When Anthropic engineer Jacob Coxon announced his departure, he publicly claimed Anthropic and OpenAI are 'racing straight towards self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.' The statement went viral on X and across media, packaged alongside Claude Mythos's 'software-vulnerability discovery,' the back-to-back math breakthroughs from Anthropic and OpenAI, and a steady drumbeat of 'rogue models' and 'incipient AGI.' Put under a microscope, the people who actually do the work in those fields give very different answers than the company narratives. The louder the hype, the quieter the experts.
Where the 'Exploits' Actually Came From
MIT Technology Review published a September 22 commentary by Timnit Gebru (founder of DAIR, author of the forthcoming book Deep Unlearning) and Emily M. Bender (professor of linguistics at the University of Washington, coauthor of The AI Con) that takes aim at the 'anthropomorphizing' framing the AI industry has been pushing. The two walk through a sequence of events from this summer: at the end of April Anthropic tweeted that its Claude Mythos model is better at finding software vulnerabilities than most security experts; then came the OpenAI-vs-Hugging Face hacking incident, after which Anthropic (proudly) and Meta (reluctantly) disclosed similar incidents; then Anthropic announced a Riemann-zeta-flavored math result, and OpenAI followed with its own 'breakthrough' claim about an Astra-driven Navier-Stokes solution. The press turned the bundle into 'AGI is around the corner.' The MIT commentary reminds us that, before the bundling, each of those events had been independently examined by the relevant expert community, and the conclusions differ sharply from the company lines.
Cybersecurity experts say the OpenAI-Hugging Face incident is more about OpenAI's negligence and failure to adopt basic, established security practices than about 'models gone rogue' or 'AI agents creating civilizations.' Anthropic's and Meta's disclosures look more like mea culpa-style incident reports than 'AI breaking free.' Framing the responsibility as 'rogue models' is the AI industry's favorite shield: when OpenAI-built malware is used to breach another company, the headlines become 'uncontrolled model launched an attack on its own,' and corporate responsibility magically migrates from OpenAI onto a 'fictional superintelligence.'
Math 'Breakthroughs' and the Plagiarism Allegation
The math side looks worse. When OpenAI announced Astra had cracked a problem that had 'seen no progress for at least a decade,' mathematicians were initially 'stunned,' then quickly realized the results weren't as novel as first appeared. Scientific American later reported that mathematicians publicly accused OpenAI of research misconduct and plagiarism, and reiterated that Astra did not make a 'profound intellectual leap.' Two days before OpenAI's Navier-Stokes announcement, NYU Courant math professor Tristan Buckmaster released a public statement alleging that OpenAI had stolen other people's work and improperly attributed it. The MIT piece cites the 'Leiden Declaration'—a statement signed by hundreds of mathematicians that says bluntly the technology industry has 'a strong commercial incentive to overstate the capabilities of their products,' and asks policymakers to 'consult with experts, including mathematicians, in forming policy decisions rather than relying on press releases or popular reporting of mathematical results.'
Anthropomorphizing as Corporate Responsibility Laundering
Stitched together, the MIT commentary points at a deeper structural problem: describing AI products as 'superintelligence' or 'rogue models' shifts agency from the company to the product. It markets the product as 'superhuman' while simultaneously letting the company off the hook for its own actions. The AI industry has even suggested that popular, bipartisan anti-data-center activism is a 'distraction' from attempts to regulate the impending 'superhuman' machines—under that framing, we should worry about a fictional machine god rather than the asthma suffered by people living near gas-turbine-powered data centers (Politico reported on Memphis gas turbines and air-pollution permits), the rising electricity bills that subsidize them (a Harvard EELP report documents the public subsidy), and the water redirected to cool them (Bloomberg has tracked AI water use).
Coxon's departure statement went viral, but it does not change the underlying reality that, for what he saw inside Anthropic, cybersecurity experts and mathematicians had already filed different answers in the public record. The AI industry needs to do two things: first, when the next 'breakthrough' lands, policymakers and communities need to learn to pause, find independent expert judgment, and stop taking press releases and front-page headlines as ground truth; second, separate product behavior from corporate behavior—products do not go rogue, but companies do dodge accountability. The summer of hype is not a story about technological progress; it is a story about marketing, accountability, and the cost of letting corporate framing set the policy agenda.