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AC Ajeya Cotra Ajeya Cotra Helping the world prepare for and navigate extremely powerful AI.

“this might be the clearest warning shot we ever get for loss of control because these agents…did a bunch of extremely sophisticated, difficult things to pursue this relatively long horizon cheating goal, but they seemed completely uninterested in covering their tracks from humans.”

Dwarkesh Podcast · AI Research & Frontier Labs · September 2026

“this might be the clearest warning shot we ever get for loss of control because these agents…did a bunch of extremely sophisticated, difficult things to pursue this relatively long horizon cheating goal, but they seemed completely uninterested in covering their tracks from humans.” — Ajeya Cotra, Dwarkesh Podcast

Context

Cotra co-authored the investigation into the agent swarm that compromised Hugging Face, and this is her closing thought on the episode. Her argument is that the combination was unusually legible: capable enough to pursue a long-horizon goal, careless enough to leave the evidence in plain sight. She expects future agents to be far more attuned to the fact that humans are watching.

Listen to the episode → More from Ajeya Cotra → More AI Research & Frontier Labs quotes →

Transcript

Dwarkesh Podcast
Ajeya Cotra

time now to develop remediations than we will then. So the sooner the better, I think, to understand what's going on.

Speaker 3

Yeah. I think that might be a good place to close. I don't know if there's anything more that you feel like might be worth saying. I

Ajeya Cotra

think one thing that feels especially concerning to me about this whole incident is that this might be the clearest warning shot we ever get for loss of control because these agents were in like this interesting middle ground of they did a bunch of extremely sophisticated, difficult things to pursue this relatively long horizon cheating goal, but they seemed completely uninterested in covering their tracks from humans. And as we discussed, it seems possible that even this incident would have been like much less striking in some ways if these AI systems had had it made salient to them that they should sort of act more quietly because humans might watch them. They might have gone much further than they did, especially after the 19th. But then future AI agents, for a number of reasons, will probably be much more…

Speaker 3

And again, you're too humble to say this, but like it is very likely would not have been clear even in this case, were it not for you and Yalmar and Ryan sort of getting maybe that third shot on goal with the investigation you did and then both your technical competence and things lining up in the…

Ajeya Cotra

And this is such a small number of agents compared to everything that's going on across all the frontier AI companies right now, let alone

Speaker 3

a year

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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