My two cents -- as a criminologist (yikes!) -- on OpenAI's report on the Hugging Face breach that hit the headlines last week and stirred debate on this platform. Despite all the caricatural and even grotesque anthropomorphizing of the whole story, I believe this is a cautionary tale about something social scientists have so far completely overlooked: AI's future salience across the economy and institutions will come from interacting agents (and yes, it is maybe time to stop thinking of AI simply as a passive tool for making research easier/faster). Multi-agent AI systems will become more and more mainstream, and this entails a quantitative and qualitative leap compared to the safety challenges associated with single AI agents. The AI safety community has already warned about this. We know virtually nothing about how opinions form, goals are steered, values develop, and strategies diffuse when AI agents interact in collective settings, especially given how fast the frontier is moving -- and the (relatively) few trying to advance our knowledge on these topics come almost exclusively from AI and computer science. And yet, where are the social scientists? I predict economists will jump on this very soon -- and rightly so -- to answer a lot of cool questions, but I find it discomforting to see the widespread indifference with which criminologists (and sociologists!) seem to dismiss the consequences these systems will have for unlawful behavior, crime, and policing. Given the not-so-great situation sociology and criminology are currently in, due to the well-known issues with rigor, replicability, and scientific transparency, I am sure not many will think of criminologists as valuable interlocutors or partners for studying emergent behavior in multi-agent AI systems. Nonetheless, I think we could contribute, interacting with AI people, economists, legal scholars and philosophers. In testing theories of crime as a social process to understand how unpredictable machine behavior is, for instance, and possibly to come up with better theories for non-human actors. In porting methods from causal inference to shed light on behavior propagation and causal chains. In thinking about institutional responses that keep up with the likely change of paradigm that will affect crime in the future (will we need policing AI agents?). In thinking about how new forms of agency may affect responsibility. I have written an article on the necessity of starting to think about a criminology of machines, and on why criminologists should step in (and why everyone else should let us help): link.springer.com/article/10… There is plenty here that people will disagree with. And that's great! We are in uncharted territory. But I think the mutual indifference between criminology and AI safety risks making our discipline even less relevant and, maybe more importantly, research on AI safety and alignment a little more off-target than it needs to be. cc'ing here colleagues/cool people I have worked with or discussed these topics with, who may find the discussion of interest. @brulepri, @L_Ferrarotti, @robdessi, @stjaco, @jzl86, @profjamesevans, @sebkrier, @MeganTStevenson