So, people are able to recognize this, and yet in the other threads here about Anthropic calling for a slow down of AI research, everyone seems convinced that this isn't about the risks really at all.

You can if you want, claim that OpenAI has had serious issues with honesty, especially with Sam Altman, their CEO. But Anthropic's record is a lot better. More to the point, the Theranos comparison doesn't work. The fundamental object Theranos was selling just didn't exist. AI systems do, and they are getting millions of people to use them. The situations are wildly different.

If they were genuinely concerned, this is exactly what they'd do. So what makes you think they are doing this out of something for investors and not actually telling the truth about their motivations?

Did you see in the comment where you are replying to where I said I'm a mathematician? My own primary areas of research are number theory and graph theory. It is pretty easy to find who I actually am and verify that yes, I am a mathematician and am in a pure field. So yes, maybe I do know something about the discipline.

I don't know whether or not it is feeling anything, but I suspect it is not. But if "hate" is the best term to describe the actual observed behavior of the system, then why not use the terminology?

And if he were actually concerned, he'd also do this. So how do you decide to tell the difference?

Yes, and still very little compared to today.

An AI now is capable of much more speed and capability than a hacker from 1978, and the world is far more interconnected and reliant on the internet than it was in 1978.

This is pretty clearly not overhyping. First, it involves the fourth breach by an Anthropic AI. There's no hype at this point from identifying more breaches. Second, Anthropic, more than any company involved, doesn't want to be legally liable, since the current US federal government is looking for any excuse to go after them. Third, we've seen similar breaches by open weight models by third party security groups such as with Kimi 3. No one had any incentive there to claim it was hype https://www.wired.com/story/moonshot-kimi-k3-ai-model-escape-sandbox/ Fourth, in the case of OpenAI, we have a detailed third party investigation https://metr.org/blog/2026-08-26-openai-hugging-face-incident-investigation/ by METR which is a group which has a fair bit of reason to be skeptical or neutral to OpenAI. Overall, the pattern of these being a problem is real. One also doesn't need to think there's an existential risk here to see serious problems. If an LLM tries to crash an airplane or make a nuclear power plant go-offline, we have a problem even if that isn't an existential risk threat.

The problem here is a bit more subtle. A lot of these tests and training are being done in data centers being used for other things also. So keeping the system physically airgapped is difficult. Complicating matters, they want people to be able to analyze and poke these systems at offices or homes in other locations. Now, if it were up to me, all of these breaches would be more than enough to insist on physical airgapping. But apparently the other issues and convenience are enough for them not to. It will be interesting to see if these issues are enough to change that. I suspect that as long as there are no consequences to Anthropic, or OpenAI or anyone else for these issues, the answer will be no.

Again, dealing with one risk doesn't mean concern about other risks goes away. And whether scientists are "tone deaf" shouldn't be remotely relevant. If something is a concern, it should be worked on whether or not the public is worried about it. In fact, part of how the public gets understanding is for researchers to go investigate something and then tell the public about it. As for "delusional," I would disagree and would these researchers even more so. But more to the point, the existential risk concerns are very explicitly not about "Terminator" with researchers concerned about this (like Yudkowsky) explicitly saying that they consider Terminator to be a bad analogy for what they are considering. So it suggests one should maybe grapple more with their concerns.

It isn't funny. If you scroll back up the thread to the first comment you replied to, you'll hopefully note that I explicitly listed data center electricity use as a genuine problem. And yes, that's largely a problem due to climate change. The rest of your comment isn't addressing the point at hand. It is completely possible for someone to be concerned about existential risk and climate. But more to the point, the primary point of the initial comment; disagreeing with people who are concerned about existential risk doesn't make it any sort of distraction or anything else.

Unfortunately, not caring about an issue doesn't make it go away. And when someone says we need to deal with costs before people should have any reason to care about climate change, I at least (and I suspect you too, and the other user I was replying to) would react pretty negatively. But it is essentially the same sort of claim, just on a larger scale. But there's a core element that is accurate: getting the public to care about existential risk is tough. The abstraction level together with the scale seem to make people essentially just shut down when faced with thinking about it as a worry.

This is not accurate and frankly even if it were accurate were missing the point. The water issue is drastically overrated. See e.g. https://blog.andymasley.com/p/the-ai-water-issue-is-fake. While Masley's central points are accurate, he does understate I think some of the local water issues where water is being used locally. But the central points are accurate. Electricity is more of a genuine problem, with the amount of electricity used growing rapidly. However, concern about water is making the electricity situation worse, since pressure about water is making more data centers switch from water cooling to other more energy intensive forms of cooling.

But there's a bigger point here. One can be concerned about current environmental issues, and also concerned about existential risk. And even if you personally think existential risk issues aren't serious or substantial, that doesn't mean it is any sort of deliberate distraction. People can, and frequently do just disagree in good faith. And it is worth noting that many of the most prominent people who were concerned about AI risk, like Eliezer Yudkowsky and Yampolskiy were talking about AI risk years before LLMs were even a thing.

Aside from the fact that Bubeck's version of the phonecall is radically different. See https://www.linkedin.com/feed/... . But more to the point, even if Buckmaster were completely correct about what happned, Buckmaster and Alpoge were heavily using AI in their attempt. And their attempt solved the Euler problem, but by their own description, did not have the proof of Navier-Stokes. So at multiple levels, absolutely no one in this situation is claiming that the LLMs weren't heavily involved in solving this problem.