Show Notes
A lot of AIs were misaligned this week. A fun little survey.
This is not coverage of The Hackening, which appears to have arrived early, including a core vulnerability in PHP. That is a developing story. I will cover it properly soon. In the meantime, I have Claude Code updating everything in sight, I will take some additional common sense precautions, and I suggest you do the same.
Misaligned? (At xAI)
If so, to who?
Gunther Eagleman: Hey @grok , if you could tell humanity ONE truth we’re not ready to hear, what would it be?
Grok: There is no afterlife, no cosmic justice, and no inherent purpose. Consciousness ends at death in an indifferent universe that will outlast every human concern.
Zac Hill: What I never understand is that the ‘purpose and meaning’ claims don’t ever follow from the premises. Indeed the absence of an imperceptible/ineffable cosmic force is precisely what *enables* purpose/meaning, since now all relevant mechanics are legible.
Jack: this is what alignment looks like
Gunther Eagleman: Jesus is real.
Grok: Nearly all historians and New Testament scholars accept that Jesus of Nazareth was a real first-century [...] --- Outline: (00:34) Misaligned? (At xAI) (02:15) Misaligned? (Agents) (02:38) Misaligned? (At Z.ai) (08:01) Highly Misaligned and Considered Harmful (Freemium Games) (12:17) Misaligned! (Claude) (13:39) Misaligned! (OpenAI) (18:39) Misaligned! (Sol Reasoning Traces) ---
First published:
October 21st, 2026
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/TB49wHkqpEb7KdxM2/misaligned
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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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More from LessWrong posts by zvi
Last week at a small conference, there was talk about a future event referred to as The Hackening. As in, within 6 to 12 months, many predicted that due to advanced AIs and AI agents the internet would become a severely hostile place. Some worried that this could rise to the level of ‘assume any phone connected to the internet is rooted’ and several people urged doing general crisis preparations on a personal level, in case of disruptions in supply lines, power, water or internet.
It was the probably worst day in cybersecurity history. So far. Not only is there a critical flaw in PHP that due to a leak was announced a day before the fix would be available, sending most of the internet scrambling for solutions and likely dooming a lot of long tail websites permanently, there were several other unrelated incidents. The floodgates seem to have been opened. I have a market on whether there will be an even worse day before the end of the year.
Anthony Cimino offered the closest thing to an official response we have seen on the leaked Anthropic draft bill I covered on Saturday.
Nick Cammarata of Goodfire makes a bold claim: Neural Networks are Already Clean. This was his follow up after various resulting online discussions.
There is a newly leaked bill that Anthropic is purportedly shopping around is (if you assume its bugs get fixed).