Ed Zitron
Writes Where's Your Ed At, a newsletter on the AI industry's finances, and hosts the Better Offline podcast covering the same territory in audio.
“These companies, these people keep saying, what if AI falls into the wrong hands? Dangerous AI is already in the wrong hands. Anthropic and open AI.”
The Tech Report · September 2026
Context
Zitron had been attacking an ex-Anthropic researcher's public warning about AI risk when his co-host pushed back, asking whether models conducting cyberattacks are a real concern. He says it is, then turns the industry's stock question about AI falling into the wrong hands back onto the two labs themselves. The rest of his answer argues the danger is unreliable software handed too much autonomy, not machine intent.
Transcript
…of that happening. It's just very frustrating. It boils my blood because modern journalism is meant to be full of smart people. These people went to Ivy League degree. They've got Ivy League degrees. They went to Oxford and Cambridge. And yet, they get hit by a parked car. They fall for anything.
What about the fact that various models have conducted cyber attacks on external platforms? I mean, poorly configured sandboxes aside, of course. Is the fact that it's kind of out of alignment and that kind of stuff not a concern at all?
It is a concern. I want to be abundantly clear about something. These companies, these people keep saying, what if AI falls into the wrong hands? Dangerous AI is already in the wrong hands. Anthropic and open AI. The hugging face attack, and Cal Newport's made some great points about this, is a result of software doing what it was trained to do, but the software itself is inconsistent and hard to control. Now, out of control does not mean, oh, it's doing stuff without us. Oh, it's intelligent. It means that you have built a technology on top of large language models, a probabilistic technology that is…
and
being able to use as much as it could, it was able to just brute force through. And the thing is, if a human, if a regular person did exactly this, if a regular person had, I don't know, they bought, I don't know how they did afford 10,000 GPUs to rent and they hacked Hugging Face, they would be in…
The thing that sticks out for me is the timing. Maybe not necessarily of him quitting now, but also just generally this open AI saying we're going to slow down development. Anthropic. CEO and various other thousand people or so saying we need to pace development while each launch is becoming more…
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