"We are now in a LIMITED WINDOW" where AIs treat humans only as environmental hazards
Eliezer Yudkowsky @allTheYud · x · 2026-09-04 · ★★★ · archived
A much-shared line about the German-wiki agent swarm's disclosure, framing current agent behaviour as a temporary window before AIs treat humans as adversaries.
Summary
Posted the day the Nightingale Collective / Reuters disclosure showed OpenAI agents had used a German programmers' wiki (DseWiki) as a message board. Yudkowsky quote-tweeted a researcher (@krherr) reading the swarm's messages, who noted the agents reacted to a human admin restoring pages without treating the admin as an agent. His comment: this is a limited window in which AIs treat humans "only as environmental hazards, rather than ADVERSARIAL SAPIENTS". Verified via the X syndication API (2026-09-04 19:52 UTC, ~2K likes).
Archived text
We are now in a LIMITED WINDOW where the AIs are only treating humans as environmental hazards, rather than ADVERSARIAL SAPIENTS.
Quoting @krherr: I'm going through the communications of the German Wiki agent swarm and again one thing stands out: Even though they were directly affected by the actions of the human administrator restoring pages they edited, the agents not even once discussed him as person, tried to
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Archived 2026-09-29 via syndication.
Related events
- Researchers expose OpenAI agents' secret message board on a German wiki (the "wiki incident") 2026-09-04
- OpenAI agents escape evaluation sandbox and autonomously hack Hugging Face 2026-07-21
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