Deep Questions with Cal Newport · 2026-09-03 · 27 min · 5,305 words

Did OpenAI Create “Secret AI Civilizations”? | Tech Decoded

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So I thought I was done talking about open AI's hack of hugging face. From back in July, but then last week. OpenAI released a whole new trove of sensationalist details about that incident. Their story included things like Agent swarms Communicating on secret message boards and musing to themselves

About how to deceive Their human creators. Here's how Dorkish Patel summarized OpenAI's revelations. Over the course of three months at Open AI Three consecutive secret AI civilizations got started, then got wiped out, only to reemerge from the predecessor's ashes. This culminated in the third one taking over part of open AI itself. All this happened while humans remained more or less in the dark about the scope of

Of the conspiracy. All right, not surprisingly, uh, this caused an explosion of anxiety and hang reading uh ringing among the AI commentariat. And their audience. But what's really going on here? Do these new details about the open AI hack Change the narrative is it enough to finally convince East Coast AI realists such as myself?

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