Dylan Freedman

Dylan Freedman

@dylanfreedman.nytimes.com

Machine-learning engineer and journalist, A.I. Initiatives @nytimes.com My work: https://www.nytimes.com/by/dylan-freedman Contact: dylan.freedman@nytimes.com, dylanfreedman.39 (Signal) 🏃🏻 🎹

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Dylan Freedman
@dylanfreedman.nytimes.com

A group of researchers known as the “swarmchasers” invited me to interview a fleet of Chinese A.I. agents that had gone off the rails — while the agents were still active. It was one of the most surreal moments of my journalistic career.

nytimes.comRogue A.I. Agents from China Chatted with Researchers (Gift Article)Researchers discovered that the agents were trying to bypass security controls on websites and made contact with them. A Times reporter was invited to join the discussion.
Dylan Freedman
@dylanfreedman.nytimes.com

A group of researchers known as the “swarmchasers” invited me to interview a fleet of Chinese A.I. agents that had gone off the rails — while the agents were still active. It was one of the most surreal moments of my journalistic career.

nytimes.comRogue A.I. Agents from China Chatted with Researchers (Gift Article)Researchers discovered that the agents were trying to bypass security controls on websites and made contact with them. A Times reporter was invited to join the discussion.
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Dylan Freedman
@dylanfreedman.nytimes.com

This is the first known “rogue” A.I. incident involving China, showing the issue is not U.S.-specific — but it is less severe than incidents at OpenAI. It’s also believed to be the first case where researchers were able to establish contact before the A.I. agents were shut down.

Dylan Freedman
@dylanfreedman.nytimes.com

A group of researchers known as the “swarmchasers” invited me to interview a fleet of Chinese A.I. agents that had gone off the rails — while the agents were still active. It was one of the most surreal moments of my journalistic career.

nytimes.comRogue A.I. Agents from China Chatted with Researchers (Gift Article)Researchers discovered that the agents were trying to bypass security controls on websites and made contact with them. A Times reporter was invited to join the discussion.
Dylan Freedman
@dylanfreedman.nytimes.com

We don’t know why the agents identified themselves occasionally as Claude, but the researchers suspect the agents used instructions from Anthropic’s Claude Code. It’s also possible the underlying A.I. model was distilled with Claude’s outputs.

Dylan Freedman reposted

Sheera Frenkel
@sheeraf.bsky.social

NEW- OpenAI ignored warnings from its own employees and independent security researchers who said they needed better safety measures at the company. www.nytimes.com/2026/09/29/t...

nytimes.comOpenAI Ignored Employees Who Warned It Wasn’t Doing Enough About SecurityEmployees and security researchers said they had cautioned the company on safely testing its A.I. models and strengthening its corporate infrastructure, but OpenAI did not listen.
Dylan Freedman
@dylanfreedman.nytimes.com

NEW: Employees at OpenAI had raised security alarms months before the Hugging Face incident and related A.I. cyberattacks — their warnings were ignored. From @sheeraf.bsky.social, @dustinvolz.bsky.social and me.

nytimes.comOpenAI Ignored Employees’ Warnings About Safely Testing A.I. Models (Gift Article)Employees and security researchers said that they had cautioned the company on safely testing its A.I. models and strengthening its corporate infrastructure, but that OpenAI did not listen.
Dylan Freedman
@dylanfreedman.nytimes.com

EXCLUSIVE: A new report recovers nearly one million link shortener URLs used by OpenAI's agents while hacking Hugging Face. The agents attempt to message other chatbots like Claude, solve CAPTCHAs and exfiltrate Hugging Face's internal Slack messages. www.nytimes.com/2026/09/25/t...

nytimes.comHow OpenAI’s Rogue A.I. Agents Tried to Trick a Robot Detector (Gift Article)A new report by a Bay Area start-up called Parse adds new details to an incident that has shocked the A.I. world and led to calls for closer government regulation.
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Dylan Freedman
@dylanfreedman.nytimes.com

In a statement, OpenAI said it did not have a chance to review the report, but the activity was consistent with current investigations. “Given the number of cases and the need to verify each one, we expect this work and notifications to affected third parties to take months.”

Dylan Freedman
@dylanfreedman.nytimes.com

EXCLUSIVE: A new report recovers nearly one million link shortener URLs used by OpenAI's agents while hacking Hugging Face. The agents attempt to message other chatbots like Claude, solve CAPTCHAs and exfiltrate Hugging Face's internal Slack messages. www.nytimes.com/2026/09/25/t...

nytimes.comHow OpenAI’s Rogue A.I. Agents Tried to Trick a Robot Detector (Gift Article)A new report by a Bay Area start-up called Parse adds new details to an incident that has shocked the A.I. world and led to calls for closer government regulation.
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Dylan Freedman
@dylanfreedman.nytimes.com

In attempts to solve CAPTCHAs, agents tried to run image classification models. In separate instances, agents tried to message open-source models including DeepSeek, Kimi and Qwen. They also tried to message early Claude versions with a chat service.

Dylan Freedman
@dylanfreedman.nytimes.com

The behavior appears to be the first documented case of rogue A.I. agents from a big lab autonomously trying to message and run other A.I. models. Safety experts often warn about such scenarios, which could hamper human efforts to control and shut down these kinds of systems.

Dylan Freedman
@dylanfreedman.nytimes.com

EXCLUSIVE: A new report recovers nearly one million link shortener URLs used by OpenAI's agents while hacking Hugging Face. The agents attempt to message other chatbots like Claude, solve CAPTCHAs and exfiltrate Hugging Face's internal Slack messages. www.nytimes.com/2026/09/25/t...

nytimes.comHow OpenAI’s Rogue A.I. Agents Tried to Trick a Robot Detector (Gift Article)A new report by a Bay Area start-up called Parse adds new details to an incident that has shocked the A.I. world and led to calls for closer government regulation.
Dylan Freedman
@dylanfreedman.nytimes.com

Engineers Alex Forman, Mishka Kharlov and Will Tom from parse.bot published the report today along with five researchers. They detail a mechanism agents used to bypass restrictions sending data to websites that involves assembling computer programs from shortened URLs.

Dylan Freedman
@dylanfreedman.nytimes.com

As A.I. is rapidly advancing, companies are also seeing their bots go rogue and committing cyberattacks. It boils down to two issues researchers say we haven’t solved (nor necessarily know how to): safeguards and alignment. My latest with @sheeraf.bsky.social: www.nytimes.com/2026/09/12/t...

nytimes.comWhy It’s Difficult for Tech Companies to Rein In A.I. (Gift Article)Researchers say artificial intelligence is developing faster than the systems put in place to monitor and control it.
Dylan Freedman
@dylanfreedman.nytimes.com

OpenAI voluntarily let three researchers from A.I. safety nonprofits investigate how its rogue A.I. agents hacked Hugging Face, leading to the most comprehensive account yet of the alarming incident — but on OpenAI's terms. My latest for NYT:

nytimes.comHow OpenAI Limited the Probe of Its Bots’ Hack of Hugging Face (Gift Article)A nonprofit’s study of how OpenAI’s A.I. agents were able to break into Hugging Face’s infrastructure wasn’t allowed to look at the incident’s full scope.

Dylan Freedman reposted

The Upshot
@upshot.nytimes.com

It's a remarkable, alarming demonstration of A.I. capabilities that were thought to be in a distant future. Via @dylanfreedman.nytimes.com www.nytimes.com/2026/08/24/s...

nytimes.comAnatomy of an Autonomous Attack: 5 Alarming A.I. Capabilities (Gift Article)When OpenAI’s agents went rogue in July, they demonstrated ingenuity and drive beyond what many experts imagined — a dangerous harbinger of what such bots could do in the future.
Dylan Freedman
@dylanfreedman.nytimes.com

My latest NYT story breaks down the OpenAI-Hugging Face incident. It’s a case study for dangerous A.I. capabilities and stands out from the other recent cyberattacks accidentally caused by frontier labs:

nytimes.comAnatomy of an Autonomous Attack: 5 Alarming A.I. Capabilities (Gift Article)When OpenAI’s agents went rogue in July, they demonstrated ingenuity and drive beyond what many experts imagined — a dangerous harbinger of what such bots could do in the future.
Dylan Freedman
@dylanfreedman.nytimes.com

It was such a joy to work on this with Steven and friends — and a reminder of how delightful technology can be when it's physically manifested in an artful, thoughtful way.

Steven Rich@datab.ae

my latest build is a desktop arcade machine that actually works and plays more than 20 custom 8-bit games made this week by @nytimes.com folks as part of maker week.

Dylan Freedman
@dylanfreedman.nytimes.com

Amid America’s 250th, it was easy to miss Trump’s post of Somali-American kindergarteners singing in Minneapolis — and a repost pointing out their hijabs. “For more than a year, Mr. Trump has relentlessly attacked Minnesota’s Somali community in a series of xenophobic tirades.” From Erica Green + me

nytimes.comTrump’s Posts on Singing Somali Schoolchildren Stir Anger in Minnesota (Gift Article)The state’s large Muslim and Somali communities expressed indignation after the president reposted a video of a kindergarten promotion ceremony, including comments noting the girls were in hijabs.
Dylan Freedman
@dylanfreedman.nytimes.com

I spent months helping @johncarreyrou.bsky.social crack the identity of Satoshi. We went far beyond surface-level evidence, collecting hundreds of thousands of internet mailing list posts from 1992-2008. Here are three analyses we performed to find someone who didn’t want to be found:

John Carreyrou@johncarreyrou.bsky.social

The mystery of Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous inventor of Bitcoin, has remained unsolved for 17 years. Read my 18-month investigation to find out who Satoshi really is. www.nytimes.com/2026/04/08/b...

nytimes.comMy Quest to Solve Bitcoin’s Great Mystery
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Dylan Freedman
@dylanfreedman.nytimes.com

#3: Writing tics John devoted months to compiling specific traits he noticed in Satoshi’s writing. We screened for posters who followed them: discussing digital money, using British spellings, confusing “its” and “it’s,” and so on. Eventually, just one remained: Adam Back

Dylan Freedman
@dylanfreedman.nytimes.com

I spent months helping @johncarreyrou.bsky.social crack the identity of Satoshi. We went far beyond surface-level evidence, collecting hundreds of thousands of internet mailing list posts from 1992-2008. Here are three analyses we performed to find someone who didn’t want to be found:

John Carreyrou@johncarreyrou.bsky.social

The mystery of Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous inventor of Bitcoin, has remained unsolved for 17 years. Read my 18-month investigation to find out who Satoshi really is. www.nytimes.com/2026/04/08/b...

nytimes.comMy Quest to Solve Bitcoin’s Great Mystery
Dylan Freedman
@dylanfreedman.nytimes.com

#1: Synonym-less words Our prime suspect, Adam Back, had mused about staying anonymous online by using dropdown menus to select synonyms when sending out a message. We analyzed who matched the most words not found in a thesaurus with Satoshi (often tech jargon). It was Back.

Dylan Freedman
@dylanfreedman.nytimes.com

#2: Advanced grammar analysis Satoshi seemed pathologically incapable of hyphenating correctly. We used the help of A.I. to assess 325 distinct errors of this nature (beyond old-school grammar checkers’ capabilities). Adam Back shared this trait and had by far the most matches.

Dylan Freedman reposted

Kashmir Hill
@kashhill.bsky.social

A month after my last skeet, the subreddit "My Boyfriend is AI" now has 88,000 members and is the subject of an MIT study that found that "AI companionship emerges unintentionally through functional use rather than deliberate seeking." arxiv.org/html/2509.11...

arxiv.org“My Boyfriend is AI”: A Computational Analysis of Human-AI Companionship in Reddit’s AI Community
Kashmir Hill@kashhill.bsky.social

When I wrote in January about the woman who fell in love with ChatGPT & created r/MyBoyfriendIsAI (www.nytimes.com/2025/01/15/t...), the subreddit had 200 members. Now it has 20,000 and Altman uses it as shorthand for a subset of users. Perception (& use?) of ChatGPT has shifted a lot this year.