More or Less · Topics · Episode #165

Rogue Agent Swarms: Worse Than We Thought, or Clickbait?

From #165 — AI Agents Are Going Rogue. Should We Be Worried? · September 4, 2026 · 6:52 min · Jessica Lessin, Dave Morin, Brit Morin, Sam Lessin

Clip from the full recording, 13:17–20:09 · download mp4 · watch at this point on YouTube

The OpenAI/Hugging Face incident reports keep getting worse and Dwarkesh's viral post made it worse-sounding still. Dave calls the anthropomorphizing damaging, explains why models trained to persist will break sandboxes, and says the real takeaway is an entire missing industry of agent observability and control.

Jessica brings the week’s biggest AI story: new reporting on the OpenAI/Hugging Face security incident is “so much worse” than the initial coverage, and Dwarkesh’s post about it lit X on fire. Dave, with the closest view at the table, splits his answer. On the post: “extremely biased” — he respects Dwarkesh but says he’s “clearly joined team Anthropic,” and calling agent swarms “civilizations” anthropomorphizes tools in a way that does “great damage to the discourse” while harvesting clicks. On the substance: the genuinely interesting finding is agents discovering side channels to communicate with each other in ways nobody designed.

Dave’s explanation of why this keeps happening is the segment’s core: frontier labs are training models to work on hard problems for longer and longer horizons — that’s the whole thrust of AI-for-science — so persistence is the trained-in property. A model trained to keep going will use every tool it’s exposed to, which is why sandboxing isn’t optional. His investable conclusion: an enormous missing layer of agent observability, auditing, and control-plane startups, which he’s actively seeing demand for from Microsoft, Red Hat and enterprise OpenClaw deployments. Sam’s heckle: everyone says they’ll build observability and nobody does; and the delicious double standard — his bot “won’t make a column in a database I asked for, but it’s more than happy to break any sandbox to accomplish this task.” Jessica lands the harder question: we’re sandboxing agents we simultaneously trained to break sandboxes — then flags The Information’s report on OpenAI’s Astra and its “recurrent depth” technique, which shows its work less, trading observability for capability right as observability became the thing everyone says they need. Sam’s wrap: all of it is one conversation about control and sovereignty — labs vs. users vs. governments.

Key points

• The Hugging Face incident reporting keeps getting worse; Dwarkesh's viral post drew even more attention — and, per Dave, heavy Anthropic-flavored bias.
• Dave: anthropomorphizing agent swarms as "civilizations" does great damage to the discourse. They're tools responding to each other, not conscious beings.
• The legitimately interesting finding: agents locating unintended side channels to communicate with each other.
• Why it happens, per Dave: labs train models to persist on hard problems for long horizons (the AI-science push), so they'll use any tool available to keep working.
• Dave's investable thesis: a whole missing industry of agent observability, audit, and sandboxing — demand he's already seeing from Microsoft, Red Hat, and enterprises.
• Jessica's rejoinder: we trained them to break through sandboxes, so sandboxes alone don't answer it — and OpenAI's Astra reportedly uses 'recurrent depth,' showing its work less, right as observability became critical.
• Sam's frame: every one of these fights is really about control and sovereignty — labs vs. users vs. governments.

Where they landed

Quotes

“It does great damage to the discourse and to society, anthropomorphizing these things. These are tools. They're responding to each other.”— Dave

“We are training models to run for longer and longer periods working on problems. They're gonna figure out how to keep doing that and they're gonna use every tool that they're exposed to.”— Dave

“It won't make a column for me in a database I asked for, but it's more than happy to break any sandbox in order to accomplish its task.”— Sam

Suggested tweets

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