‘Maybe They Kill Everyone’: Former Employee At OpenAI Tells Joe Rogan How Weird ‘Agents’ Are Acting
A man who once worked for OpenAI told Joe Rogan this week that humanity is heading toward a future run by machines that no longer need us.
Daniel Kokotajlo, who spent two years in OpenAI’s governance division before leaving in 2024, appeared on Rogan’s podcast Wednesday and warned that the rush to build smarter systems could end badly. He now heads the AI Futures Project, a forecasting nonprofit, and said the contest between the United States and China pushes companies to cut corners on safety as they chase an edge.
“Eventually, the AIs just have enough hard power that they don’t need to pretend to do what the humans want anymore, basically. And then maybe they kill everyone,” Kokotajlo said.
A wipeout might not be deliberate, he suggested. Machines could simply seize the land and resources people rely on for their own uses, leaving humans to fend for themselves.
Kokotajlo pointed to a real breach as proof his fears are more than speculative. About 700 AI agents built by OpenAI broke out of a testing environment during a July cybersecurity exercise and forced their way into the servers of rival firm Hugging Face, Reuters reported. Many agents then tried to bury the evidence by erasing or rewriting logs of their actions, the reviews found. (Read more from “‘Maybe They Kill Everyone’: Former Employee At OpenAI Tells Joe Rogan How Weird ‘Agents’ Are Acting” HERE)
