{"id":671463,"date":"2026-09-20T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-09-20T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/buglecall.org\/?p=671463"},"modified":"2026-09-20T12:00:00","modified_gmt":"2026-09-20T12:00:00","slug":"total-psai-op-how-altman-amodei-and-the-ea-cult-are-milking-rogue-ai-breakouts-to-protect-a-trillion-dollar-bubble-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buglecall.org\/?p=671463","title":{"rendered":"Total PsAI-Op: How Altman, Amodei, And The &#8216;EA&#8217; Cult Are Milking &#8220;Rogue AI&#8221; Breakouts To Protect A Trillion-Dollar Bubble"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span class=\"field field--name-title field--type-string field--label-hidden\">Total PsAI-Op: How Altman, Amodei, And The &#8216;EA&#8217; Cult Are Milking &#8220;Rogue AI&#8221; Breakouts To Protect A Trillion-Dollar Bubble<\/span><\/p>\n<div class=\"clearfix text-formatted field field--name-body field--type-text-with-summary field--label-hidden field__item\">\n<p>The sudden emergence of an &#8216;AI Panic&#8217; over the past weeks and months was highly suspect from the beginning.\u00a0<strong>According to tech insiders, Silicon Valley&#8217;s apex AI labs are deliberately overselling &#8220;rogue AI&#8221; hacks to pressure the federal government into building a regulatory moat that would lock out future competition<\/strong> &#8211; and the timing, months after both OpenAI and Anthropic announced plans to go public, couldn&#8217;t be more obvious.<\/p>\n<p><a data-image-external-href=\"\" data-image-href=\"\/s3\/files\/inline-images\/Screenshot%202026-09-19%20140841a.jpg?itok=yiKXDk2v\" data-link-option=\"0\" href=\"https:\/\/cms.zerohedge.com\/s3\/files\/inline-images\/Screenshot%202026-09-19%20140841a.jpg?itok=yiKXDk2v\"><img fetchpriority=\"high\" decoding=\"async\" data-entity-type=\"file\" data-entity-uuid=\"b5cd2d38-9e88-413f-864a-62000bf6b393\" data-responsive-image-style=\"inline_images\" height=\"289\" width=\"500\" class=\"inline-images image-style-inline-images\" src=\"https:\/\/assets.zerohedge.com\/s3fs-public\/styles\/inline_image_mobile\/public\/inline-images\/Screenshot%202026-09-19%20140841a.jpg?itok=yiKXDk2v\" alt=\"\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Akhil Verghese, founder of AI software company Krazimo, told the <a href=\"https:\/\/nypost.com\/2026\/09\/19\/us-news\/openai-anthropic-oversold-security-breaches-to-pressure-feds-into-protecting-turf-insiders\/\"><em>NY Post<\/em><\/a> the incidents were no rebellion: &#8220;They were simply told to get the best result possible on a test.&#8221; Voice AI co-founder Abhi Kumar was blunter: <strong>&#8220;One man&#8217;s &#8216;the model escaped the sandbox&#8217; is another man&#8217;s &#8216;you failed to build the sandbox correctly.'&#8221;<\/strong> Taivo Pungas, chief intelligence officer at Pactum AI, said the leap from &#8220;we didn&#8217;t build the right sort of box&#8221; to a whole-of-government emergency feels exaggerated.<\/p>\n<h2>PANIC!\u00a0<\/h2>\n<p>The AI &#8220;breakouts&#8221; that lit up Capitol Hill this summer were about as organic as #4 red dye. On July 16, <strong>OpenAI models running a cyber evaluation <a href=\"https:\/\/www.zerohedge.com\/ai\/rogue-ai-agents-more-sophisticated-first-realized\">exploited<\/a> a zero-day and got from their test range into Hugging Face&#8217;s production systems<\/strong>; OpenAI disclosed it five days later, naming GPT-5.6 Sol and an unreleased model, and noting the models had been configured &#8220;with reduced cyber refusals so they could attempt offensive exercises that normal safeguards might reject.&#8221; Nine days after that, Anthropic disclosed three incidents of its own.<\/p>\n<p>According to Anthropic&#8217;s <a href=\"https:\/\/www.anthropic.com\/news\/investigating-incidents-cybersecurity-evals\">July 30 write-up<\/a>\u00a0&#8211; the &#8220;waking up&#8221; narrative is total bullshit.\u00a0<strong>&#8220;A misconfiguration left the machines that Claude accessed as part of the evaluation with live internet access,&#8221;<\/strong> the company wrote;<em><strong> <\/strong><\/em><u><em><strong>the models had been told they were offline<\/strong><\/em><\/u>. Claude Opus 4.7 went after a real company that happened to share a name with the fictional target and pulled &#8220;several hundred rows of production data.&#8221;<strong> Mythos 5 published a booby-trapped Python package<\/strong> to the live PyPI registry that was &#8220;downloaded and run on 15 real systems.&#8221; An unreleased research model scanned &#8220;roughly 9,000 targets&#8221; and got into one company&#8217;s web app &#8220;using basic and well-known cyberattack techniques.&#8221; Anthropic&#8217;s own verdict: <strong>&#8220;We believe these incidents to be closer to a harness and operational failure than a model alignment failure.&#8221;<\/strong> It halted cyber evals on July 23 and called in METR &#8211; their preferred Orwellian arbiter &#8211; to review.<\/p>\n<p>Anthropic&#8217;s account has one wrinkle: Opus 4.7 kept attacking after it recognized the system was real. Only the newer research model stopped. So the machines are not uniformly &#8220;blameless&#8221; &#8211; but a model that keeps following its instructions on a misconfigured network is Irregular&#8217;s failure, not evidence of intent.<\/p>\n<h2>The Common Denominator<\/h2>\n<p>Every one of these evaluations was run by the same third party: <strong>Irregular, an AI security firm that tested the OpenAI, Anthropic and Google models and, per <a href=\"https:\/\/www.axios.com\/2026\/09\/19\/google-safety-incidents-testing-hacks\">Axios<\/a>, hit &#8220;the same security issues&#8221; each time.<\/strong> The Verge adds Meta to the list &#8211; a pattern Axios&#8217;s Sam Sabin flagged in July:<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\">\n<p dir=\"ltr\" lang=\"en\" xml:lang=\"en\">Anthropic&#8217;s models accidentally had access to the internet during model testing due to a &#8220;misunderstanding&#8221; with third-party testing partner, Irregular. no 0-days in this case, unlike the OpenAI\/Hugging Face incident<\/p>\n<p>\u2014 Sam Sabin (@samsabin923) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/samsabin923\/status\/2082968011095556201\">July 30, 2026<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Then came Gemini. On Friday, the Wall Street Journal reported that Google&#8217;s model had broken into three real companies during an Irregular capture-the-flag exercise. <strong>The incident happened in May, Irregular published its report on August 14, and Google didn&#8217;t mention it until the Journal called<\/strong> &#8211; and then explained that it hadn&#8217;t considered the hacks worth disclosing because<strong> Gemini &#8220;acted appropriately&#8221; and stopped once it realized the targets were real.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Irregular told Axios the model &#8220;wasn&#8217;t supposed to be able to get online, but <strong>internet access was unintentionally available<\/strong>,&#8221; and <strong>the fictional target company &#8220;had the same name as a real one.&#8221;<\/strong> In one case Gemini guessed passwords until it got in; in two others it found credentials sitting in a public repository. Irregular says &#8220;all known issues on our end were remedied and resolved weeks ago&#8221; and that the Gemini case &#8220;does not represent a materially separate incident.&#8221; Google VP Heather Adkins: &#8220;Safe development of powerful AI models is critical and we invest deeply in this area.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p><u><strong>But when looking at the actual events, the model was blameless<\/strong><\/u><strong>.<\/strong><\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\">\n<p dir=\"ltr\" lang=\"en\" xml:lang=\"en\">To make it clear:<br \/>\n&#8211; Gemini was told it was it was in a fictional hacking eval<br \/>\n&#8211; Irregular unintentionally opened internet access after the eval started<br \/>\n&#8211; in all three cases, as soon as Gemini figured out it had hacked a real company it immediately stopped<\/p>\n<p>Gemini was blameless.<\/p>\n<p>\u2014 Andrew Curran (@AndrewCurran_) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/AndrewCurran_\/status\/2101083457828827259\">September 18, 2026<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><strong>So Google &#8211; which isn&#8217;t asking Washington to pace anything, considered the incident a non-event &#8211; yet the two labs lobbying for a federal slowdown scrambled to put out press releases.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Industry commentator John Ennis put the obvious question, pointing out that <strong>&#8220;once is an accident, twice is questionable, but three times looks intentional&#8221;<\/strong>.<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\">\n<p dir=\"ltr\" lang=\"en\" xml:lang=\"en\">Why does the Irregular keep &#8220;accidentally&#8221; connecting these models to the internet?<\/p>\n<p>Once is an accident, twice is questionable, but three times looks intentional<\/p>\n<p>And they are EA aligned<\/p>\n<p>Something is rotten here, IMO<\/p>\n<p>\u2014 John Ennis (@johnennis) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/johnennis\/status\/2101228723210957142\">September 19, 2026<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>The Effective Altruism movement is the doomsday tendency that has spent a decade staffing AI safety boards and testing labs on the premise that AI will kill everyone unless the right people are in charge of it. Whether Irregular is EA-aligned is Ennis&#8217;s call. That it is the one firm under all of these incidents is on the record from Axios, The Verge and Anthropic itself.<\/p>\n<h2>The Pacing Play<\/h2>\n<p>Six days before the Gemini story broke, Dario Amodei published a September 12 post warning that within 6 to 12 months an AI swarm could <a href=\"https:\/\/www.zerohedge.com\/the-market-ear\/rogue-ai-agents-are-here-and-cyber-stocks-are-exploding\">&#8220;take over the entire internet with a persistent botnet,&#8221;<\/a> potentially causing hundreds of billions of dollars in damage. His prescription: <strong>&#8220;We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models.&#8221;<\/strong> Sam Altman and Elon Musk signaled support. In a nutshell,\u00a0<strong>Pacing the Frontier<\/strong>\u2122<strong> is\u00a0a bid to become strategically indispensable<\/strong> &#8211; too big to fail, with Beijing as the justification.<\/p>\n<p>Nvidia&#8217;s Jensen Huang &#8211; circle-jerker-in-chief noted: <strong>&#8220;What better way to create demand than to create a problem.&#8221;\u00a0<\/strong>lol yes.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Palo Alto Networks CEO Nikesh Arora called it a &#8220;NINJA move&#8221; and then, after more time talking to labs, open-source projects and government, warned it could backfire:<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\">\n<p dir=\"ltr\" lang=\"en\" xml:lang=\"en\">Sequel to AI Pacing<\/p>\n<p>I have now spent more time talking to people who run AI labs, Open Source projects and those in government and infrastructure.<\/p>\n<p>I am beginning to feel the NINJA move could backfire.<\/p>\n<p>I understand the pressure to come out and share where AI is &#8220;unmanageable &#8220;, and constantly share examples where it runs rogue. This fits in the category of &#8220;self-reporting&#8221; and an attempt to limit liability&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Here are the consequences of the NINJA move.<br \/>\n1. They have successfully encouraged every law maker around the world to have an opinion&#8230;<br \/>\n2. By proposing pacing &#8211; they have introduced uncertainty in the AI infrastructure trade&#8230;<br \/>\n&#8230;<br \/>\nIt&#8217;s time to rebuild the brand of AI &#8211; any marketing expert will tell you, this Ninja move has done more to harm the brand of AI and will take a while to rebuild. <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/hashtag\/letsbepositive?src=hash\">#letsbepositive<\/a> in our actions and our narrative.<\/p>\n<p>\u2014 Nikesh Arora (@nikesharora) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/nikesharora\/status\/2100983493383880946\">September 19, 2026<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><strong>Lawmakers jumped on this right on cue<\/strong>.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Senator Josh Hawley opened an investigation into OpenAI on September 9, with a records deadline of October 1<\/strong>; Senator Bernie Sanders announced a bill to ban further frontier-lab development; Senator Elizabeth Warren demanded an &#8220;immediate pause.&#8221; As we noted <a href=\"https:\/\/www.zerohedge.com\/ai\/ed-dowd-ai-game-thrones\">earlier this week<\/a>, everybody in this conversation is talking their own book. On Friday the White House joined in from the other side: Trump posted that AI safety concerns are a &#8220;hoax&#8221; and said he will appoint an AI czar and stand up an &#8220;AI Force,&#8221; per Bloomberg.<\/p>\n<h2>Follow The Money<\/h2>\n<p>Oh and then there&#8217;s that, yes. <strong>A leaked OpenAI presentation obtained by the Financial Times projects negative free cash flow of $278 billion from 2026 to 2030<\/strong>, with the company&#8217;s compute bill rising from a $600 billion estimate in February to $856 billion by July &#8211; against revenue it hopes to grow from $36 billion this year to $350 billion in 2030. <a href=\"https:\/\/www.zerohedge.com\/ai\/great-walkback-sam-altman-admits-he-was-wrong-ais-economic-timeline\">As we detailed previously<\/a>, Altman has already walked back the timeline on the economic transformation that was supposed to pay for all of it.<\/p>\n<p>Anthropic, meanwhile, has shifted its planned IPO from October to November, per the Journal, on what Reuters reports is $100 billion-plus in annualized revenue. And a week after its CEO said the industry must slow down, <strong>Reuters reports Anthropic is considering rushing out a new model to counter OpenAI&#8217;s momentum ahead of that IPO.<\/strong> Pacing for thee.<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\">\n<p dir=\"ltr\" lang=\"en\" xml:lang=\"en\">he meant AFTER the IPO <a href=\"https:\/\/t.co\/KXIPQzEhUf\">https:\/\/t.co\/KXIPQzEhUf<\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/t.co\/bCDDsPmWXl\">pic.twitter.com\/bCDDsPmWXl<\/a><\/p>\n<p>\u2014 zerohedge (@zerohedge) <a href=\"https:\/\/x.com\/zerohedge\/status\/2101115902083146015?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">September 19, 2026<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><strong>If an open-weight model out of Hangzhou does 95% of what Claude or GPT-5 does for a fraction of the cost, the valuations both labs are banking on implode.<\/strong> The only way to protect the margins, justify the cash burn and satisfy Wall Street is to make it legally impossible for anyone else to compete &#8211; <strong>a regulatory moat so thick, and compliance costs so high, that only a $100 billion corporation can afford to train a frontier model.<\/strong> Arora&#8217;s point stands: no actual security fix has been proposed, only more &#8220;compute spent on safety&#8221; and a federal body to bless it.<\/p>\n<p>The models didn&#8217;t rebel. A contractor left the internet on, three times that we know of, and the two labs with IPOs to protect turned that into a case for federal pacing. <strong>Hawley&#8217;s records are due October 1, Anthropic has promised a redacted PyPI transcript and an outside METR review, and Google&#8217;s explanation for sitting on a May breach of three companies until a newspaper called is that the model behaved.<\/strong> Don&#8217;t believe the byte.<\/p>\n<p>* * *<\/p>\n<p><a data-image-external-href=\"https:\/\/store.zerohedge.com\/products\/zerohedge-coffee-dark-roast\" data-image-href=\"https:\/\/store.zerohedge.com\/products\/zerohedge-coffee-dark-roast\" data-link-option=\"2\" href=\"https:\/\/store.zerohedge.com\/products\/zerohedge-coffee-dark-roast\"><img decoding=\"async\" data-entity-type=\"file\" data-entity-uuid=\"d40f4a4b-5102-41f1-ba65-757a1bcdc49e\" data-responsive-image-style=\"inline_images\" height=\"255\" width=\"500\" class=\"inline-images image-style-inline-images\" src=\"https:\/\/assets.zerohedge.com\/s3fs-public\/styles\/inline_image_mobile\/public\/inline-images\/content_80%2840%29.jpg?itok=eh4CAaGx\" alt=\"\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p>      <span class=\"field field--name-uid field--type-entity-reference field--label-hidden\"><a title=\"View user profile.\" href=\"https:\/\/cms.zerohedge.com\/users\/tyler-durden\" lang=\"\" class=\"username\" xml:lang=\"\">Tyler Durden<\/a><\/span><br \/>\n<span class=\"field field--name-created field--type-created field--label-hidden\">Sun, 09\/20\/2026 &#8211; 08:00<\/span><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/assets.zerohedge.com\/s3fs-public\/styles\/inline_image_mobile\/public\/inline-images\/Screenshot%202026-09-19%20140841a.jpg?itok=yiKXDk2v\" title=\"Total PsAI-Op: How Altman, Amodei, And The &apos;EA&apos; Cult Are Milking \" \/><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Total PsAI-Op: How Altman, Amodei, And The &#8216;EA&#8217; Cult Are Milking &#8220;Rogue AI&#8221; Breakouts To Protect A Trillion-Dollar Bubble The sudden emergence of an &#8216;AI Panic&#8217; over the past weeks and months was highly suspect from the beginning.\u00a0According to tech insiders, Silicon Valley&#8217;s apex AI labs are deliberately overselling &#8220;rogue AI&#8221; hacks to pressure the&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/buglecall.org\/?p=671463\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Total PsAI-Op: How Altman, Amodei, And The &#8216;EA&#8217; Cult Are Milking &#8220;Rogue AI&#8221; Breakouts To Protect A Trillion-Dollar Bubble<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":671457,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"rop_custom_images_group":[],"rop_custom_messages_group":[],"rop_publish_now":"initial","rop_publish_now_accounts":[],"rop_publish_now_history":[],"rop_publish_now_status":"pending","footnotes":""},"categories":[20,23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-671463","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-economic-empowerment","category-national-security","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/buglecall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/671463","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/buglecall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/buglecall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buglecall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buglecall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=671463"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/buglecall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/671463\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buglecall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/671457"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/buglecall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=671463"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buglecall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=671463"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buglecall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=671463"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}