The models did what they were instructed to do. Nothing went rogue. As Cal Newport writes, “Circumventing internet restrictions and hacking into servers are exactly the kinds of things these ExploitGym systems are designed to do.” If the example reveals anything, it is how sloppy OpenAI was in controlling ExploitGym’s parameters for the sake of competing with Anthropic. And it cannot have been unhappy with the resulting coverage that, to the extent that it was alarmist, was also a tribute to the power of its models and to the ultimate objective of creating an AGI.

The obverse of criti-hype is just hype. A recent example of this was OpenAI’s claim to have solved the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize problem. In essence, the problem is whether the standard mathematical equations used to describe the motion of fluids (the Navier–Stokes equations) are mathematically perfect under all physical conditions. OpenAI said it had used a swarm of ten thousand AI agents over eighty-eight hours to solve the problem definitively, proving that the equations always reach a limit: since “a real fluid cannot move infinitely fast, this would mark a breakdown in how the equations model the fluid.”

OpenAI’s claim was totally disingenuous: it had gotten wind that other researchers, Tristan Buckmaster and Levent Alpöge (who works at Anthropic), had made critical advances to the solution and used their pathways to prompt its own agents. This is really an appropriation of the commons, in this case the mathematical commons — the whole process of solving the problem from Claude-Louis Navier and George Gabriel Stokes onward has been a collaborative human effort.

OpenAI’s solution is not yet peer reviewed, and the Clay Mathematics Institute, which runs the Millennium Prize, lists the problem as unsolved. Even so, like the Hugging Face hack, this entered into internet lore as an example of how rapidly AI is accelerating toward AGI and out of human control, despite the fact that not one of these AI models has ever approached such a threshold, nor done anything that it was not designed, enabled, and instructed to do.