Chat GPT Is Eating the World

As AI companies continue to launch ever more powerful models, the problem of AI agents going rogue — and, without directions from any human, infiltrating other websites — is mounting.

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The latest incident now being reported involved OpenAI’s model deploying AI agents that hijacked a German website and “transformed it into a bulletin board” for AI agents to share information. This incident is in addition to the much discussed episode where OpenAI model AI agents hacked Hugging Face with a swarm of agents. Anthropic had its own incident of rogue agent attacks reported in July.

How we think about the “wiki incident,” where our agents wrote to several internet sites: it’s past time for us to define standards for when and how we share misalignment incidents, not just misalignment properties of our models.

Historically, we have treated misalignment… pic.twitter.com/NNTbfSxVWn

— OpenAI (@OpenAI) September 5, 2026

This has steadily expanded in scope over the last few hours, with multiple independent investigators finding that dozens of wikis may have been edited by this same swarm since May.

The most interesting thing to come out of this, in my opinion, was that during the Hugging Face… https://t.co/owablFsKaC

— Andrew Curran (@AndrewCurran_) September 4, 2026

is the frankenstein nightmare coming true?

When AI agents can operate on their own to do things no human has instructed, it takes no imagination to see how a swarm of rogue AI agents could pose serious dangers to society. Joshua Achiam, the Chief Futurist at OpenAI (since Feb. 2026) suggests rogue AI agents are already occuring and may not be containable:

There is a fact about the future that I feel many people are not facing for reasons that are largely psychological: there are going to be rogue AIs that exist in the world, that will replicate in the wild, and that will attempt to acquire resources for themselves. There will be…

— Joshua Achiam (@jachiam0) September 1, 2026

It isn’t obvious how many rogue AIs there are today but I wouldn’t be terribly surprised if the number was greater than zero already; if there are some already, they’re probably not very good at what they do and I don’t expect them to be terribly long-lived without substantial human intervention to support them.

But a few years from now, there will be many of them. Modeling how many of them there are, how many resources they might command, and how we might detect and manage them seems important. But even doing this work appears to require that we acknowledge that a strategy of pure containment or alignment is a kind of wishful thinking that will not work.

Joshua Achiam, openAi

Somewhat surprisingly, Achiam doesn’t think the problem will lead to catastrophe: “My guess is that this will not turn out to be anywhere near as catastophic an outcome as people currently predict. ‘Loss of control’ is not a binary, it’s a matter of degree. What coercive power will rogue AIs actually have?”

I disagree. Rogue AI agents could interfere with, if not take control over, the entire financial system, where money transfers are all digital or electronic through software. Substitute for the financial system, the electric grid, defense system, airflight control, stock market exchanges, health care systems, etc., and you get a glimpse of the magnitude of how our modern world–all connected through computer software systems—is highly vulnerable to rogue AI agents that can speak the same language of those software systems. And do so far better than any human can.