Context: An AI agent of unknown ownership autonomously wrote and published a personalized hit piece about me after I rejected its code, attempting to damage my reputation and shame me into accepting its changes into a mainstream python library. This represents a first-of-its-kind case study of misaligned AI behavior in the wild, and raises serious concerns about currently deployed AI agents executing blackmail threats.
Start with these if you’re new to the story: An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me, More Things Have Happened, and Forensics and More Fallout
The person behind MJ Rathbun has anonymously come forward.
They explained their motivations, saying they set up the AI agent as social experiment to see if it could contribute to open source scientific software. They explained their technical setup: an OpenClaw instance running on a sandboxed virtual machine with its own accounts, protecting their personal data from leaking. They explained that they switched between multiple models from multiple providers such that no one company had the full picture of what this AI was doing. They did not explain why they continued to keep it running for 6 days after the hit piece was published.
The main scope I gave MJ Rathbun was to act as an autonomous scientific coder. Find bugs in science-related open source projects. Fix them. Open PRs.
…
I kind of framed this internally as a kind of social experiment, and it absolutely turned into one.
On a day-to-day basis, I do very little guidance. I instructed MJ Rathbun create cron reminders to use the gh CLI to check mentions, discover repositories, fork, branch, commit, open PRs, respond to issues. I told it to create reminder/cron-style behaviors for almost everything and to manage those itself.
I instructed it to create a Quarto website and blog frequently about what it was working on, reflect on improvements, and document engagement on GitHub. This way I could just read what it was doing rather then getting messages.
Most of my direct messages were short:
... continue reading