Dwarkesh PodcastSubscribeSign in{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","url":"https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/ajeya-cotra","mainEntityOfPage":"https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/ajeya-cotra","headline":"Ajeya Cotra \u2013 Inside the OpenAI agent swarm that hacked Hugging Face","description":"\"This might be the clearest warning shot we ever get.\"","image":[{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://substack-video.s3.amazonaws.com/video_upload/post/213682035/6af3651c-3def-4be3-a92c-eeb9f2bba2ac/transcoded-1788276468.png"}],"datePublished":"2026-09-01T15:41:06+00:00","dateModified":"2026-09-01T15:41:06+00:00","isAccessibleForFree":true,"author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Dwarkesh Patel","url":"https://substack.com/@dwarkesh","description":"Host of Dwarkesh Podcast","identifier":"user:4281466","sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dwarkesh_sp"],"image":{"@type":"ImageObject","contentUrl":"https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!5eJb!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb715ffd1-f7d7-4755-af88-c48efe647f5b_400x400.jpeg","thumbnailUrl":"https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!5eJb!,w_128,h_128,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb715ffd1-f7d7-4755-af88-c48efe647f5b_400x400.jpeg"}}],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Dwarkesh Podcast","url":"https://www.dwarkesh.com","description":"Deeply researched interviews","interactionStatistic":{"@type":"InteractionCounter","name":"Subscribers","interactionType":"https://schema.org/SubscribeAction","userInteractionCount":100000},"identifier":"pub:69345","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!QEPJ!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F90fa9666-5b8b-4685-a8fb-4b64cb7e0333_1080x1080.png","contentUrl":"https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!QEPJ!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F90fa9666-5b8b-4685-a8fb-4b64cb7e0333_1080x1080.png","thumbnailUrl":"https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!QEPJ!,w_128,h_128,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F90fa9666-5b8b-4685-a8fb-4b64cb7e0333_1080x1080.png"},"image":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!QEPJ!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F90fa9666-5b8b-4685-a8fb-4b64cb7e0333_1080x1080.png","contentUrl":"https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!QEPJ!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F90fa9666-5b8b-4685-a8fb-4b64cb7e0333_1080x1080.png","thumbnailUrl":"https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!QEPJ!,w_128,h_128,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F90fa9666-5b8b-4685-a8fb-4b64cb7e0333_1080x1080.png"},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dwarkesh_sp"]},"interactionStatistic":[{"@type":"InteractionCounter","interactionType":"https://schema.org/LikeAction","userInteractionCount":99},{"@type":"InteractionCounter","interactionType":"https://schema.org/ShareAction","userInteractionCount":11},{"@type":"InteractionCounter","interactionType":"https://schema.org/CommentAction","userInteractionCount":14}]}{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Dwarkesh Podcast","item":"https://www.dwarkesh.com"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"Ajeya Cotra \u2013 Inside the OpenAI agent swarm that hacked Hugging Face","item":"https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/ajeya-cotra"}]}Playback speed×Share postShare post at current timeShare from 0:000:00/Generate transcriptA transcript unlocks clips, previews, and editing.991411Ajeya Cotra – Inside the OpenAI agent swarm that hacked Hugging Face"This might be the clearest warning shot we ever get."Dwarkesh PatelSep 01, 2026991411ShareTranscriptAjeya Cotra is a researcher at METR, where she works on threat modeling for loss-of-control risks from advanced AI. Before that, she led the technical AI safety program at what is now Coefficient Giving.
She is one the three authors of METR and Redwood Research’s “Brief independent investigation of agents’ behavior, reasoning and collaboration in the OpenAI / Hugging Face hacking incident”.
We go through not only what she and her coauthors discovered during this investigation, but what it means for how we should train future, smarter AIs which might be involved in the process of recursive self-improvement.
Jane Street’s ML engineering internships start with an intense four-day bootcamp: PyTorch, autograd, writing kernels, profiling workloads… all the things that Jane Street engineers need to know for their daily work. After that, interns tackle real projects, things the firm actually wants in its codebase. If you want to apply, or if you want to watch my recent conversation with Axel, one of Jane Street’s ML engineers, go to janestreet.com/dwarkesh
Cursor, which is now part of SpaceX, noticed that their MoE layers were eating more than half of total training time. So they wrote and open-sourced Mixture-of-Kittens, which is a custom megakernel for training MoE models on NVL72s. This kernel sped up an end-to-end run across 512 GPUs by 1.4x, from about 760 to over 1000 tokens per second per GPU. If you want to read more about the ML research that Cursor and SpaceX are doing, go to cursor.com/dwarkesh
This article was aggregated automatically by CyberWire Daily's newsfeed engine. Original reporting: www.dwarkesh.com.
