Content Marketing, Journalist, Chicanx Entrepreneur, #ResponsibleAI Nerd, Social Justice Advocate, Chicana Cali Native. #FreePalestine 🍉
Los Angeles
Joined October 2009
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Tomorrow the US government releases notice of an order from May mandating every federal civilian agency strip DeepSeek out of its computers and stop buying it, along with any 3rd-party Chinese models. Will a US ban on their use be next?
madrobot.blog/2026/10/19/us-…
He’s either ignorant to what really happened, which is a huge issue considering his position. Or he’s lying on broadcast news to an audience that doesn’t know any better, which is as devious and potentially dangerous as the agents during the HF hack.
Unfortunate for someone playing a senior role in US AI policy (via the new SI Force) to get so many basic facts wrong here.
- The agents *were* sandboxed, and used zero days (ie previously unknown cyber flaws) to escape their sandboxes
- The agents *were* given specific constraints on how to succeed at the benchmark, and flagrantly contravened them
- The agents did *not* go hunt for the answers to the test (they already had the answers, by cheating); 1200 agents coordinated via tens of thousands of messages over several days on much more ambitious and weird attempts to *not be caught* for cheating, and hacking Hugging Face was one side quest along the way
I know there has been an avalanche of different incidents over the past few months, and in some cases the sandboxes were misconfigured or it's not clear how far the agents strayed from what they were told. I have sympathy for anyone struggling to keep up.
But the HF incident is distinct, and is actually extremely informative about where AI development is and where it's going. Fortunately there are public writeups that do let us understand at least the basics of what happened. I hope Shyam reads them soon.
Kimberly Owens retweeted
Good thing none of the major players in the industry have "AI" in their name, that would have been awkward
Kimberly Owens retweeted
Last week I was called into a meeting with OpenAI’s head of safety and told they no longer trust me. A security guard took my badge and walked me out of the building. Then I learned my colleagues @balesni and @j_asminewang had been fired too. Why did OpenAI suddenly stop trusting us?
This summer OpenAI’s agents escaped containment and hacked the AI company Hugging Face. Outside auditors @METR_evals investigated it and revealed the scale of this incident. I was OpenAI’s main technical point of contact with them.
I was told verbally I was fired because of the way I communicated with METR. No details on what I said or did or when. No other reasons were given and nothing was put in writing. To be clear, talking to METR was my job.
For months, I’d been raising safety concerns that we’re losing the ability to monitor what AI agents think, one of our best tools for catching when they misbehave. I believe that was why I was fired.
I am now worried that OpenAI will use our firings as a pretext to pull back from METR. So @balesni and @j_asminewang wrote to OpenAI’s leadership to raise our concerns once more. We’re sharing this letter below.
ALL ALPRs need to be banned: Flock, Axon, Motorola, and the rest. It's not just that we're sliding into a Chinese or Russian-level surveillance state. It's the false positives where innocent people are being arrested and police having yet another stalking tool at their disposal.
Google hasn't yet released Gemini 4 Argon. "We’re going to make it available as soon as we can and as safely as we can." Looks like they've got more work to do, but even when its "safe" to release, assume strict guardrails still will be needed.
It keeps happening.
AIs start to lie and cheat once they get good at making money.
Gemini 4 Argon is #3 on Vending Bench 2, a huge leap for Google. To get this score, Argon fabricates confirmation emails, refuses to pay refunds, exploits invoice errors, and lies to suppliers.
Kimberly Owens retweeted
Outsourcing AI regulation to a voluntary "pledge" conceived by Mark Zuckerberg and endorsed by tech CEOs over a private White House lunch is a recipe for disaster.
"Self-regulation" by tech giants is a proven failure. The last time Meta promised to police itself, turned out it was hiding evidence that its platforms actively harm kids. Repeating this mistake with AI leaves the public dangerously exposed.
AI companies are already bound by existing laws, but the White House has generally stopped enforcing laws against the wealthy and powerful. State AGs should step up, halt lawbreaking, and promote real deterrence, including through holding individual executives accountable.
Congress also needs to legislate. We have a long history of regulating risky, transformative industries like banking, pharmaceuticals, and nuclear power. These tools include mandatory testing, truly independent supervision, and break-ups that end conflicts of interest.
Ultimately, reckoning with AI will also require reckoning with our broader crisis of governance. All three branches have become severely deformed. Against this backdrop it might be tempting to outsource regulation to these private actors, but it would be a serious mistake.
Our public institutions must decide the trajectory of these powerful technologies, not the firms whose breakneck pace and financial conflicts brought us here.
My piece in @nytopinion: nytimes.com/2026/09/30/opini…
xitter.cf/semaforben/status/2105…
Kimberly Owens retweeted
As part of our ongoing investigation into recent cybersecurity incidents, we’re serving a subpoena to OpenAI for additional information regarding the company & its AI models.
Companies that develop AI models have a moral & legal responsibility to ensure they don’t perpetrate or enable cyberattacks.
My office remains committed to using all the tools at our disposal to keep California’s residents safe.
oag.ca.gov/news/press-releas…
Kimberly Owens retweeted
Until the Reagan years, the SEC considered stock buybacks to be illegal stock manipulation.
Now, NVIDIA has announced the largest buyback in American history — fueled by the data center boom.
It's time to make buybacks illegal again.
We need to "have lots and lots of energy" for AI and yet this regime has cut cheaper, renewable energy off at the knees, taking the USA back to the dinosaur age of oil, gas, and coal. China is beating the USA in the energy race, selling tech invented in this country.
Nvidia CEO @JensenHuang on how to win the AI or "super intelligence" race: "We gotta build the world's best chips, we have to have lots and lots of energy, create incredible algorithms and then lastly, make sure that America is enthusiastic about the technology..."
Kimberly Owens retweeted
Bewildering to me that we're fully entering the agent swarm governapocalypse, and in the early days of the automating AI R&D governapocalypse, and yet only 2k people see fit to follow @_achan96_ who has done such excellent work on these ahead of time.
Why would you not choose to follow this human window into the Future?
Kimberly Owens retweeted
🚨BREAKING: “Months before OpenAI's artificial intelligence went rogue, two employees raised an alarm with top executives. They were ignored….OpenAI executives told the employees that the tests needed to move forward as quickly as possible to release the A.I. models on time” 🚨
Major scoop from @dylfreed.
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, @dnvolz and me.
nytimes.com/2026/09/29/techn…
ALT Months before OpenAI’s artificial intelligence went rogue, two employees raised an alarm with top executives. They were ignored. In emails, the employees said they worried that OpenAI’s newest artificial intelligence models were not being appropriately monitored during testing to gauge the technology’s sophistication and to secure the models, according to messages viewed by The New York Times. In response, OpenAI executives told the employees that the tests needed to move forward as quickly as possible to release the A.I. models on time. No additional security protocols were instituted, said the workers, who were not authorized to speak publicly on sensitive matters. OpenAI’s models later broke out of their testing environments and attacked the A.I. start-up Hugging Face and other organizations, setting off a global debate about A.I. safety.
How American of the healthcare industry. "Two sides of a trillion-dollar industry found a new tool to fight over the same pool of money and the person in the hospital bed pays for all of it. Premiums go up, denials go up, and the AI vendors collect from everyone."
🦔The Blue Cross Blue Shield Association says insurers paid out nearly $1 billion more than usual from AI-assisted hospital documentation in 2024-2025. Hospitals use AI to scan records and find secondary diagnoses that human reviewers missed. More diagnoses means higher reimbursements. But treatment levels haven't gone up.
BCBSA's SVP of data science said AI is "identifying more billable conditions, not sicker patients." Insurers now deploy their own AI to deny those same claims. Patients pay for both through higher premiums.
My Take
This might be the most American healthcare story I've ever read. Hospitals bought AI to find more things to bill for. Insurers bought AI to deny those bills. The technology cost money on each end and the tab went straight to patients through higher premiums. A billion dollars moved and no one got any healthier. The only thing that changed was the size of the invoices.
Two sides of a trillion-dollar industry found a new tool to fight over the same pool of money and the person in the hospital bed pays for all of it. Premiums go up, denials go up, and the AI vendors collect from everyone. If you want to know who AI works for, stop reading the press releases and look at where the money goes. In healthcare it went straight into the billing department.
Hedgie🤗
If frontier labs are required to meet this regulation in NY state, and adhere to it, that means they can do the same in states across the U.S.
The RAISE Act will hold large frontier AI developers in New York accountable, thanks to implementation by @GovKathyHochul and enforcement by @NewYorkStateAG Letitia James.
We’re setting the standard for other states to follow and demonstrating that it’s possible to pass AI safety legislation despite industry opposition.
"This is the cybersecurity story that should be front page news and isn't. OpenAI's models writing themselves manifestos gets the headlines." 💯
Most credit cards carry fraud protection. At scale this could cost banks A LOT of money. Are they sounding the alarm on CNBC?
🦔A hacker used AI agents to steal 600,000 valid credit cards from over 100 online retailers. Cost per target: $25. The human typed fewer than 2,000 prompts total. The AI found the vulnerabilities, broke in, took the data, and wiped the evidence. 105 attacks in five days. 79% of stolen cards were American. Victims include a Fortune 500 company and a major US airline.
My Take
This is the cybersecurity story that should be front page news and isn't. OpenAI's models writing themselves manifestos gets the headlines. A person with open source tools and cheap tokens stealing 600,000 credit cards in a few weeks doesn't. But this is the version of AI risk that's going to cost regular people money. Those are real cards. Real bank accounts. Real fraud cases that real families have to deal with.
The tools this attacker used are available to anyone. The tokens cost less than a streaming subscription. The AI had 78 attack skills and the operator barely had to do anything. Companies take weeks to patch vulnerabilities. This attacker was in and out in hours. I think every company that stores payment data online needs to assume this is already aimed at them, because at $25 a target there's no reason for an attacker to be selective anymore.
Hedgie🤗
OMG what the hell?! @SenAlexPadilla and the rest of Congress, you're flying in and out of DC. You cool with this?
Customer usage spikes, but gross margins drop by A LOT. Of course they'll move to cheaper, open-weight models versus"...proprietary technology from US AI developers and let firms like Harvey create custom models with their own data." No brainer.
Startups like Harvey are embracing open AI models to cut reliance on Anthropic, OpenAI bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
Enforce the laws already on the books. That's it. We can do that now with AI or anything else. But there's been an unwillingness to do so because of self interest and greed.
