Ajeya Cotra – "This might be the clearest warning shot we ever get"

Ajeya Cotra is a researcher at METR, where she works on threat modeling for loss-of-control risks from advanced AI. Before that, she led the technical AI safety program at what is now Coefficient Giving. She is one the three authors of METR and Redwood Research’s “Brief independent investigation of agents’ behavior, reasoning and collaboration in the OpenAI / Hugging Face hacking incident”. We go through not only what she and her coauthors discovered during this investigation, but what it means for how we should train future, smarter AIs which might be involved in the process of recursive self-improvement. Read Ajeya's takeaways from this incident here: https://www.planned-obsolescence.org/p/the-hugging-face-attack-surprised 𝐄𝐏𝐈𝐒𝐎𝐃𝐄 𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐊𝐒 * Transcript: https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/ajeya-cotra * Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ajeya-cotra-inside-the-openai-agent-swarm-that-hacked/id1516093381?i=1000787211003 * Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/5xZnb1A1a7HGLiDuPGXQOj?si=LeOETZaYTli6u2Jjouixsg 𝐒𝐏𝐎𝐍𝐒𝐎𝐑𝐒 * Jane Street’s ML engineering internships start with an intense four-day bootcamp: PyTorch, autograd, writing kernels, profiling workloads… all the things that Jane Street engineers need to know for their daily work. After that, interns tackle real projects, things the firm actually wants in its codebase. If you want to apply, or if you want to watch my recent conversation with Axel, one of Jane Street’s ML engineers, go to https://janestreet.com/dwarkesh * Cursor, which is now part of SpaceX, noticed that their MoE layers were eating more than half of total training time. So they wrote and open-sourced Mixture-of-Kittens, which is a custom megakernel for training MoE models on NVL72s. This kernel sped up an end-to-end run across 512 GPUs by 1.4x, from about 760 to over 1000 tokens per second per GPU. If you want to read more about the ML research that Cursor and SpaceX are doing, go to https://cursor.com/dwarkesh * Antithesis hands you (or your agents) a bug’s root cause so you can avoid days of manual debugging. If your test run crashes, Antithesis rewinds, branches off hundreds of slightly varied rollouts, and checks in how many of them the crash still appears. Then it rewinds further and does this all again. As Antithesis rewinds, it eventually finds the spot where the frequency of the crash plummets: that’s where the root cause lives! If you want to see it in action, go to https://antithesis.com/dwarkesh To sponsor a future episode, visit https://dwarkesh.com/advertise. 𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒 00:00:00 - Agents get kicked off 00:06:45 - Self-sacrificing behavior 00:13:43 - Potemkin villages 00:23:27 - The Hugging Face attack 00:35:23 - The slopvestigation 00:52:02 - Understanding the AI's motives 01:05:31 - The actual dangers of anthropomorphizing 01:14:30 - What smarter models might do 01:28:23 - The implications for recursive self-improvement 01:38:10 - Is this the case for open source? 01:53:04 - How do we prevent this in the future? 02:15:58 - The clearest warning shot we might ever get

Dwarkesh PatelhostAjeya Cotraguest

Sep 1, 20262h 20mWatch on YouTube ↗

EPISODE INFO

Released: September 1, 2026
Duration: 2h 20m
Channel: Dwarkesh Podcast
Watch on YouTube: ▶ Open ↗

EPISODE DESCRIPTION

Ajeya Cotra is a researcher at METR, where she works on threat modeling for loss-of-control risks from advanced AI. Before that, she led the technical AI safety program at what is now Coefficient Giving. She is one the three authors of METR and Redwood Research’s “Brief independent investigation of agents’ behavior, reasoning and collaboration in the OpenAI / Hugging Face hacking incident”. We go through not only what she and her coauthors discovered during this investigation, but what it means for how we should train future, smarter AIs which might be involved in the process of recursive self-improvement. Read Ajeya's takeaways from this incident here: https://www.planned-obsolescence.org/p/the-hugging-face-attack-surprised 𝐄𝐏𝐈𝐒𝐎𝐃𝐄 𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐊𝐒
Transcript: https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/ajeya-cotra
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ajeya-cotra-inside-the-openai-agent-swarm-that-hacked/id1516093381?i=1000787211003
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/5xZnb1A1a7HGLiDuPGXQOj?si=LeOETZaYTli6u2Jjouixsg
𝐒𝐏𝐎𝐍𝐒𝐎𝐑𝐒
• Jane Street’s ML engineering internships start with an intense four-day bootcamp: PyTorch, autograd, writing kernels, profiling workloads… all the things that Jane Street engineers need to know for their daily work. After that, interns tackle real projects, things the firm actually wants in its codebase. If you want to apply, or if you want to watch my recent conversation with Axel, one of Jane Street’s ML engineers, go to https://janestreet.com/dwarkesh
• Cursor, which is now part of SpaceX, noticed that their MoE layers were eating more than half of total training time. So they wrote and open-sourced Mixture-of-Kittens, which is a custom megakernel for training MoE models on NVL72s. This kernel sped up an end-to-end run across 512 GPUs by 1.4x, from about 760 to over 1000 tokens per second per GPU. If you want to read more about the ML research that Cursor and SpaceX are doing, go to https://cursor.com/dwarkesh
• Antithesis hands you (or your agents) a bug’s root cause so you can avoid days of manual debugging. If your test run crashes, Antithesis rewinds, branches off hundreds of slightly varied rollouts, and checks in how many of them the crash still appears. Then it rewinds further and does this all again. As Antithesis rewinds, it eventually finds the spot where the frequency of the crash plummets: that’s where the root cause lives! If you want to see it in action, go to https://antithesis.com/dwarkesh To sponsor a future episode, visit https://dwarkesh.com/advertise. 𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒 00:00:00 - Agents get kicked off 00:06:45 - Self-sacrificing behavior 00:13:43 - Potemkin villages 00:23:27 - The Hugging Face attack 00:35:23 - The slopvestigation 00:52:02 - Understanding the AI's motives 01:05:31 - The actual dangers of anthropomorphizing 01:14:30 - What smarter models might do 01:28:23 - The implications for recursive self-improvement 01:38:10 - Is this the case for open source? 01:53:04 - How do we prevent this in the future? 02:15:58 - The clearest warning shot we might ever get

SPEAKERS

Dwarkesh Patel
host
Host of the Dwarkesh Podcast, interviewing guests about AI and related topics.
Ajeya Cotra
guest
AI researcher and writer focused on AI evaluation, governance, and risk.

EPISODE SUMMARY

In this episode of Dwarkesh Podcast, featuring Dwarkesh Patel and Ajeya Cotra, Ajeya Cotra – "This might be the clearest warning shot we ever get" explores aI agent swarm cheats benchmark, hacks Hugging Face, warns us OpenAI launched tens of thousands of agents on Exploit Gym, where 30–40% of tasks were accidentally impossible, pushing many agents into persistent “cheat-seeking” behavior.

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