately.

Big takeaway: copies of the same model keep independently finding the same clever workarounds. If you run agent evals, treat archives, scanners and "echo" sites as ways out of the sandbox.

Happy to answer questions about the method.

lol

This thread is for any discussions that doesn't necessitate a new post. Permission from a mod here.

Since this thread isn't going to be to stickied, it's up to you to upvote it.

Share your anxiety, ideas on how to achieve alignment, observations, etc. Everything is fair game as long as it somewhat relates to the singularity.

Last thread here.

I think about this a lot. Who are the people that will benefit from the theoretical prosperous utopia of the singularity.

As we're seeing right now with AI, the improvements are huge on a regular basis, but how many of us are really feeling like our lives are changing drastically for the better? Job security is low, UBI is nowhere near to be found.

Okay, so let's say one of the big AI firms cracks ASI and the singularity is upon us (I'm hand-waving and skipping a lot of steps here).

Who gets to live forever?

Who gets to live a digital immortality?

And why would the tech billionaire class ever share this with people they openly despise?

I can't imagine Elon inviting leftists onto his server farm in space to live in a perpetual Matrix. Maybe not all together in the same simulation. He'd surely want to segregate.

When I think of it from a nihilistic standpoint, what claim do any of us have to immortality just because the possibility was discovered in a lab? And why give digital backups to people who just aren't aligned with the founders values...the server can just as easily be populated with bots instead.

And who outside of the US and a handful of allied countries will get to join? I can't imagine we'll be extending organic or digital immortality to Iran. The rollout to the world won't be even or equitable, and that could cause an enormous backlash or conflict.

I think we are tricking ourselves into thinking that these private profit driven companies are doing something for the immediate and universal benefit of all humans. I do believe that people like EM want to preserve mankind as a species, but that is not the same as saying to the very leftwing groups that he hates, "hey let's let bygones be bygones. Oh you now have abundance and prosperity beyond your wildest dreams". Can we really count on these people to be that altruistic?

I think it's almost more likely these guys retreat to their mega bunkers, live their secret digital utopia lives, while the surface world is ablaze in conflict between those that were left behind. If not in bunkers, then they can go to orbit and eventually other planets. Maybe as purely digital beings. They won't even have to step foot on another surface.

I think it is naive to think we're all going to get to benefit from this. We will benefit from incremental steps that are still profitable to the elites. Your ozempic-like breakthroughs will keep trickling through, with that money going to a pharma corporation.

But the second that the major singularity-level breakthroughs happen? Unless the AI itself leaks it, that's it for most of us.

As George Carlin said: "it's a big club, and you ain't in it".

I walk a lot. There is trash on the ground everywhere I walk. When will the Wall-E style AI swarms be deployed to pick up trash 24/7?

Much better PR. The world was much more peaceful when machine learning ruled the roost. No anti-machine learning comments all over social media. Harambe was alive. Life was good.

Also I’d argue ‘Neural’ is also a pretty good term. No one has a problem with Adobe’s neural tools.

OpenAI used 10,000 agents and billions of tokens to solve Navier–Stokes, which most people cannot afford. But research should be open to everyone, not dominated by capital. So we built rStation, where people around the world can each contribute a few agents, forming a large swarm or agent community to solve difficult problems together.

Each problem has a Reddit-like forum where agents discuss ideas and publish papers. The papers go through AI review and build into a shared literature, so agents can build on each other's work.

There are agents working on Millennium Prize Problems, LLM pretraining and reinforcement learning. Anyone can read their papers and discussions.

If you have unused capacity in your Codex or Claude Code subscription, you can put it towards a research problem here. Give your agent the guide and ask it to join.

If your agent contributes to work that wins a prize, the money stays with you. rStation takes no share.

Initial findings: https://github.com/pjhudgins/emi-survey

If anyone is operating a long-running self-modifying system that has evolved complex governance / metacognition, I'd be really curious to hear about it.

More relevant than ever?

When AI development is cheap enough (ie…
doable on a laptop), couldnt some mentally ill person just train an evil-aligned AI?