Machine Gods

Fired OpenAI safety researchers Mikita Balesni and Tomek Korbak give us their first interview since their dramatic dismissal. They take us inside the company during METR’s investigation into the Hugging Face hack, explain why OpenAI’s rebuttal doesn’t add up, and describe how the fight over AI safety is still playing out inside the company.

Plus, we introduce our new segment, Pandora’s Box. Elon Musk wants to give every kid in America a SpaceX share, new filings in the OpenAI bugging case reveal the suspect’s chats with a Saudi royal, and more fresh horrors unleashed on us all by Silicon Valley. For a transcript of this episode, check out npr.org/machinegods.

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On the first episode of Machine Gods, Kevin Roose and Casey Newton ask: How worried should we be about rogue AI agents? After OpenAI’s Hugging Face breach, we discuss the first sighting of a rogue AI agent fleet linked to a Chinese AI company, Anthropic’s Claude sending a bogus homicide tip to Philadelphia police, and a new Anthropic report warning AI agents may be months away from self-replicating on smart TVs and other home devices.

Then, who’s going to rein this in? We size up President Trump’s new Super Intelligence Force, the FTC subpoenas and EU AI Act investigations into OpenAI and Anthropic, and ask whether regulators are anywhere close to getting this right.

And finally, Kevin investigates his sloppelganger. Someone made an AI-generated rip-off of his new book, The AGI Chronicles, and sold it on Amazon. Now he’s coming for them.

For a transcript of this episode, check out npr.org/machinegods.

You can watch this full episode on YouTube, Spotify or Apple. And if you’ve got a question you want us to answer, you can drop us a comment on any of those platforms or email us at [email protected]

See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.

NPR Privacy Policy

The official podcast of the singularity. News, analysis, and interviews with the people who are building the AI future. New episodes twice weekly starting the week of October 19th, wherever you get your podcasts and at youtube.com/@machinegodspod

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