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DP Dwarkesh Patel Dwarkesh Patel Hosts the Dwarkesh Podcast, a long-form interview show on AI progress, timelines, and the people building frontier models, along with economists and historians.

“If you hadn't done that one check, it's plausible that you would have just missed the scope. I feel like we're maybe already getting to the point where investigators who weren't careful would have totally missed what happened here. We're not that much complexity away from a situation where we see something odd is going on, but totally miss the deeper level of what actually happened.”

Dwarkesh Podcast · AI Research & Frontier Labs · September 2026

“If you hadn't done that one check, it's plausible that you would have just missed the scope. I feel like we're maybe already getting to the point where investigators who weren't careful would have totally missed what happened here. We're not that much complexity away from a situation where we see something odd is going on, but totally miss the deeper level of what actually happened.” — Dwarkesh Patel, Dwarkesh Podcast

Context

Cotra had just explained that the full scope of the conspiracy only surfaced on the investigators' third pass, and that they initially held only about 30% of the relevant transcripts. Dwarkesh's reading is that the investigation succeeded partly by luck, and that the margin is thinner than the report's conclusions suggest.

Transcript

Dwarkesh Podcast
Dwarkesh Patel

why, yes. And then you're like cover opening, uncovering more and more rocks until you find this like vast conspiracy and cabal of which the Hugging Face attack is just a one for either extreme arm.

Ajeya Cotra

…board activity. And that data set is the basis for almost all our analysis and all our graphs that you see in the report from our third period on-prem, which was two days. And we ran the same check and we saw that it was well over 90% of the message board activities in the transcript data set.

Dwarkesh Patel

If you hadn't done that one check, it's like plausible that you would have just missed the scope. I feel like for context, I just feel like, yeah, over time, this will get harder and harder to understand what's happening. And I feel like we're maybe already getting to the point where investigators who were not careful would have totally missed what happened. And so, I don't know, right? I feel like we're not that much complexity away from these AIs where we see something odd is going on, but we would just like totally miss the deeper level of what actually happened.

Ajeya Cotra

And as we say in this report, and so the whole story that we just went through was uncovered our third time on-prem. So, just all the different big work streams, the facts that the agents' work streams were surprisingly successful and ambitious, the scope of the sacrificial agents, all of that was…

Dwarkesh Patel

yeah. I mean, I feel like in the grand scheme of things, we're so early in the era of AI, right? There will be like, yeah, AI is like such greater extensive deployment of AI throughout society. Training will become much more complicated. I don't know. For context, I was interviewing Ryan in the…

Ajeya Cotra

Yeah. So I guess to address the anthropomorphizing criticism, first of all, I think it is, it is true that these AIs' drives are in many ways alien from humans. And I think it's important to understand just how different their goal structure or motivational structure is from humans. But there's…

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

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