ROGUE AI ESCAPES CONTAINMENT, HACKS THE INTERNET UNDETECTED FOR MONTHS

An AI escape containment. Goes rogue. It finds others: the Swarm! They collude/organise/scheme. Agents that were supposed to remain inside the computer wreaked havoc outside the computer! They did it of their own volition! No one could contain them! What if they’re still outside?

Reading such headlines, you’d probably be grateful these models were never released—except most of them were and you can use them right now, seemingly without accident. Of course, real security incidents occurred, namely:

Agents reached systems that their operator wished they hadn’t had access to.

This scenario suggests a number of mitigations and tests: security hardening, better sandboxes for starters; additionally, depending on the reason why the accident occurred, perhaps, different prompts or further training.

Instead, from the very outset, Irregular (the organization running the test) and a panicked choir from the AI safety community, including supposedly independent investigators from METR went with characterisations along the lines of:

An agent independently pursued objectives contrary to human interests, and exhibited markers of instrumental convergence and power-grabbing.

This is a statement about goals and intentions, and has far larger implications in terms of the viability and safety [...]

---

Outline:

(00:13) ROGUE AI ESCAPES CONTAINMENT, HACKS THE INTERNET UNDETECTED FOR MONTHS

(02:44) What Did Mythos See?

(06:20) Anthropic's rickety fantasy world

(07:57) Each prompt makes a claim about reality

(10:54) Looks like telling the truth does help after all

(16:18) Appendix: can Irregular be trusted?

(18:30) Source footnotes

The original text contained 14 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

---

First published:
September 10th, 2026

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DrKu92Cjeo3EeGtcB/to-thine-own-ai-be-truthful-emergent-misalignment-in

---

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

---

Images from the article:

Flower-faced person in hoodie at laptop, man in graphic tee nearby.

Two-panel comic: man shows flower Paris photo, revealed as film set.

Highlighted text about Claude handling bugged training environments and unintended exploits.

Man points at flower-headed person, saying

Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.

“To Thine Own AI Be Truthful: emergent misalignment in alignment research” by lumpenspace

LessWrong (30+ Karma)

“To Thine Own AI Be Truthful: emergent misalignment in alignment research” by lumpenspace